Sales Lead

About Kitovu

Kitovu is a forward-thinking fintech company revolutionizing financial services in the Rwandan market. Our mission is to provide inclusive, accessible, and innovative financial solutions that empower individuals and businesses across East Africa. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and a deep understanding of local markets, Kitovu aims to bridge the financial gap and enhance financial inclusion for millions of people.

Role Overview

As Sales Lead, you will build and run the commercial engine behind KitovuPay's merchant and growth across the Rwandan market. This is a fast-moving hands-on leadership role: you will personally source, qualify, and close strategic merchant relationships, while bringing process, speed, forecasting, and qualification discipline to a commercial function that is still taking shape. You will work with our Kitovu's Head of Business Development.

Responsibilities

• Own merchant pipeline hygiene and forecasting: consistent stage definitions, honest close-date discipline, and a single source of truth the leadership team can trust.
• Personally source, qualify, and close strategic merchant relationships, particularly where deal complexity or seniority calls for direct leadership involvement.
• Build and run a qualification framework that distinguishes real signal, live, transacting relationships with clean settlement, from pipeline that looks good but is not evidence of anything
• Coordinate with the Head of Business Development to keep lanes clear between merchant-side and institutional-side outreach, so no organization gets contacted twice from two different directions inside Kitovu.
• Bring commercial input into onboarding sequencing decisions, in coordination with engineering and compliance, so new merchant commitments are realistic against what the team can actually deliver.
• Represent Kitovu in commercial conversations with merchants, banks, and institutional partners.
• Track key performance indicators such as merchant acquisition, live transacting volume, and settlement reliability to assess commercial success.
• Report regularly and directly to the CEO on pipeline health, forecast accuracy, and deal-level risk, not just wins.
• Negotiate contracts and commercial terms with merchants to ensure profitable, well-structured partnerships

Skillset

• Direct, demonstrable experience selling or operating commercially in Rwanda; you already understand how business gets done here, the relationships, the pace, the institutions, and the norms around trust and follow-through.
• Genuine dynamism and agility; priorities here shift as fast as the regulatory and product picture shifts, and you can reorient quickly without losing momentum or needing everything re-explained from scratch.
• A high output bar and a high-quality bar on that output; your pipeline, forecasts, and closed deals hold up under scrutiny every time.
• Autonomous "self-starter" who thrives when given responsibility and takes initiative.
• Comfort operating with real ambiguity; this is not a role with a mature playbook to execute, and some of the playbook will be built by you, in partnership with the CEO
• Process discipline; you instinctively want a clean CRM, an honest forecast, and clear definitions of what counts as a qualified deal, not just the chase.
• Strong judgment about what to escalate, and comfort working inside a tight compliance and legal review process for anything customer-facing.
• Excellent at strategic relationship building and maintenance

Qualifications

• At least 3 – 7 years of experience in B2B/institutional sales, business development within payments, banking or fintech in Rwanda or similar emerging markets.
• Meaningful experience in B2B or institutional sales within payments, fintech, or a comparably regulated industry, ideally in an emerging market context.
• A track record of personally closing complex, relationship-driven deals with real cycle length, not primarily inbound or transactional sales.
• Strong understanding of the Rwandan market and its financial and regulatory landscape.
• A working understanding of cross-border payments.
• Existing relationships with key potential merchant or partner networks are an added advantage.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to engage effectively with internal and external stakeholders.
• Holds a degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, Banking & Finance, Economics or related fields.