Head of Sales Development

Fulcrum; Minneapolis (MN); On-site; USD 122,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

OTE: $122,000–$200,000 (uncapped) + 0?

401(k) matching after 90 days — immed.

Job summary

Fulcrum is seeking a results-driven Sales Development Leader to own the SDR pipeline and drive the outbound motion in a high-growth environment. You will coach reps, diagnose blockers, and design plays that move opportunities through activity, meetings, and qualified pipeline.

In Minneapolis, you’ll partner with Sales, Marketing, RevOps and Product, building dashboards, testing messaging, and leveraging AI to accelerate learning.

Qualifications

• Comfortable picking up the phone, cold calling prospects, testing messaging, and learning directly from the market.
• Exceptional coach who can diagnose why someone is struggling—not simply tell them to make more calls or follow the script more closely.
• Understands the numbers deeply: knows where the team is relative to target, why performance is above or below plan, where the funnel is breaking, and what needs to change.
• You’re a builder. When a process, dashboard, training program, hiring motion, territory model, or playbook doesn’t exist, your instinct is to create a useful version quickly and improve it from there.
• You actively use AI to make yourself more capable and productive, and you’re excited by how quickly these tools are expanding what you can build, analyze, automate, and solve.
• You move quickly and experiment constantly. You develop hypotheses, test messaging and tactics, measure what happens, and would rather learn from a thoughtful V1 today than spend three weeks designing the perfect solution.
• You have high standards and are comfortable giving clear, direct feedback. You care about people, but you don’t confuse being supportive with avoiding difficult conversations.
• You have enough confidence to lead without needing to always have the answer. You’re comfortable being wrong, bombing a call in front of the team, changing your mind, and learning from someone who is better than you at something.
• You’re competitive, resilient, and accountable. You care intensely about results, can absorb rejection and bad weeks without losing momentum, and take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for someone else to tell you what to do next.

Responsibilities

• Own the SDR pipeline target and monitor funnel performance. Know where the team is relative to plan and what needs to change.
• Cold call alongside the team learning market, testing messaging, developing new plays, and understanding what prospects are actually saying.
• Develop deep expertise in Fulcrum’s customer, product, positioning, competitive environment, and the operational problems manufacturers face.
• Coach SDRs individually by diagnosing what is actually limiting them—activity, time management, confidence, product understanding, discovery, objection handling, closing, learning velocity, or something else—and creating a specific plan to improve it.
• Listen to calls constantly and create a culture where feedback is direct, specific, frequent, and expected.
• Hold a high standard for effort and performance, set clear expectations for what great looks like, and make timely decisions when someone is not meeting the bar.
• Recruit proactively, continuously improve how we identify the characteristics that predict success at Fulcrum, and raise the quality of our SDR hiring process.
• Build and improve onboarding so new SDRs become productive, knowledgeable, and confident as quickly as possible.
• Design and rigorously measure experiments across messaging, targeting, sequencing, call strategy, account selection, objection handling, and other parts of the outbound motion—and turn what works into repeatable behavior across the team.
• Build the dashboards, workflows, training materials, AI tools, and other systems the team needs rather than waiting for another function to build them.
• Use AI aggressively to analyze calls and data, create training, automate work, prototype tools, research problems, and increase the speed at which the SDR organization learns.
• Develop emerging leaders within the SDR organization and partner closely with Sales, Marketing, RevOps, and Product while remaining fully accountable for Sales Development performance

Skills

Cold calling

Coaching

Analytics

Process design

AI literacy

Execution

Feedback

Leadership

Resilience

Job description

Our mission is clear and staggeringly important: we're building the manufacturing operating system of the future from the ground up, one that’s engineered to create network effects as we grow. A beautiful, sophisticated quantum leap forward for the most important core industry in the world.

Manufacturing is important. It’s the fundamental industry on which everything else is built. We take it for granted. In 1989, 35% of the entire software industry was manufacturing systems. What was the first massive burst in productivity from technology has stagnated into diminishing returns and increasing complexity. We can only continue to add complexity for so much longer until the whole system collapses.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - Albert Einstein

Who You Are

• You can actually do the job you’re asking other people to do. You’re comfortable picking up the phone, cold calling prospects, testing messaging yourself, and learning directly from the market
• You’re an exceptional coach because you can diagnose why someone is struggling—not simply tell them to make more calls or follow the script more closely
• You understand the numbers deeply. You know where the team is relative to target, why performance is above or below plan, where the funnel is breaking, and what needs to change
• You’re a builder. When a process, dashboard, training program, hiring motion, territory model, or playbook doesn’t exist, your instinct is to create a useful version quickly and improve it from there
• You actively use AI to make yourself more capable and productive, and you’re excited by how quickly these tools are expanding what you can build, analyze, automate, and solve
• You move quickly and experiment constantly. You develop hypotheses, test messaging and tactics, measure what happens, and would rather learn from a thoughtful V1 today than spend three weeks designing the perfect solution
• You have high standards and are comfortable giving clear, direct feedback. You care about people, but you don’t confuse being supportive with avoiding difficult conversations
• You have enough confidence to lead without needing to always have the answer. You’re comfortable being wrong, bombing a call in front of the team, changing your mind, and learning from someone who is better than you at something
• You’re competitive, resilient, and accountable. You care intensely about results, can absorb rejection and bad weeks without losing momentum, and take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for someone else to tell you what to do next

