Senior Sales Manager - Rivonia Verfied

Salary Negotiable Rivonia, Gauteng Rivonia, Gauteng more than 14 days ago 06-10-2019 6:42:55 PM
01-12-2019 6:42:55 PM
Job title: Senior Sales Manager
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Job function: Sales; Business Development
Employment type: Full-time
Company Industry: E-Learning
Seniority level: Mid-Senior level

Job Description:

At Snapplify we're increasing access to digital educational materials, and empowering educators to transform their classrooms for the 21st Century. We need a senior sales manager to join our Growth team, and help us tackle that challenge by developing and executing sales strategies to drive customer acquisition in 20 territories globally.

Our team believes in making a real, measurable impact. We're known for being innovative, and have a hardworking team of experts who are incredible to work alongside. We move fast, with a bias towards action. If you're ambitious, driven, and like to work on big, chewy projects, then our team might just be for you.

You’ll have the opportunity to help us reach new heights, by negotiating high-value deals, developing exciting business opportunities, and managing our outside sales team as they generate leads and close deals.

You’ll know that you’re the person for the job if:
You’re passionate about the world of learning: for yourself, and for others. You’re smart, curious, and a committed life-long learner. You’re the kind of leader who seeks to empower your team through knowledge sharing: from sharing learnings based on your long experience, to recommending books and articles, to identifying areas where team members need upskilling, and then coaching them to develop their expertise.
Speaking of leadership: you’re a natural. People who’ve worked with you hold you in high-esteem, and trust your leadership decisions. You know how to get the team’s buy-in on new strategies, products, and processes.
You’re particularly skilled at identifying client’s needs, communicating value, and packaging offers that appeal to them. You’ll go above and beyond to meet a deliverable that takes Snapplify to the next level.
Most importantly: you’re a closer. You’re the one who steps up to the plate in the last mile, and helps to get a deal across the line. You never give up. You’re tenacious. But, you also know when to walk away from a deal, and have the conviction to stand behind your decisions.

If every word of that resonates with you, then read on to find out what a typical week would look like for you:

Monday
You start the day like every other: by reading and engaging with the daily ‘stand-up’ of the sales team. You check these to make sure their goals for the day are aligned with the needs of the business, and review any blockers that are preventing them from moving forward in key areas. You work to swiftly unblock these.
Next, you review email and Slack activity, as well as inbound tickets and tasks in our CRM to prioritise and triage any critical work for yourself or the sales team. The inside sales team has identified a new tender opportunity, and it falls directly in your area of functional authority - you review the requirements, and then arrange a kick-off meeting to make sure everyone involved is aware of their deliverables and deadlines.
In the course of your morning review, you identify two areas of misalignment within the sales team. One is important, but less urgent, so you flag this to be raised later in the weekly sales meeting. The other is critical, and requires immediate intervention. You cut through the noise and call the team member directly, in order to get to the bottom of their issue. They leave the call feeling positive and confident about their next steps.
After the tender submission kick-off meeting, you review your deal pipeline in the CRM. A few of the high-value deals that you’re currently working on are in the final stages of negotiation, and you complete some action points required to drive these forward. You also spend some time leveraging your network to try and set a meeting with a key prospective partner in the education space.
Finally, you prepare to run the weekly sales meeting by reviewing the deal pipeline and the team’s sales activity for the previous week. You identify any redflags or concerns which you’d like to raise and discuss with the team, as well as any effective strategies that could be applied to other deals. The goal of this meeting is reducing deal inertia, and ensuring that the team is highly focused and doing the right work.

Tuesday
Late last night our product team released a key new feature, that is critical for all of our clients. You invest time in reading the detailed release notes, and you test the feature for yourself in the platform. You corral the team to jump on a quick group call to ensure they have also reviewed the new feature, and to establish next steps: they need to inform existing clients, and current prospects. You help them to define a strategy for doing this productively.
You have a mid-morning call set up with the director of a group of educational institutions we want to work with. You’ve prepared a demo in advance, but you review this again to include the new product release. On the call, you ask smart and insightful questions, so that you can later pin-point the aspects of the platform that will speak to them. All the while you keep detailed notes, which you log diligently in the CRM as soon as your call ends.
You are attending a key educational event in the upcoming month, and you’ve just been sent the kick-off document by the inside sales team. You read this carefully, noting that you will be required to fill a 20 minute speaking slot. You also carefully review the list of key attendees that they have listed, and see that several include people you’ve been wanting to connect with. You invest some time in reaching out to these contacts to set up meetings at the event. You align with other team members and, between you, make sure that you’ve reached out to every key attendee on the list.
You spend the afternoon in meetings: in one, you review progress on the preparation of the tender; in another, you contribute to discussions around a group deal strategy.

Wednesday
As usual, you have a few calls set up with current and prospective clients. It’s a busy time of year, and you want to make sure that everything is running smoothly in relation to our key procurement deals. After you’ve logged all the notes and action items from your calls in the CRM, you action what you can in terms of moving those deals forward. You also check in with the rest of the sales team. They need to perform similar calls, and you want to make sure that they are on track with reaching their daily call targets.
Between calls, you are still working closely with your incoming mails and tickets and reviewing tasks (your own, and the teams’) to make sure this stays within KPIs.
You spend a bit of time after hours working on the tender documents, as it is important to you that we get this right. Over the course of the day some team members have raised queries in the docs - you answer these, tweak some of the language, and put together a pricing schedule for review in the morning.

Thursday
In a morning alignment meeting you identify that there are just a few items outstanding for the tender submission, and that everything else has been done to a high standard. You review timelines for the completion of remaining work, and for delivering the submission the following week. Then you update the senior management team to let them know everything is on track.
A deal seems to have stagnated just as the client was getting ready to sign on the dotted line. You accompany a team member to an in-person meeting with the client, to push it over the line. You use your extensive set of sales tools swiss-knife-style to pin-point and resolve the blockers, repackaging part of the deal, and getting them to sign straight-away.
When you return to the office, you discover that a key client (with whom we are in the middle of a renewal discussion), has been experiencing some difficulties, and that their issue has unfortunately been mismanaged. As a result, they are very unhappy. You jump into problem-solving mode: calming flustered members of your team, and working with the sales, customer-service, and product-escalation teams to understand the crux of the problem, come up with a resolution, and effectively communicate this to the client in a way that makes them feel heard and looked after.

Friday
You’ve set aside a half-day to work on automating aspects of the deal pipeline to increase efficiencies and reduce deal inertia with a colleague.
You spend the rest of the day reviewing new opportunities that have been qualified by the inside sales team, searching through them for interesting high-value deal potential. You’re particularly looking to develop opportunities in two new verticals, which we’ve only just launched - so the work is fresh, and exciting.

Responsibilities
Contributing to the development of the sales strategy.
Executing on the sales strategy, and managing the deal pipeline.
Managing negotiation of high-value deals and developing key business opportunities.
Mentorship and direction of the sales team.
Effective client management and maintenance of relationships.
Assist in the development of effective strategies based on data-driven insights.

Qualifications
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
3+ years' experience in sales at a senior level
Experience working with educational institutions, government, and partners (preferred)
Experience selling SaaS (preferred)
Experience working with HubSpot or similar CRM (preferred)
You can speak English, Zulu/Xhosa (preferred)

We have not predetermined the salary for this position. We’ll work that out with you based on your skills, experience, and career path.

If you're excited by this opportunity, please send us a cover letter and your CV or a link to your LinkedIn profile (or similar). Our Sales team wields words as weapons, so that cover letter is the thing that will drive us to call you back. Make sure it's as exceptional as you are.

Recruiter: Snapplify.com