Commercial Lead, Kenya

SOKIFY JOB LISTING Job Title: Commercial Lead, Kenya Company: Lua Global About the Role Lua is building the Agent OS — digital employees that perform real work end to end. They read company systems, make decisions, take action, and improve with every run. These are genuine digital workers operating on your own data and workflows, not question-answering chatbots. Teams define their logic on Lua's platform while the infrastructure handles the complexity: multi-provider model orchestration, data management, omnichannel connectivity (WhatsApp, Slack, Email, Instagram, Messenger, voice-capable web widget, HTTP API) and comprehensive monitoring. Lua's customer base spans Africa, the Middle East and South Asia — heritage site operators, travel-and-hospitality conglomerates, region-leading supermarket chains, listed healthcare and consumer goods groups, major regional banks, social-commerce platforms and microinsurers covering over a million people. These 64,000+ employees across client organisations drive over $5bn in annual revenue, all seeking to become AI-native on their existing systems without costly overhauls. Backed by Y Combinator with $5.8M raised, this is an opportunity to build the market playbook from scratch. What You'll Do As Lua expands into East Africa, you'll own market development from day one. This isn't traditional sales work — you'll navigate to senior leadership, dig into complex business challenges, shape opportunities through structured discovery, and guide deals from initial conversation through paid audits, pilots, deployments and growth phases. Your key responsibilities include opening the market by identifying and developing enterprise opportunities across priority sectors in Kenya using your network to reach senior decision-makers and influential stakeholders. You'll lead early-stage commercial conversations to quickly and honestly assess pain points, urgency, available budget and decision-making processes. Working closely with Lua's product and technical teams, you'll develop client-appropriate use cases and present agents, audits, pilots and deployments in concrete business language. You'll orchestrate the entire motion — managing demonstrations, discovery sessions, workshops, proposals, business cases and client materials. You'll drive opportunities from initial interest to signed paid engagements, maintaining disciplined follow-up and pipeline visibility throughout. Building the broader ecosystem involves developing relationships with partners, consultants, systems integrators and other market connectors. Finally, you'll feed market insights back into Lua's go-to-market approach, including positioning, packaging and pricing strategy for East Africa. Success Metrics Beginning immediately, you'll be evaluated on the quality and seniority of opportunities opened, execution velocity, follow-up discipline and ultimately signed, collected revenue. Within your first 90 days, you should convert market access and sales activity into at least one signed, paid client engagement — whether that's a paid audit, pilot or initial deployment. What You Bring Essential Requirements You bring 10+ years of B2B or enterprise sales, partnerships or commercial experience with demonstrated success opening, managing and closing deals with mid-market or enterprise clients. Your existing network across Kenya's business ecosystem — senior decision-makers, founders, executives and established operators — actively converts into tangible commercial progress, not just meetings. You're a consultative seller comfortable navigating new, complex or emerging technology where the opportunity is apparent but the solution emerges through discovery, not off-the-shelf pitching. You understand Kenya's actual business buying processes: relationship-driven sales, internal political dynamics, procurement requirements, budget timing and executive sponsorship needs. Your commercial judgement is sharp — you quickly qualify what's real versus what isn't, and you're direct about what needs to happen next. You own your work independently, follow up without prompting, and maintain deal momentum even when clients move slowly, lack clarity or present navigation challenges. Advantageous Experience Prior success selling SaaS, AI, automation, fintech, cloud or digital transformation solutions is valuable, particularly to banks, insurers, SACCOs, telcos, logistics companies, manufacturers, retailers or large service organisations. Experience specifically with pilots, audits, discovery projects or transformation initiatives strengthens your candidacy, along with disciplined CRM and pipeline management practices.