Pre-Sales Manager

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Overview

Do you want to be help enrich the lives of learners worldwide?

At RM, we've been pioneers of education technology since 1973. We provide technology and resources to the education sector supporting over 10 million students around the world. We work with 28,000 schools, nurseries, and education trusts in 115 countries to deliver customer-centric solutions that improve education outcomes worldwide.

What we do helps learners at all stages of their lives, from preschool to higher education and professional qualification, we partner with schools, examination boards, central governments and other professional institutions, to enrich the lives of learners.

Reporting to the Head of Global Growth Enablement, you will lead a team of Assessment Solution Consultants providing expert pre-sales support and consultancy to Sales and Account Management teams to enable us to meet RM Assessment's business growth targets.

This is a high performing team of motivated individuals with a range of specialist skills and domain knowledge. As the Pre-Sales Manager you will be expected to ensure the team has the processes, skills, capacity, resources and motivation to provide expert support and consultancy needed across business growth. You will manage the team day to day, providing support, coaching and guidance to maximise the potential of individuals and the achieve the best results for our Sales and account growth plans and for our customers.

The role holder will also ensure they keep informed of market trends within education and assessment. Gain intelligence through attendance at events and customer strategic sessions to ensure solutions offered to customers remain relevant and dynamic. The role holder should build and develop strong insight into future propositions and promote within the business where RM would maximise from investment to generate long term sustained growth.

This is a player-manager role in which you will be expected to lead by example in contributing and supporting Solution Consultants in building compelling proposals when needed.

Responsibilities

Team Management

Line manage the Pre-Sales team made up of

• 4 x Pre-Sales Solution Consultants based in the UK and Australia. This number may vary depending on workload. This role will work with Business Development Managers and Account Directors to provide customer facing expert pre-sales consultancy support in bids and contract renewals. The role includes nurturing customer relationships, building solution proposals and articulating these through bidding and contracting activities.
• Up to 3 x Strategic Solution Consultants. This role provides more strategic consultancy for enterprise customer solutions. Strategic Solution Consultants will support customers to build solutions to meet their goals and will own these solutions with RM Assessment to ensure internal teams deliver successfully for the customer. This role also supports Pre-Sales activities when needed.

As a line manager you will be expected to:

• Coach and support individuals to ensure they develop and perform effectively,
• Provide clear guidance on the job role and expectations,
• Set clear performance goals and targets for each individual based on experience and skills,
• Provide regular performance feedback to individuals including management of underperformance,
• Ensure workload is managed equitably across the team and to assign individuals matching their skills to best support business needs.
• Manage capacity and skills of the team to support work forecast - including resource planning and recruitment when needed.
• Promote and encourage the team to constantly build market knowledge by attending events and customer strategic sessions. Therefore, building their own experience and networks within the assessment landscape

Pre-Sales Management

As Pre-Sales Manager you will be responsible for defining and successfully delivering pre-sales activities and processes within the wider sales and account management processes including:

• Ensuring that the role, responsibilities and touch points of pre-sales are defined and agreed within the wider sales process within Assessment Business Growth.
• Ensuring that the role, responsibilities and touch points of pre-sales are defined and agreed within the wider Account Management activities such as strategic upsell and contract renewals.
• Leadership for alignment between Assessment Solution Consultants and Business Development Managers and Account Managers and/or accounts that is agreed with those teams for maximum effectiveness.
• Leadership for the delivery of clear, responsibilities and touch points of pre-sales are aligned and agreed with wider business functions including operational delivery, service architecture, product management and product development teams.
• Implement individual Assessment Solution Consultants have new business and account growth targets that are aligned with their counterparts in the sales and account teams and with overall targets for Business Growth.
• Leadership for development and skills review for all Assessment Solution Consultants ensuring they are trained and equipped to deliver their roles effectively and work to agreed processes.
• Ensure the Head of Global Growth Enablement and Head of Propositions are fully informed of market trends from bidding and event management to inform how RM will get the best return on products and services through our investment

In addition

• Ensuring all pre-sales activities are delivered in strict adherence and support of governances processes defined by the Head of Growth Enablement on behalf of RM Assessment.
• Ensuring assessment Solution Consultants proactively engage in the recording and communication of market insights to inform the definition of solution and proposition business cases to drive product and service roadmaps for development.

