Business Development Director

About LeanDNA

LeanDNA is helping solve the $150B problem global manufacturers face: too much of the wrong inventory and not enough of the right. Excess inventory ties up working capital. Shortages stop lines and break delivery commitments. Most manufacturers are buying too much, not enough, or the right part in the wrong place at the wrong time.

APEX by LeanDNA is a factory-first AI for supply chain planning and synchronization. It gives supply chain teams the data and the specific actions needed to reduce shortages, optimize inventory, and improve on-time delivery. Our customers see 14% inventory reduction, 32% shortage reduction, and 18% improvement in on-time delivery. We work with manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, industrial, and medical devices across more than 30 countries.

The Role

Our BDRs support our Enterprise Account Executives who own a top named-account list, but they also carry a much broader market, and that market does not cover itself. A large part of your week is high-volume outbound: working the territory by phone, at pace, to find the operators with a problem worth talking about. This is real dial volume, every day, and it is the engine of the job.

The other part is depth. On named accounts and on warm signals, marketing activity, and  buying intent. Those accounts get researched, multi-threaded, and worked with patience, because a generic touch on a target logo burns it.

Most BDRs are good at one of these. We are looking for someone who can hold both, and who will not let the volume quietly crowd out the depth. We sell a complex, technical platform to Directors, VPs, and C-level operators inside large manufacturing organizations. These are people who run plants, own inventory targets, and do not respond to generic outreach. You need to have done this work before and be good at it, not be learning prospecting for the first time.

What You'll Actually Do

• Dial, every day, at volume. You will run high-volume outbound across the broader market using our AI-enabled email and parallel dialing stack. Most of your conversations start here, and the pace is not something you ramp into and then coast on.
• Work warm signals fast. Inbound demo requests, intent data, event and content engagement get worked immediately. Speed to lead matters here. A hand-raiser waiting a day is a hand-raiser lost.
• Go deep on named accounts. On the top list you will know your accounts: what they make, where their plants are, what ERP they run, what they said on their last earnings call, and who actually owns the inventory problem. These accounts do not get the volume treatment.
• Run a real conversation with a Director-and-above operator. Not a script. You need enough fluency in manufacturing and supply chain to ask a plant leader a question no vendor has asked them before, whether that call was the fifth of the day or the fiftieth.
• Multi-thread. One contact is not an account. You will build coverage across operations, supply chain, procurement, and finance.
• Use AI and the stack to make both motions fit in one week. We run Claude, Nooks, Salesloft, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Salesforce. AI is how you hold a heavy dial day and still show up prepared on a named account. We expect you to use it for research, prioritization, and first-draft personalization, and to bring us workflows we have not thought of yet.
• Own your data. You are accountable for the accuracy of the contact data underneath your accounts: verified numbers, clean records, correct source attribution. Bad data is the single biggest tax on this function today, and we want someone who refuses to work on top of it.
• Hand off cleanly and stay engaged. Your AE should walk into the first meeting already knowing the story. You stay on the account after the handoff.

How You'll Be Measured

We care a great deal about volume. We just measure it in conversations, not dials:

• Connects and real conversations per day. This is the number that matters most, and the bar is high.
• Research and personalization quality on named accounts and warm signals.
• Opportunities that convert into a real, AE-accepted pipeline.
• Contact data accuracy across your accounts.

Dials are the input, not the scoreboard. If you are used to being paid to open opportunities regardless of what happens to them afterward, this will be an adjustment. We reward the pipeline that lives.

Your First 90 Days

• By day 30: You are at full dial volume across the broader market, you know your named accounts cold, including sites, ERP, org structure, and the operators who matter at each, and you have audited the contact data on your list and flagged what is wrong.
• By day 60: You are holding a consistent daily conversation count with Director-and-above operators across both motions, and you have your first AE-accepted opportunities in flight.
• By day 90: You have delivered a clean, verified contact foundation across your accounts, and you are telling us which parts of the motion to change rather than waiting to be told.

You Are

• Someone who converts, not just books. You can point to specific opportunities you sourced that became a real pipeline, and you can tell us honestly which ones died and why.
• Built for the phone. You sustain a dial pace most people cannot, and you are still sharp on the tenth conversation of the day. Rejection does not stick to you. You would rather call than email, and it shows in your numbers.
• Focused, in a job that will happily unfocus you. You can look at a broad territory and a named list and know what each deserves today. Knowing what to ignore, and protecting the deep work when the dialer is right there, is the skill.
• Interesting to talk to, and disciplined about when to stop talking. Personality is an asset here. It is not the job. Executives give their time to people who are prepared and specific, not to people who are merely charming.
• AI-native by instinct. You already use AI every day and you would be frustrated at a company that did not.
• Genuinely curious about how things get made. Manufacturing is not a glamorous category. The people who do well here find factories interesting.
• Coachable, and comfortable pushing back with data. We change our minds when the numbers say to. We expect you to bring the numbers.
• Here to be excellent at this craft. This role is built for someone who wants to master enterprise business development and own a meaningful book, not someone passing through.

What You Need

• 1+ years in outbound business development, SDR, or BDR roles selling B2B software, with a demonstrable record of converting conversations you sourced into qualified pipeline.
• A track record of sustained calling volume. You have carried a real daily dial and conversation bar and hit it consistently, over quarters, not weeks. Be ready to talk about your actual numbers.
• Experience selling to Director, VP, and C-level buyers outside of IT at enterprise-scale companies with long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles.
• Fluency with a modern sales stack: CRM (Salesforce), sequencing (Salesloft or equivalent), data and intent (ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator), and AI-assisted dialing.
• Demonstrated daily use of AI tools in your workflow. Be ready to show us exactly how you use them and what it saves you.
• Based in Austin, TX, and able to be in our office two days per week.

Bonus Points

• Professional Spanish. A developing share of our prospects' manufacturing footprint is in Mexico. Being able to run a plant-level conversation in Spanish is a real advantage, not a checkbox.
• Manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, ERP, or industrial background, whether you sold into it or worked in it.
• Experience owning a data hygiene, enrichment, or CRM cleanup project end to end.