Sales Manager

At Oxford Scholastica, we’re looking for an outstanding Sales Manager to head up the crucially important Sales portfolio for our award-winning residential summer school and online programmes. We’re a super-small team of six people, and deliberately so – since starting over twelve years ago, we’ve learnt that bigger isn’t necessarily better. We combine the energy and agility of a startup with the stability and track record of an established organisation. It’s one of the reasons our team members tend to stick around (our average tenure is 6 years). We like to do things differently, and our “ambitiously lean” model has seen us welcome over 8,000 students to our programmes (we were proud to win the first ever King’s Award for Enterprise at Buckingham Palace in 2023).

We’re passionate about supporting more students to experience our programmes, to benefit from our worldview and to engage with their futures. While many in the world are pessimistic about the future, we think the world’s fast pace of progress means it’s the greatest time to be alive. The purpose of OSA is to empower students, parents and schools to maximise the opportunities for young people rather than feeling constrained by the challenges. We do this through promoting active thinking, collaboration and long-term thinking - the mindset that we believe will set students up for success in a changing world.

If you’re an A* player who is self-motivated, optimistic, flexible of mind, keen to learn and excited by our mission, we’d love to hear from you.

As Sales Manager, you’ll need to excel at five core things:

• Meeting targets – you’re someone who loves a challenge and thrives on meeting targets. As our main sales person, we’ll be looking to you to bring in our sales – we’ll rely on you, and you love that. You’ll go above and beyond to win a sale (in the right way) and are happy checking in on weekends/evenings when needed, like we do.
• Phone communication – you’re someone who loves to proactively pick up the phone to win a sale. In fact, you prefer this to email. You enjoy building relationships, and you’re keen to help parents to make the best decision for their child.
• Written communication – you’re someone who writes fluidly, accurately and at speed. You’re a natural at writing high quality emails, and you hate making grammatical or spelling mistakes. We’ll rely on you to reply to incoming enquiries swiftly - we’re operating in a competitive market so speed and accuracy of response are crucial in giving parents confidence to entrust their child to us with our premium products. You’ll be backed by our highly automated tech, allowing you to major your time on the things that count.
• Administration – you don’t tend to make mistakes, and if you do you learn from them. You let no lead go un-contacted, and you make sure the administration of our CRM is as perfect as it can be.
• Ownership and self-motivation – you’re someone who embraces responsibility. You expect to hold yourself to account rather than needing external monitoring or motivation. You love our mission and see work as part of what makes life meaningful, rather than a job to fulfil. You’re restless to improve our sales figures – and improve yourself.

We’ll need to see evidence of these qualities in your application, including at least three years of sales experience.

From September to May, your main focus will be selling places on our Oxford summer school, as well as developing and implementing the sales strategy behind this. You’ll work closely with Charlotte, who provides customer service support. From June to August, you’ll focus on sales for our online programme, while also playing a customer service role in handling higher-level parental queries and challenges.

Your salary will be £40,000-£50,000. We don’t pay commission, as we’re looking for team members who are intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated. Instead, we believe strongly in performance-related progression.

We’re a fully remote team so we welcome applications from anyone in a UK-compatible timezone. If you’re based in the UK, we have regular team events and socials, and an annual trip (this year, to Dubai). You’ll be working directly with our Co-Director Lavinia who will support and coach you. You’ll be given the opportunity to turbocharge your professional development. And if you’re an A* player, we’ll fast-track your salary and growth.

Please note, the Oxford Scholastica Academy is committed to safeguarding its students, and all our staff play a key role in this. As a result, appointments will be subject to reference and a successfully completed enhanced DBS check. This is an outline job description and should not be regarded as an inflexible specification. As a term of your employment you may be required to undertake such other duties and/or hours of work as may reasonably be required, including evenings and weekends during the summer school.