Founding Account Executive

Bernardhq; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Bernard is seeking a founding Account Executive to close enterprise-like deals with appliance repair company owners. You will own the number, build your pipeline, run demos, and craft proposals to convert opportunities into ARR.

You will work directly with the CEO in a fast-growing NYC-based startup, shaping the sales motion, pricing, and strategy. This role demands self-motivation, resilience, and a track record of closing deals end-to-end.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of closing experience in SaaS, technology, or high-consideration B2B sales.
• Proven ability to own quota and convert pipeline into ARR.
• Experience selling to small business owners and field service/trades is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle deals from discovery to contract closure.
• Self-source pipeline and build relationships at target accounts.
• Deliver demos, proposals, and negotiate terms.
• Collaborate directly with CEO to test segment messaging and pricing.

Skills

Full-cycle sales

Self-sourced pipeline

Demo & proposals

Negotiation

Account management

Relationship building

Job description

About Bernard

Half of all appliance repair visits fail on the first trip. Wrong part. Wrong diagnosis. The homeowner waits another week. The company eats another truck roll. Multiply that across millions of service calls a year and you’re looking at a broken layer of American infrastructure that nobody’s talking about.

Bernard fixes this at the point of first contact. Our AI answers the call, runs the diagnostic, predicts the right parts against live inventory, and sends the technician out with a game plan. We don’t just book the job. We solve it before the truck rolls. The result: first-visit fix rates go from 50% to 80%.

We’re live with enterprise customers, growing fast, and building the operating system for field service from our office at in NYC. Every hire here touches the product, the customer, and the trajectory of the company.

The Role

You are Bernard’s Founding Account Executive. You close deals. You own the number. You are the person who turns pipeline into revenue.

Your buyers are appliance repair company owners. They run 15–300 trucks. They’ve been in business for decades. They’ve seen vendors come and go and they can smell a pitch from a mile away. You earn their trust by understanding their operation better than the last 10 reps who called them. You close by showing them exactly how Bernard solves a problem they live with every single day.

You will self-source a significant portion of your pipeline and also work qualified leads from our GTM infrastructure. You run the demo, you build the proposal, you negotiate the contract, you close the deal. You don’t hand off to a closer because you are the closer.

You work directly with the CEO. No VP of Sales. No layers. No forecast theater. If you have a thesis about a segment, a message, or a pricing structure, you test it this week.

What You’ll Own

• Revenue. You carry a quota. You close new business. Your commission is tied directly to signed ARR.
• Full-cycle deals. From first conversation through signed contract. Discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation, close. The whole thing is yours.
• Self-sourced pipeline. You don’t sit and wait for leads. You prospect into target accounts, work referral networks, and build relationships at industry events and associations.
• GTME pipeline. Work qualified opportunities from our outbound and inbound engine. Turn warm leads into closed revenue.
• Deal strategy. You know your accounts cold. You know who the decision maker is, what their objections are, what their timeline looks like, and what it takes to get to yes.
• Market feedback. You’re in the field every day. You surface what buyers care about, what competitors are saying, and where the product needs to go. You feed this directly to the CEO and product team.

You Should Apply If

• You’ve carried a quota and hit it. Consistently.
• You’ve closed deals end-to-end, not just run demos or booked meetings for someone else to close.
• You can sell to a business owner who has never bought software before. You don’t need a champion who “gets it.” You create the champion.
• You’ve self-sourced pipeline. You know how to work a territory, build a referral network, and generate your own opportunities.
• You want to be the founding sales hire at a company where your work directly shapes the trajectory of the business.
• 5–8 years of closing experience in SaaS, technology, or a high-consideration B2B sale. Bonus if you’ve sold into field service, trades, or small business owners.

Preferred

• Experience selling into blue-collar, field service, home services, or trades industries.
• You’ve sold at a startup or early-stage company where the playbook didn’t exist and you had to build it.
• Territory or field sales experience in addition to inside sales. You know how to work a market, not just a CRM.
• Comfortable with AI products and can demo technology to non-technical buyers without drowning them in jargon.

How We Work

We are a small team. Everyone owns their domain end-to-end. There is no middle management, no committees, and no approval chains. If something needs to happen, you make it happen.

We work in person in New York City. We move fast, give direct feedback, and hold each other to a high bar. The pace is startup pace - if that energizes you, you’ll love it here.

You should be someone who picks up the phone first and sends the email second. The best deals at Bernard start with a real conversation, not a nurture sequence.