VP of Sales

We’re looking for a VP of Sales to join our leadership team as part of our next chapter of growth in the UK. 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.

Why we exist

Education is the cornerstone of a thriving society. Schools do their utmost to provide children with positive experiences, but having the right staff is essential to fulfilling that promise – that’s where we come in. Whether it’s a year 1 teacher to greet her “good morning” or a Teaching Assistant to support him in the break times, Zen helps schools find the right educators faster without breaking the bank. Schools in the UK and US spend over £12bn a year on agency staff, and over £3.6bn of that goes straight into the pockets of recruitment agencies. Zen is an all-in-one digital platform that gives schools full control over how they find, vet, and manage temporary educators. School leaders can search, book, and manage staff in real time, while gaining full visibility and control over their spend and compliance. To go with our technology, we practice a culture of “we care more”, so that ultimately, by improving staffing in schools, we’re delivering thousands of smiles to children’s faces every day. What we need now is to reach the next level in school awareness and adoption. That’s where you come in.

What we are looking for

• We’ve built strong foundations already:

• 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

We’re now looking to level up even further. 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.

Some traits that usually correlate with success in this role

• 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.

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).

Who you’ll work with

We’re a 400+ (and growing!) team operating across the UK, US, and Canada. We’re well funded, default alive, growing fast, and have tremendous unit economics. Simply put, we’re doing really well by doing good. As such, we’re a passionate group of missionaries rather than mercenaries. We’re looking to find someone who shares our passion for the mission of making education better.

What you might like or dislike

Every place makes trade-offs based on what they value and where they are in their journey. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them.

• 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.

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.

Interested? Let’s go! If you’ve made it this far and you’re excited then hit apply. If the timing isn’t right or you’re not sure it’s a right fit, reach out anyway. We’re always open to talking to those who believe in our mission. Let’s build something that actually matters.