Business Development Intern at Contoro Robotics in Austin, TX

Job description

• Application
• The role
• You'll work directly with our Director of Business Development, in our Austin office.
• Our Director of Business Development sits at the center of the commercial work here: the sales conversations, the marketing, the customer support calls, the proposals, the site visits, and the spare parts that have to reach a customer's dock on schedule. With our growth, this role is vital to providing the business with the additional support to obtain great customers.
• The work is a mix. Some of it is writing that goes in front of customers. Some of it is coordination and follow-up that nobody notices until it doesn't happen. You will learn how a robotics deal is actually won, and you will learn it from close range.

Responsibilities

• Sales pipeline management
• Keep the CRM accurate and current. Log activity, clean records, chase down missing fields. Pipeline you can't see isn't a executable pipeline.
• Investigate target accounts and build the call lists. We already know this industry and mostly know who we're talking to — your job is to have the volumes, the site details, and the history in hand before the meeting, not to discover the market.
• Automate the boring parts. Build AI and automation workflows that take repetitive sales and marketing work off the team — lead enrichment, sequence drafting, follow-up triggers, report generation.
• Draft and send outbound sequences, and route inbound leads so nothing sits unanswered.
• Sales support
• Help assemble proposals, quotes, and customer-facing performance reports.
• Pull performance data from deployed systems and turn it into something a customer can read in two minutes.
• Take notes in customer calls, write up next steps, and make sure they happen.
• Marketing
• Support trade show and event logistics — registration, shipping, booth materials, set up, staffing, post-show follow-up.
• Help produce case studies, one-pagers, and social posts.
• Customer support
• Stay in regular contact with customers. Understand how our robots are actually performing on their floors, and keep the relationship warm enough that they tell you the truth about it.
• Escalate customer issues to the right person internally and follow them to closure.
• In the field
• Travel to customer sites to support visits, installs, and demos. Walk docks, watch our systems run in a live building, and bring back what you learn.
• Warehouses run when warehouses run. Some visits start before dawn and some run late.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in or recently graduated from a bachelor's or master's program. Business, supply chain, marketing, engineering, and communications backgrounds all work here. We care more about how you operate than what you studied.
• Based in Austin and able to work on-site. This is not a remote internship.
• Strong written communication. A customer email or a performance report is a piece of writing, and it either builds confidence or erodes it.
• Highly organized, and the kind of person who follows up without being told to. Much of this job is remembering the thing nobody else remembered.
• Comfortable being useful before you're an expert. You will be asked to figure things out with incomplete instructions. Contoro is a fast growing startup whose work environment is very dynamic.
• Valid driver's license and willingness to travel to customer sites, including occasional overnight trips and visits outside normal business hours.
• Any exposure to logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, or robotics — coursework, internships, or a family business.
• Experience with CRM tools (HubSpot, Salesforce) or basic spreadsheet analysis.

Skills

Required

• Strong written communication
• Highly organized
• Follow-up skills
• Comfortable with incomplete instructions
• Valid driver's license
• Willingness to travel

Preferred

• Basic spreadsheet analysis

Benefits

• You'll be one of the first people on a commercial team that is still small enough to see all of at once, at a company whose robots are already in production at name-brand logistics operations. You will see the full arc including how a deal is won, how a system gets deployed, why it breaks, and what makes a customer expand.
• Interns who do this job well have a path to a full-time commercial role if the intern showed his/her potentials.