The Sales Executive is a sales professional that drives revenue growth across Cengage’s K12 print and digital products within an assigned sales territory. This role requires coverage of the defined territory through developing and maintaining sales to key primary K12 accounts, showcasing all applicable products and solutions in both digital and print forms.
This position combines consultative selling, focused execution, and strong relationship management to deliver predictable growth achieving assigned sales targets.
Key Accountabilities:
Sales Execution & Territory Ownership
- Own end-to-end revenue execution for assigned territory, including pipeline creation, deal progression, and achievement of sales targets across new logo, expansion, and renewal-influenced growth.
- Meet and exceed sales targets by effectively implementing territory sales strategies and prioritized account plans.
- Implement focused sales motions and pipeline rigor, ensuring strong qualification, clear opportunity progression, and early identification of deal risk.
- Maintain strong reporting discipline in CRM, accurate pipeline, forecasting, and sales activity tracking.
Customer Engagement & Solution-Led Selling
- Build and maintain strong relationships with educational institutions, faculty,
- administrators, distributors, and decision-makers through in-person, virtual, and phone engagement.
- Lead solution-led selling conversations anchored in customer outcomes, value, and measurable impact—shifting beyond relationship-based selling.
- Conduct product presentations, demonstrations, competitive pitches, and training sessions aligned to customer use cases and buying criteria.
- Own solution design, value storytelling in complex deals and outcome-driven proposals.
- Accelerate pipeline velocity and improve win rates by proactively addressing technical, pedagogical, adoption, and implementation considerations.
Portfolio Growth & Account Expansion
- Identify and develop new business opportunities within existing and prospective accounts.
- Build long-term customer lifetime value through proactive account planning, expansion pathways, and close alignment with Customer Success on post-sale adoption and outcomes.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner closely with Product team on complex opportunities, applying expertise for demos, competitive positioning, and formal proposal requests driven deals.
- Collaborate with Marketing and Customer Success to design customized learning solutions and ensure a seamless customer experience.
- Partner with Sales Leadership and Revenue Operations on pricing, forecasting, and negotiations.
- Monitor market trends, customer needs, and competitive activity to identify growth opportunities and inform sales strategy.
- Communicate territory performance, pipeline status, key opportunities, and insights to leadership through regular reporting.
- Provide post-sale support in partnership with internal teams to ensure customer satisfaction and long-term success.
Educational qualifications, work experience and other requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, education, related field, or equivalent experience.
- Minimum of 3 years of sales experience, preferably within K12 or EdTech industry.
- Demonstrated success leading large, complex customers and driving long-term revenue growth with consistent achievement of sales targets and pipeline accuracy.
- Understanding of educational trends, digital learning tools, and curriculum standards.
- Strong digital proficiency with the ability to engage customers on both digital solutions and print products.
- Ability to uncover customer needs and translate them into compelling, value-based solutions.
- Excellent communication, presentation, and negotiation skills.
- Experience using CRM tools (e.g., Salesforce) to lead pipeline and sales activity.
- Strong organization, time-management, and prioritization skills.
Travel requirements:
- Ability to travel extensively in the assigned territory.
- Ability to regularly travel to meet customers within the territory and to attend customer events and sales meetings.
Compensation
At Cengage Group, we take great pride in our commitment to providing a comprehensive and rewarding Total Rewards package designed to support and empower our employees. Click here to learn more about our Total Rewards Philosophy.
The full base pay range has been provided for this position. Individual base pay will vary based on work schedule, qualifications, experience, internal equity, and geographic location. Sales roles often incorporate a significant incentive compensation program beyond this base pay range.