SMB Innovation Sales & Strategy Lead

The role

The SMB Innovation Sales & Strategy Lead will identify, incubate, and scale new revenue opportunities for the SMB Ads business. This role involves developing customer propositions, validating product opportunities, and launching go-to-market programs through cross-functional collaboration.

What you will do

• Identify untapped opportunities across SMB segments, industries, and channels.
• Build business cases and launch pilots to validate customer demand and commercial potential.
• Design new acquisition, activation, and expansion programs.
• Partner with sales teams and outsourced sales providers.
• Translate customer discovery into product opportunities.
• Develop actionable SMB segmentation based on needs, business characteristics, and economics.
• Own pilot delivery and measurement across revenue, conversion, and cost to serve.
• Scale successful programs through clear playbooks.
• Shape SMB strategy and investment recommendations with leadership.
• Lead the innovation portfolio through roadmaps and performance measures.

Required qualifications

• Approximately 8-10 years of experience in business incubation, growth, strategy, business operations, product strategy, or consulting.
• Substantial ownership of implementation and commercial results.
• Understand SMB customers and self-serve business models.
• Success taking initiatives from customer insight and business case through pilot, launch, and measurable impact.
• Strong analytical and financial modeling skills across opportunity sizing, unit economics, funnel analysis, and experimentation.
• Ability to translate customer segmentation into differentiated propositions and engagement models.
• Ability to work directly with customers to uncover needs.
• Ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and align senior stakeholders.
• Ability to combine strategic analysis with hands-on customer discovery and pilot delivery.
• Ability to exercise sound judgment in ambiguous environments.

Nice to have

• Experience in advertising platforms, marketplaces, or SMB technology businesses.
• Combine management consulting experience with substantial hands-on operating responsibility.
• Experience in both established technology companies and startups.
• Experience with outsourced sales channels, sales-assisted growth, or industry-specific commercial programs.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The SMB Ads Marketing team is building advertising opportunities for an AI-powered world.