Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that combines engaging, leveled content with integrated formative assessments and insights to supercharge engagement and learning in every subject. Students and teachers use Newsela to find digital content from hundreds of the best sources—from National Geographic to NASA, Biography.com to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Washington Post to the Wichita Eagle. Content is instructionalized to meet students where they are, with interactive tools and analytics to take them where they want to go. Newsela has become an essential solution for schools and districts, with a presence in over 90% of U.S. K-12 schools. Newsela is the content platform for the connected classroom.

The Director of Sales Operations and Planning is a key member of the Finance and Sales Leadership team who is responsible for leading planning, analysis, reporting, automation and accountability across a team of 50+ Sales Reps, SDRs, Solutions Engineers, and Account Managers as this high-growth, mission-based SaaS company doubles in revenue and disrupts an industry.

As part of the Finance team, you get to partner with the Chief Revenue Officer as well as Product, Marketing, Data and Customer Success to support a scalable sales team to more smartly achieve aggressive goals. You get to work with a group of people who are smart and passionate about building a business that is transforming a market segment. You also will get to build upon great momentum where you can mold and shape how our entire company approaches forecasting and planning, as well as driving greater data orientation in our sales and company decision making.

Responsibilities: 

• Operate as the “COO” of the sales organization.
• Act as a thought leader and change agent in driving sales outcomes and efficiency.
• Define KPI’s for each segment of the Sales organization. Identify market opportunities and partner with others to execute a strategy to win those segments.
• Proactively engage with sales team to understand deal status and recommend actions to increase deal values, accelerate opportunities through the sales cycle, or improve win rates.
• Determine hiring needs and timing to maximize each new sales professional’s potential.
• Drive pricing strategy, testing and compliance. Optimize sales productivity to help achieve goals.
• Oversight of creation of reporting dashboards and cadence at each key level of management.
• Anticipate additional reporting needs due to changes in the business. Provide insights after every major business period, with insights and action items.
• Run the weekly, monthly, and quarterly pipeline, forecast, and business reviews, and hold the team accountable for delivering against commitments.
• Design incentive plans that align and ladder up to overall company goals, and drive the right behavior across the sales team.
• Administer plans in timely fashion and provide adequate tracking to ensure transparency and the ability of each stakeholder to adjust behavior to meet their goals.
• Review and augment existing forecasting models to deliver accurate annual and quarter-over-quarter forecasts for new sales and renewals.
• Manage all facets of the Sales budget from annual budget planning to monthly tracking of sales expenditures to ensure we stay within budget.
• Lead account and territory planning clinics, and drive the annual and quarterly customer-segmentation, capacity-planning, rostering, and quota-setting processes for each sales team, using advanced analytics.

Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of experience using data and analysis to drive actionable outcomes for sales and account management teams in a fast-paced, high-growth SaaS business.
• Demonstrated success in using data and technology to drive automation, team efficiency, effectiveness, and alignment, and your insights have led to innovative process improvements and new forecasting/measurement models and frameworks.