What The Job Is

• Own the SDR pipeline target and understand performance across the funnel—from activity and conversations through meetings and qualified pipeline—so you always know where the team is relative to plan and what needs to change
• Cold call alongside the team regularly, particularly while learning the market, testing messaging, developing new plays, and understanding what prospects are actually saying
• Develop deep expertise in Fulcrum’s customer, product, positioning, competitive environment, and the operational problems manufacturers face
• Coach SDRs individually by diagnosing what is actually limiting them—activity, time management, confidence, product understanding, discovery, objection handling, closing, learning velocity, or something else—and creating a specific plan to improve it
• Listen to calls constantly and create a culture where feedback is direct, specific, frequent, and expected
• Hold a high standard for effort and performance, set clear expectations for what great looks like, and make timely decisions when someone is not meeting the bar
• Recruit proactively, continuously improve how we identify the characteristics that predict success at Fulcrum, and raise the quality of our SDR hiring process
• Build and improve onboarding so new SDRs become productive, knowledgeable, and confident as quickly as possible
• Design and rigorously measure experiments across messaging, targeting, sequencing, call strategy, account selection, objection handling, and other parts of the outbound motion—and turn what works into repeatable behavior across the team
• Build the dashboards, workflows, training materials, AI tools, and other systems the team needs rather than waiting for another function to build them
• Use AI aggressively to analyze calls and data, create training, automate work, prototype tools, research problems, and increase the speed at which the SDR organization learns
• Develop emerging leaders within the SDR organization and partner closely with Sales, Marketing, RevOps, and Product while remaining fully accountable for Sales Development performance

Who You’ll Work With

• SDRs who range from brand-new reps learning how to cold call to high-performing, tenured reps who need increasingly sophisticated coaching
• Account Executives who depend on the SDR team to create high-quality pipeline and provide feedback on which opportunities ultimately convert
• Sales Leadership to set pipeline expectations, diagnose performance, develop talent, and continuously evolve our go-to-market motion
• Marketing to improve targeting, messaging, campaigns, account selection, and our understanding of which markets and messages are producing results
• Product and other teams across Fulcrum to continually deepen your understanding of what we sell, why customers change, and how our market is evolving

Why this role is different

Sales Development at Fulcrum isn’t about managing a group of people who execute a finished playbook.

We sell into manufacturing businesses that often operate very differently from modern technology companies. Our SDRs may speak with a shop owner who has run the same business for thirty years and has little interest in talking to a software salesperson. Creating a real opportunity requires more than persistence. Reps need to understand how manufacturers operate, ask intelligent questions, handle skepticism, and create enough curiosity that someone is willing to reconsider a system or process they may have used for decades.

At the same time, this is an extremely high-activity outbound environment. The answer can’t be to spend an hour researching every account or write perfectly personalized emails to ten prospects a day. Great SDRs here combine unusually high work capacity with increasingly sophisticated judgment. Building a team capable of both is the job.

That means you can’t lead entirely from a dashboard. You need to stay close enough to the work to understand what’s actually happening—listening to calls, making them yourself, digging into conversion data, testing new approaches, and building what the team needs to get better.

AI is also changing what’s possible. Sales Development leaders can now analyze thousands of calls, work with data, automate processes, build internal tools, create individualized training, and test ideas at a speed that wasn’t possible a few years ago. We want someone who sees that as an opportunity to rethink how a Sales Development organization should operate—not someone who occasionally uses AI to write an email.

The job sits intentionally between two responsibilities: understand the craft deeply enough to know what great looks like, and build a system that makes the entire team better than you could ever be individually.

If you want to inherit a mature Sales Development engine, manage primarily through process, and spend most of your time one level removed from the actual work, this probably won’t be a great fit.

If you like building from incomplete information, competing against a number, getting close to customers, developing people, figuring out why something works, using AI to move faster, and turning what you learn into a better system, it probably will.

The market tells us we’re on the right track: +50% year over year growth but we know to not rest on our laurels and that there's a lot of stuff to build and a huge amount of work to be done. We're looking for people who can stand alongside us and work hard to make our dreams become reality in the fastest, smoothest, and best way possible.

If you're someone who is obsessed with making amazing things, being the best, and wanting your work to contribute to something excellent

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

Benefits

• OTE: $122,000–$200,000 (uncapped) + equity
• 401(k) matching after 90 days — immediate vesting
• Health, dental, and vision benefits
• Wellbeing benefits and perks
• Unlimited vacation policy with required minimums
• Cell phone & internet plan coverage

This role is open to candidates located in the U.S. and authorized to work here. We’re not able to offer visa sponsorship or consider international applicants at this time.

Candidates should be able to commute to our Minneapolis office or be willing to relocate.