GTM Principal (EMEA)

Valis; Lisboa; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary + equity

Performance bonus

Equity

Job summary

Valis is seeking a GTM Principal to own a market, win CEOs, and drive six-figure opportunities from first contact to signed contracts. You will operate autonomously, leading the demo, negotiation, and post-sale expansion with the deployment lead alongside.

You will sell transformational AI-driven changes, travel to client sites as needed, and help build the market across EMEA while shaping how customers operate.

Qualifications

• Full-cycle closing of complex deals.
• Experience selling to CEOs / C-level executives.
• Proven ability to create demand for AI-enabled solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own a market and lead early conversations with target companies.
• Run the first meeting and the product demo, handling architecture and security questions.
• Lead the deal through offer, negotiation and contract signing with deployment behind you.
• Advise on expansion and renewal by interpreting platform insights for strategy.

Skills

Full-cycle closing

Enterprise sales

Negotiation

AI sales

Tools

CRM software

Forecasting tools

Job description

About us

We are Valis - a company building an institutional AI operating layer for mid-market companies: shared company memory, workflow mining and agentic automation.

Role overview

Demand runs ahead of us: we have more CEO conversations than we can carry, and you start by taking over live ones - Companies that have seen the product and want to move. You close them, then build the market around them: you choose which companies matter next, win their CEOs, sign the contracts, and the clients stay yours. You work standalone - the first meeting, the demo, the negotiation are all yours to run - and the measure of the role is companies that signed and stayed. A warm network of CEOs helps and we pay for it gladly; the craft we hire for is turning a conversation, inherited or created, into a signed contract.

What you sell is a change in how a company operates. That shapes the rest of the role. The sale runs on insight: a CEO gives you the second meeting because the first one changed how they see the problem. And you carry the trust conversation that decides these deals - what the system captures, who sees what, how access control works. After signature you and the deployment lead become the client's advisory pair: you keep the CEO relationship and turn what the platform surfaces about the company into expansion - new automations, new use cases, renewal.

Underneath all of it sits your own practice with AI. You use agents and LLM tools daily yourself, so when you demo the product or debate with a CEO what to automate first, you speak from experience.

What you'll do

• Own a market - an industry, a region, a founder community or an investor ecosystem. The first conversations you inherit warm; the ones after that you create.
• Run the first meeting and the demo on your own. You know the product and the technology well enough to carry the room through architecture, data and security questions without backup.
• Lead the deal through offer, negotiation and contract, with a deployment lead and forward-deployed engineers behind you for the build - you sell something a real team delivers.
• After go-live, advise the CEO together with the deployment lead: read what the platform shows about how the company actually works and turn it into decisions - what to automate, what to redesign, where the operating model changes.
• Own renewal and expansion on your accounts. Expansion here is consultative selling on live company data.
• File what you learn - objections, working pitches, use cases that landed - into the playbooks, so each deal starts further ahead than the last.
• We expect a GTM Principal to work hybrid, spending part of working time on-site with the Client.

What we need to see

• Full-cycle closing: you personally took complex six-figure deals from first conversation to signature. For each deal we will ask who sourced it, who ran the demo and who negotiated.
• You have created demand rather than won comparisons: sold something the buyer was not out shopping for, or grew a deal far beyond what the client first had in mind.
• Advisory presence: an owner-CEO takes your view on how their company runs seriously, and you can point to a client relationship that kept going after the deal closed.
• AI in your own hands: you can walk us through workflows you have automated for yourself or your team, with real LLM tools and agents, and run the product demo yourself.

Who we expect to hear from

• Consultants from MBB-class firms at associate partner or senior manager level who sold and built AI engagements (the QuantumBlack and BCG X shape), or who built something real in AI after leaving.
• Senior sellers of complex systems - AI platforms, ERP, finance or HR suites - who close six-figure consultative deals with company leadership and have a chapter outside sales behind them: a startup, a consultancy, something they built.
• Founders who personally sold their B2B company's work to mid-market clients and exited.
• Investors who miss building: VC or PE people with a commercial chapter in their story who want their hands back on clients.
• Apart from preferred locations, we are ready to consider candidates from other EMEA countries.

What helps

• Pipeline you built yourself: a market, region or segment you opened on your own.
• A live network of mid-market owner-CEOs in a nameable community or region. It is worth real money here, and it comes second to conversion.
• Selling company-wide systems (ERP, HR or finance platforms), a founder past with your own exit, or deal origination in mid-market M&A.
• Transformation or implementation work you ran end to end.
• Languages beyond English that match a market.

Base, a bonus on new contracts and on the retention of your clients, and equity.