Sales Manager / Steel Trader (m/f/d) - France & Benelux

Your mission

Vanilla Steel is a Berlin-based B2B steel trading company. We trade steel across Europe and build the software our own traders use.

You take over an existing portfolio of French-speaking buyers and suppliers and grow it from there. Because you are not starting from an empty pipeline, your commission starts working in your first months rather than late in year one. You will work directly with our Head of Sales and our steel traders, and you will own your deals end to end.

Tasks

• Own and grow an existing portfolio of customers and suppliers across France and Benelux

• Act as a main point of contact for our French-speaking buyers & suppliers

• Win new customers through targeted outreach by phone and email

• Own deals from first contact to close, coordinating execution and logistics with Operations

• Run your own pipeline in HubSpot

• Use pricing and market data to sharpen your negotiations

Your profile

• Perfect written and spoken French, plus solid English

• Experience selling or negotiating with business customers. This does not have to be steel or industry. Hospitality, logistics, recruitment, retail management - anything where you carried a target and dealt with people directly is relevant

• You build your own tools. You are the person who automates the boring part rather than doing it twice - a dashboard to track your own pipeline, a script or a no-code flow to clean a list, AI to draft and research faster. We don't care which tools. We care that you reach for them without being told

• Ownership. You follow up, you keep your CRM clean, you learn the product properly, and you do not need chasing

• Spanish, German or Polish is a plus.

• Experience in steel, metals or commodities is a real advantage, not a requirement.

Why us?

• Competitive fixed salary plus uncapped commission on every deal you close

• An existing customer base rather than a cold start

• Direct access to the founders in a team of around 25

• Hybrid working, office in Prenzlauer Berg

• JobRad bike leasing, subsidised Urban Sports Club membership and Deutschlandticket

• Team events, company breakfast, Friday drinks

About us

We are a Berlin-based startup that has successfully established a leading digital-first trading company for industrial metals across Europe.

The multi-billion-euro metal trading industry is operated on Excel, PDF and Email. Our mission is to integrate smart technology and data to drive every decision, transaction, and workflow in the steel industry. Our technologies & services increase liquidity, accelerate transactions, reduce scrapping rates and enhance trading convenience for hundreds of steel and metal distributors across Europe.