Job Description
Do you believe that a sincere desire to help is at the heart of great selling?
Do you want to help more students and parents benefit from a service that truly makes a difference?
Are you looking for resources, support, and training to do the very best selling of your career?
Collegewise is looking for an inside salesperson to become the next great addition to our sales team. While the position is fully remote, our ideal candidate will be someone who is able to work Pacific Time Zone hours.
First, a quick introduction
Collegewise believes that the college admissions process has spun out of control for high school students and their parents. Too much anxiety and confusion. Too much obsession with prestigious colleges. Too little appreciation for the wonderful educations and experiences waiting at so many schools beyond just the famous ones. And we’re out to change all of that. Together, we’ve built the nation’s largest college counseling organization with over 50 highly trained counselors injecting guidance, perspective, and occasional cheerleading into the admissions process for the families who join our programs. Since 1999, we’ve helped over 24,000 A-students, C-students, and everyone in between find, apply to, and attend the right colleges for them.
To learn more about our inspiring work, check out this short video (https://vimeo.com/280938905)
How We Work
Here’s a short video to help you learn about our culture and the amazing people we work with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM6Sgi2kSpg
What’s the job?
Your mission will be to drive revenue that allows Collegewise to continue to grow, scale, and change lives. In this role, you will be both an executer of our sales process and a helpful guide to those families who enter into it.
As an executer of our sales process, you’ll join a team that handles all the activity from the moment a prospect reaches out to us until they decide to enroll with us. You’ll follow up with contacts. You’ll engage meaningfully and efficiently by telephone, website chat, and email with parents of college-bound students. You’ll pair them with appropriate programs and follow up to make sure that hand-off has gone smoothly. And you’ll need to do all of this while efficiently managing a high volume of incoming leads.
Responsibilities
Here are the five most important day-to-day responsibilities for an inside salesperson at Collegewise:
Communicate via phone and email with families interested in learning more about our services. Some of those inquiries are incoming, but even when you are making outbound efforts to reach families, you will never be contacting anyone who hasn’t specifically asked that we do so.
Learn about a student’s needs by asking the right questions and taking time to listen (what you ask and hear is often more important than what you say).
Educate families about the Collegewise program options.
Follow up with families who’ve asked for time to consider their options.
Track and update a family’s sales status in our CRM system.
Who We’re Looking For
Given the mission of our work, we require that candidates have earned a bachelor’s degree. But beyond your education and the experience on your resume, here is the type of person and talent we’ve learned thrives in this role:
You make work a way of life without making it your actual life. Someone who’d rather be challenged by something important than phone it in for something mundane. You want to commit to a calling that matters to you, and you have high expectations of yourself, your job, and your employer.
You’ve got an inner drive to get things done, to learn, and to progress towards mastery in your job. You’re not deterred by obstacles. You welcome the accountability of a role like this. And you thrive in a busy, productive atmosphere.
People listen to you. You’re honest and forthright, able to win trust easily. You’re an impeccable in-person and written communicator, and you develop positive relationships with both colleagues and customers.
You want to understand a potential customer’s needs before you recommend a solution. You see that time spent as an opportunity, not an obstacle.
You want to contribute your significant sales skills to our goal of helping as many families as possible transform their journey to college. Your day is made when you’ve helped as many people as possible, and you see this role as a chance to do so while selling a service you genuinely believe in.
Salary, start date, and location
This position starts at a 40k base plus commission with uncapped earnings. A successful Program Advisor might earn an additional 80% of their salary in commission. We also offer a full suite of benefits that includes vacation time, summer work hours, paid parental leave, and a robust insurance plan. We’ve worked hard to build a company that allows each of us to bring our best self to work without sacrificing our best life at home. You can learn more about our benefits and our approach to a healthy workplace in our employee handbook, which we’ve made public (https://tinyurl.com/37wtdfw7).
We’d like our new inside salesperson to start as soon as possible, but we can adjust the start date to accommodate the right person. We’re comfortable with the person in this role working remotely, but the ideal candidate will be based in and serve families in the Pacific time zone.
We want to hear from you
If you’re excited about this opportunity but unsure if you’re the right fit, we hope you’ll take a shot. There is no such thing as a perfect applicant (or a perfect job, for that matter). And we promise to give a fair and thorough read to every applicant who takes the time to submit a thoughtful application to us.
We also understand that the more we embrace diversity of age, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability, ethnicity, and perspective, the stronger the company we’ll be able to build together. Creating an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work is the right thing to do. And we hope you’re excited to embrace and contribute to our efforts.
How to Apply
If your interest is piqued, please start by writing us a cover letter that tells your story. What role has admissions or counseling played in your professional life? What brought you to this place seeking this role? What excites you about this opportunity?
We really enjoy working with people who are clear thinkers and equally clear communicators. And you’re more interesting than a generic “insert-name-of-company-here” letter. So please be yourself and use your letter to help us get to know the real you. You might also consider checking out our five tips for job-seekers.
Then submit your application. When you paste your cover letter into the text box, your formatting will hold up when we see it (but if it doesn’t, we’ll blame the text box, not you).
Questions?
Feel free to email us at jobs@collegewise.com (please no phone calls). We promise to respond to you quickly.
Thanks for reading our post. We’d love to hear from you, but if we don’t, we hope you find the perfect professional fit someplace else.