Vice President of Sales in London

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 are 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 version of 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 playbooks 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-manoeuvring 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.

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.