Founding BDR, AI Packaging SaaS (Remote - Global

Founding BDR Opportunity

Lavendo partners with startups and high-growth companies to help them hire top-tier sales, GTM, and technical talent. This role is with one of our clients; we'll share full details about the company and interview process as we get to know you and confirm mutual fit.

Our client is an early-stage AI software startup based in San Francisco, building a category-defining AI-powered platform for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) and packaging supply chain. They have paying customers, real revenue, and are preparing for their first institutional funding round. The team is small, technical, and operator-led.

Replace the spreadsheets, emails, and PDFs that hold the packaging industry together with one AI-powered source of truth for packaging specs and artwork. Help brands ship products faster and suppliers respond faster — across procurement, design, and manufacturing.

This is a founding sales hire — the Founding BDR for the company. You will be the first dedicated outbound seller, working directly with the founder. Your job is to fill the top of the funnel — book qualified meetings with brand, packaging, and supply chain decision-makers so the founder can run discovery and close. The competitive window is open right now: well-funded incumbents exist, but no one has won the mid-market yet.

You can.

• Run high-volume outbound across phone, email, and Linked In into a curated list of CPG brands, packaging companies, and adjacent manufacturers

• Book qualified discovery meetings for the founder (target: minimum 2 meetings/week after a 2-week onboarding ramp)

• Own the CRM (Hub Spot): clean pipeline, sequence cadences, log every call, keep data tight

• Research target accounts and identify the right buyer — Creative Director, Packaging Engineer, Formulator, Procurement, Supply Chain, or Account Executive — depending on company

• Iterate weekly on messaging with the founder: what objections came up, what hooks worked, what stories resonate

• When given pre-built target lists, work them ruthlessly. When given a blank ICP, source your own.

• Bring market signal back to the founder: what buyers care about, what they push back on, what features they ask about

• 1–3+ years of B2B SaaS outbound sales experience (SDR / BDR / Founding BDR)

• Demonstrated track record of cold-outbound success — you can talk in numbers about dials/day, meetings/week, conversion rates

• Excellent spoken English, confident on a cold call, comfortable with US business buyers (East Coast and Central time zones)

• Experience selling into non-tech, traditional industries — manufacturing, packaging, supply chain, construction, CPG, or similar "blue-collar" buyers

• You can pitch an early-stage product without flinching — you know how to handle "you're too early" and "come back when you have more customers"

• Fluency in modern outbound tools:
  Hub Spot (or Salesforce), Apollo / Zoom Info, Linked In Sales Nav, a sequencer (Outreach / Salesloft / Lemlist)

• Willing and able to work US business hours that overlap with the East Coast (roughly 6am–2pm PT / 9am–5pm ET)

• Prior founding sales hire at a YC or seed-stage startup

• Sold into Procurement, Packaging, or Creative/Brand decision-makers specifically

• Closed your own deals (not just SDR meeting-booking)

• Experience running outbound from a founder's Linked In account

• Familiarity with CPG, beauty, or packaging supply chain terminology

• Hungry. You want to be a founding hire and grow with the company, not just clock a steady SDR check.

• Resourceful. You hit a wall, you find a way around — you don't wait to be told what to do.

• Direct. You communicate in specifics, not abstractions. You bring problems and proposed solutions.

• Honest. Founders here have been burned by salespeople who oversold themselves. References will be called.

• Persistent on the phone. Buyers in this industry are hard to get on calls. You don't take "not a priority" as a final answer — you reframe.

• Ownership-minded. You treat the pipeline as your pipeline.

• Coachable. You can take direct feedback without getting defensive and turn it into better calls…