Advanced Specialist, Sales in Sunderland

Home-based role with travel across the North East area, and is term-time only (205 days per year). Our mission is to partner with schools to deliver learner progression. All students from the age of 5 through to 18+, have their own individual learner journeys. Alongside their teachers, Pearson can help them make the progression most appropriate to them, whether onto Further or Higher Education onto Apprenticeships or directly into work. Through a consultative, collaborative sales approach we support our school customers with the right choice of products and services for their learners.

Reporting to the Manager, Sales, the role is to build and maintain relationships with a defined group of customer accounts to deliver year on year business growth. These accounts will be based on Multi Academy Trusts, Chains, Dioceses, Federations, Teaching Alliances and other large, organised consortia or schools across 11-19, targeting Senior Leaders in those organisations to influence curriculum decisions. This role aligns with industry level titles such as Partnership Manager.

Main Accountabilities:

• Managing a retain and grow strategy with cross curricular SLT within Multi-Academy Trusts and priority school accounts.
• Leading on Lead/Opportunity generation across GQ & VQ for CDMs.
• Driving revenue growth in MAT customer base.
• Driving revenue growth in priority school customer base.
• Identifying and acting upon growth and risk opportunities in your region.
• Achieve coverage targets.
• Multi-functional collaboration to support customers in acquisition and retention.
• Delivering termly regional SLT Briefings.

Key Performance Indicators:

• Annual revenue in customer base courseware and qualifications vs target.
• YoY revenue growth in customer base courseware and qualifications.
• Meetings virtual and in-person.
• Customer and prospect coverage.
• Lead generation.
• Pipeline health & Lead conversion.
• SLT Briefings attendance, NPS & Lead Generation.

Results:

• Generating profitable sales through new business growth and senior leadership relationship, driving sales effectiveness and efficiency.
• Exceed annual revenue goals by building and maintaining a pipeline of opportunities across qualifications and learning services that follow clearly defined strategies for accounts.
• Working closely with accounts and stakeholders to deliver a retain and grow strategy leading to overall growth year on year.
• Taking accountability for driving qualifications and learning services revenue within a broad product portfolio across your region.
• The ability to drive results and outcomes as a result of professional, well planned and executed strategies.
• Develop strategy to ensure the highest chance of success in your region.
• Working productively across your regional matrix team, including developing and implementing regional strategies to increase revenue.
• Demonstrating foresight and flexibility to adapt your strategy to maximise opportunity and minimise risk.
• Ability to use and interpret market information which capitalise on strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for promoting revenue growth.
• Use One CRM (Salesforce) effectively to capture interactions and pipeline, but also drive the most effective outputs.

Customer:

• Creating, maintaining and managing relationships with future customers at key stakeholder level.
• Managing the complex nature of secondary schools and their stakeholders.
• Regularly responsible for uncovering and developing new customer relationships.
• Use sales experience and technique to develop customer relationships into growth opportunities.
• Delivering breadth of product expertise in the 11-19 education market; providing expertise to various stakeholders.
• Apply appropriate sales tools and skills to drive productive outcomes at each stage.
• Demonstrate an in depth understanding of the customers learning and growth strategies, values, challenges, internal policies and apply that to growth plans.
• Articulating the value of what you are selling in ways that are relevant to the customer, overcome competition and engage key stakeholders.
• Deliver powerful sales presentations, communicate effectively and with gravitas to relevant stakeholders and decision makers.

Personal:

• Think and work independently – forming and implementing your strategy for the region.
• Take responsibility for solving complex customer and market challenges.
• Makes understanding changes in the market a key focus and uses that information effectively with customer and the business.
• Uses strong communication skills to not only influence customers, but also to develop a successful internal network.
• Take ownership for personal development of skills, knowledge and experience.
• Growth mindset.
• A proactive decision-maker who considers commercial implications alongside customer need.

Required Skills / Experience:

• The ability to leverage communication in order to change attitudes or behaviour by using written or spoken words to convey information to gain specific advantage, impact or outcome.
• Demonstrate collaborative attitude and behaviour consistent with team and organisational values as the matrix account structure will deliver the complete customer experience.
• Strong selling skills with a particular focus on managing senior level relationships in secondary schools/trusts and driving revenue growth.
• Strong product knowledge across resources and qualifications in the secondary market.
• Objection handling, negotiation and presentation skills.
• Demonstrate, share and inform best practice.
• Provide key market insight to other areas of the business and to inform regional activity.

Personal Competencies:

• Highly motivated and results driven – shows initiative to achieve and generate opportunity.
• Customer growth focused.
• Strong organisational and planning skills.
• Commercially minded and able to effectively define and deliver sales strategy.
• Committed and flexible.
• Aptitude for learning new technologies and skills.
• Competent with digital media.

Role Qualifications:

• Excellent knowledge of the UK education market.
• Demonstrative experience in a business to business sales environment, selling complex solutions at a senior level (growth and acquisition).
• Field based and willingness to travel (80%).
• Full UK driving licence.

Your Rewards & Benefits:

We know you’ll do great work, so we give a lot back with some of the best benefits in the business. We also recognise that one size doesn’t fit all, so our workplace programmes are designed to support the diverse needs of our colleagues and their families too. There’s a wide range of benefits available, but when you join Pearson, you can look forward to:

• Flexibility in the way we work.
• A starting holiday entitlement of 25 days plus UK public holidays, with one additional day for each completed year of service (pro-rated in line with the term-time working pattern – 205 days per year).
• A generous pension scheme, where we match and double your contributions, up to 16% depending on your age.
• Maternity, paternity, and family care leave, alongside flexible working policies.
• Share purchase options.
• Healthcare and dental plans, as well as an employee wellbeing assistance programme to support you and your family.
• A cycle to work scheme, gym membership concessions (at selected locations), and a range of retail and leisure discounts.

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are.