Sales Development Representative (SDR)

SALES DEVELOPMENT REPRESENTATIVE (SDR) — GROUNDED Detroit, MI (in-person) ABOUT GROUNDED Grounded is a 25-person Detroit-based startup building modular electric platforms for specialty vehicles. We take cab chassis from OEMs like Ford and Harbinger and build configurable vehicle systems on top, serving mobile healthcare, RVs, command centers, food and beverage, pet care, and more. Our customers include Colgate, Nokia, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and Portland PD. We've raised ~$5M in VC funding and are shipping vehicles in market today. We also build our own software: a mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer system that lets customers monitor and control vehicle systems remotely. We design, fabricate, and assemble everything in-house at our facility in Corktown. THE ROLE We're hiring our SDR to build the top of Grounded's sales funnel. We sell modular electric vehicles across wildly different verticals — mobile healthcare, RVs, command centers, food and beverage, pet care, and more — to customers ranging from startups to enterprises like Colgate and Nokia. Your job is to find and start conversations with the next wave of them. This is an early, build-it-from-scratch role. You won't inherit a polished playbook — you'll help create it: figuring out which verticals and personas to target, what messaging lands, and how to turn cold outreach into qualified opportunities for our account managers. WHAT YOU'D ACTUALLY DO - Own outbound prospecting: research, identify, and reach out to potential customers across our verticals - Run multi-channel outreach (email, calls, LinkedIn) and qualify inbound interest - Book qualified meetings and hand them off cleanly to account managers - Learn the product and the verticals well enough to speak credibly to very different buyers - Build and refine the outbound playbook — messaging, sequences, target lists — and track what works - Keep CRM data clean and report on pipeline (we use HubSpot) WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 1–3 years in an SDR/BDR or similar outbound sales role, ideally B2B - Genuinely comfortable with cold outreach and hearing “no” — persistent and resilient - Strong written and verbal communication; you can tailor a pitch to a hospital, a police department, and a coffee brand - Organized and self-directed; you can build process where none exists - Hungry to grow into a closing role - Startup experience a plus NICE-TO-HAVES - Experience selling a physical or technical product, or selling into fleets - Familiarity with HubSpot or similar CRM and outbound tooling - Interest in EVs, vehicles, or hardware COMPENSATION Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in Grounded + comprehensive health insurance WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT Most SDR roles have you reading a script someone else wrote, selling one thing to one type of buyer. Here you'll prospect across a dozen industries for a product people actually get excited about, help build the sales motion from the ground up, and have a clear path to grow as the team scales — working directly with leadership in the room where the playbook gets made.