Responsibilities

Win new partnerships

• Own a defined portfolio of target colleges and providers, delivering against an annual new business and first-year growth target.
• Self-source opportunity through the routes described above, maintaining meaningful coverage of your named account list.
• Build genuine relationships across the institutions you work with, understanding their learners, their pressures and their constraints before proposing anything.
• Forecast accurately against quarterly and annual targets, with the pipeline coverage needed to hit them.

Diagnose and design

• Run discovery that reaches the real operational problem — where support is failing, what it is costing, and who inside the institution feels it.
• Translate that into a business case senior leaders can defend internally, quantifying the impact on achievement, compliance, funding and workload.
• Bring market insight, sector context and honest comparison, including where we are not the answer.
• Design the shape of the partnership — scope, rollout, success measures — alongside Customer Success, so what we sell is what we can deliver.

Run a disciplined commercial process

• Qualify and manage opportunities through a structured process (we use BANT and MEDDPICC), keeping CRM records current and forecasts honest.
• Work across the whole buying group — quality, curriculum, support, finance and executive leadership — identifying early who sponsors the change, who signs, and who can stop it.
• Navigate procurement, tender and framework routes where they apply, and negotiate terms that hold up over a multi-year relationship.

Own the relationship after signature

• Retain commercial ownership of your accounts post-close, accountable for the value of the relationship over its lifetime.
• Partner with Customer Success on adoption and outcomes, because a partnership that is not delivering will not grow and should not renew on autopilot.
• Identify and execute growth within existing partnerships, including expansion from apprenticeship provision into whole-college delivery.

Feed the wider business

• Bring what you learn in the market back to Product and Marketing — where the proposition lands, where it does not, and what the sector is about to face.
• Contribute to sector content, events and thought leadership alongside Marketing.
• Share approaches, insight and intelligence with colleagues across Sales and Customer Success.
• Help improve how we go to market: process, enablement, systems and reporting.

Required Skills & Experience

• Experience owning commercial relationships end to end in a considered, multi-stakeholder sale, with a record of winning new business and growing accounts over time.
• Understanding of the further education, apprenticeship or skills sector — how institutions are funded, inspected and held to account, and how decisions actually get made inside them. Directly equivalent experience from an adjacent sector will be considered.
• Strong diagnostic and problem-solving ability: able to work out what is really wrong in a provider’s support model, not to run a standard demo.
• Excellent relationship and communication skills across the full range, from support practitioners to executive leadership.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to adapt — the proposition, the market and the funding landscape all move.
• Commercially disciplined: accurate forecasting, clean CRM hygiene, and familiarity with a structured sales methodology such as MEDDPICC or MEDDIC.
• Willing and able to be visible in the sector — events, speaking, writing and professional networks.
• Able to travel across the UK to be in front of customers.

Key Competencies

• Curiosity and listening — asks better questions than the competition and actually hears the answers.
• Judgement — knows which opportunities to pursue, which to walk away from, and when to say we are not the right fit.
• Credibility — is worth the meeting, and is remembered for being useful rather than persistent.
• Resilience and self-direction — plans their own coverage and keeps going through long buying cycles.
• Organisation — runs multiple live opportunities without losing forecast accuracy or letting relationships go cold.
• Negotiation and presentation — confident in front of a leadership team and in a commercial conversation.

Qualifications & Motivation

• No specific qualification is required. Experience of the education, EdTech, skills or apprenticeship sector is a strong advantage.
• A genuine interest in cognition, inclusion and learner achievement, and in the commercial mission of widening access to cognitive assessment.

How Success Is Measured

• New partnership revenue and first-year growth against annual target.
• Coverage and quality of intelligence across the named account list.
• Opportunities created, by source — so we learn which routes into this market actually work.
• Forecast accuracy.
• Retention and multi-year commitment across the accounts you own.

What's in it for You?

• EMI company share scheme, meaning you would own a percentage of shares, turning into significant monetary value in time.
• Competitive salary.
• Westfield Health cash plan.
• 1-2-1 Sanctus coaching sessions to support personal and professional development with proactive mental wellbeing support.
• Flexible working.
• A paid day off on your birthday.
• Aviva Life insurance.
• Workplace Nursery Benefit.
• Long service awards to celebrate key employment anniversaries.
• Excellent discounts/wider wallet.
• 5% matched contribution pension scheme
• Pension salary exchange scheme
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays (33 days).
• Paid wellbeing days, volunteer days, and study days.
• Quarterly All Star award.
• Annual company Summer event.
• Modern homeworking tech kit.
• Enhanced maternity & paternity pay.
• And being part of something AMAZING!

Cognassist is a Disability Confident Committed employer, and we welcome your application even if you believe you do not meet all of the above criteria - your unique skills, and experiences are valued, and your contribution could be exactly what we need to grow together.