Bids and proposals

This is a player manager role. The role holder will be expected to lead and support the pre-sales solution consultants as an experienced pre-sales consultant and/or solution expert within the Pre-Sales team. The activities carried out by the Pre-Sales Manager will depend on the skills and experience of the job holder. This may include:

• Working with prospective and new customers to build relationships and leading the development of winning assessment solution proposals;
• Driving consultancy support to Sales and Marketing teams, providing insights, ideas and solutions that facilitate our opportunities to grow our business and achieve our targets and ambitions;
• Leading tenders for solutions with clear and compelling articulation of proposals and solutions. Leading winning solutions for each tender based on your insight of each customer's needs and drivers;
• Cross team leadership within RM Assessment business to ensure solutions are fully supported and correctly costed. Including product management, product development; technical architecture and operational delivery teams;
• Articulating solutions in internal governance forums with leadership teams as well as to customers in workshops and bid presentations;
• Supporting commercial planning and modelling of proposals by providing creative and accurate costing models and ideas that will ensure our customers get the best solution their budget allows.

The job holder will:

• Be comfortable engaging with and influencing stakeholders at all levels of the customer up to and including c-Suite level and within RM, able to tailor your communication to the particular audience.
• Be a strong communicator both written and spoken. Able to articulate proposals and ideas in a compelling, clear, concise, and accurate form.
• Strong and confident presenter with excellent listening and adaptability skills when presenting solutions to customers for business growth
• Ideally have a working knowledge of the Assessment market and of e-Assessment products and services - ideally of RM Assessment's own products and services.

Based in the UK, the role may also include travel, both in the UK and overseas, as RM develops its international business in regions such as AsiaPacific, Africa, the Middle East, and North America.

Experience

The Pre-Sales Manager will be an excellent communicator. They will be experienced in inputting to high quality proposals and tender responses for software solutions large and small with attention to detail and using a range of techniques to get the message across, including written tender responses and proposals prepared in a clear, compelling and concise manner. They will be a confident presenter, able to demonstrate RM propositions to new prospects, existing customers and industry figures and apply those products to the business needs that the prospect has.

They will be an experienced people manager with the ability to support and coach team members the develop the skills needed for the pre-sales consultant role.

The Assessment Solution Consultant should have or be able to gain knowledge and expertise in the assessment domain, to enable them to collaborate with their team, customers and prospects to identify need and propose how RM can address those needs. They will be able to gain a good understanding of the RM product portfolio, and have a breadth of product understanding, underpinned by knowledge of the end to end Software Delivery Life Cycle.

In addition, they will have:

• Experience of working in a software development and service delivery organisation.
• Demonstrable ability to be a supportive team manager and player.
• The ability to influence internal and external stakeholders of all levels, by flexibility of approach
• Flexibility and adaptability.

What's in it for you?

At RM we have "My Work Blend @RM" which provides office-based colleagues with multi location and hybrid working options to suit them. As well as your office base, you can spend a proportion of your time working at other locations in the UK that suit your role and your life, including home, other offices, customer sites, distribution centres or on the move. We encourage you to discuss arrangements for this role with your potential line manager during the recruitment process. We expect how we make best use of hybrid working may continue to adapt as we adjust to our new ways of working.

As well as a competitive salary and our core benefits package which includes private medical healthcare, life assurance and a Group Personal Pension Plan with higher contribution levels available, some roles are also eligible for a performance-related bonus. There are lots of voluntary benefits too. You could buy additional annual leave, join our dental plan, sign for a health assessment, or take part in our cycle to work scheme. You could even earn yourself an extra bonus for successfully recommending a friend or family member for a position within RM.

To better reflect the society that we serve, we're committed to building a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all. To achieve this, we create teams of talented people from different backgrounds and experiences and strive to be a business where our people can bring their whole selves to work. We also want to make the recruitment process as inclusive as possible for everyone. Should you require additional support with your application or through the interview process, please contact us at recruitment@rm.com.

Unfortunately, we are unable to offer sponsorship for this role.