Vice President of Sales

Requirements

• If you love turning chaos into clarity and are deeply passionate about solving real world problems that everyone around the dinner table would love “someone to solve”, then keep reading
• You’ll be excited about this role if you a proven sales leader that is just as obsessed about building systems and leading teams as you are about closing a sale
• You’re as comfortable aligning strategy and process as you are running a sales meeting
• You set a high bar for your team and are skilled at coaching them to be the best versionof themselves
• You’re a systems thinker by default and love driving clarity from ambiguity
• You get goosebumps from the opportunity of making a real impact on the education system
• You think BIG, not only incrementally. In three years, with you at the helm, your function will be unrecognisable from where it is now
• You’re process-led and hyper-structured. You plan meticulously and build play books to deliver commercial results, rather than relying on herculean individual efforts or hope
• You can align teams, not just ideas
• You love finding simple answers to complex problems
• You love looking around corners and out-maneuvering the competition
• This also means, that if you’re a proven sales leader who’s curious and hungry to keep learning, but haven’t worked in education before, then you should still apply

What the job involves

• We’re looking for a VP of Sales to join our leadership team as part of our next chapter of growth in the UK
• We are one of the leading suppliers in our industry and one of the fastest growing companies in the UK
• A high-performing team of sales people and managers in place, craving leadership
• A differentiated product that makes a genuine impact on the lives of educators, pupils, and the education system
• What your first 6-12 months might look like
• Redefine our customer segmentation and go-to-market strategy at a time of considerable industry change
• Test and iterate several new acquisition channels
• Double the size of the outbound sales team and level it up into a world-class SDR function
• Develop a compelling sales playbook for several new products for large groups of schools (Multi-academy trusts)
• Building the system rather than individual heroics: having great players on the pitch is critical
• However, a great system trumps the best salesperson without one
• We’ve got a product with genuine product market-fit that makes our customers lives better
• We’re looking for someone who can level up the system in getting the word out
• First principles reasoning rather than replicating other companies’ best practices: we believe every situation has nuance
• Experience is an input in decision making, but not the only one
• The leaders that do best are endlessly curious and deconstruct problems to first principles
• They’re not just making decisions because they’ve seen them work elsewhere, they experiment a lot and double down on the successful ones
• Slope and passion over Y Intercept
• High-trajectory individuals with a passion for what they do very quickly lap those with a higher initial starting point in their domain but slower trajectory
• That means Executives at Zen often end up spending more time up-front investing in the upskilling of colleagues from non-traditional backgrounds but it quickly pays dividends many times over

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