Head of EMEA Education Sales

About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one lab together to accomplish this.

In pursuit of this mission, our Go To Market (GTM) team is responsible for helping customers learn how to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their business. The team is made of Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals that work together to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible.

About the role

The Head of EMEA Education Sales will be responsible for building and leading OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu sales presence across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including hiring, coaching, and developing a new team of Account Directors (ADs). You will own regional go-to-market strategy and execution—driving customer acquisition, expansion, and successful deployments with universities, higher education systems, and school districts across EMEA.

The ideal candidate will possess not only comprehensive sales experience but also a robust understanding of AI technologies. This leader will have the capability to maneuver within a complex technological environment while also appreciating the intricacies of selling a wall-to-wall application.. Their responsibilities span from customer acquisition, key account management, and sales strategy, to education sales and beyond.

This leader will also need to be a proven leader who can effectively collaborate cross-functionally with product, marketing, sales engineering and customer success, while guiding and mentoring a sales team towards achieving business objectives.

This is an EMEA-based role with a preference for office location in London, Dublin, Munich, or Paris. We operate a hybrid work model (3 days in-office per week where an office is available) and offer relocation assistance to new employees in eligible locations. This role requires regular travel across EMEA and collaboration across multiple time zones.

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• Understanding of Education: Higher Education systems, including variation across countries, public-sector procurement models, and ministry- or system-level decision-making. Experience navigating complex, multi-stakeholder education environments is strongly preferred. Passion for improving educational outcomes.

• Leadership and Strategy: The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of leading a diverse team of sales professionals across various competencies. They should exhibit expertise in formulating and executing strategic sales plans with a clear understanding of metrics and results. This role requires a forward-thinking strategist capable of driving growth and customer satisfaction in a dynamic and competitive market.

• Sales Expertise: With extensive experience across multiple sales domains, the candidate must demonstrate the ability to design, plan, and execute multifaceted sales campaigns. A history of successful customer acquisition, key account management, and enterprise engagement strategies is a must. The candidate should be a visionary, anticipating market shifts and understanding best practices in both traditional and digital sales environments.

• Understanding of AI and Technology: Experience working in a technology organization or with technical products is critical. A deep understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies is preferred. The candidate must be comfortable navigating and explaining complex technical landscapes, including the potential benefits and opportunities these technologies present for businesses and consumers.

• Strong Product Sense: The candidate should have a natural ability to understand product complexities and customer needs. They should be able to foresee market trends, comprehend how a product will be received, and translate intricate product features into compelling messages that resonate with customers. The ideal candidate will work closely with product managers, ensuring sales strategies align with and enhance product strengths and unique selling points.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Effective cross-functional collaboration skills are vital. The candidate will work closely with various teams such as success, support, product, marketing, sales eng, operations, and growth, aligning goals and driving execution. The ideal candidate must show the ability to influence and work harmoniously with diverse teams, driving a unified organizational approach to achieve primary goals.

• Communication Skills: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills are essential. The candidate must be able to convey complex technical concepts effectively to various audiences, ensuring key messages are clear and understood. Strong presentation skills, coupled with the ability to build understanding and consensus among key stakeholders, are paramount.

• Customer-centricity: A customer-centric mindset is key. The candidate must demonstrate a proven ability to understand and anticipate customer needs, effectively utilizing this insight to shape product and sales strategies. This involves fostering customer empathy within the team and ensuring the voice of the customer is central in all decision-making processes.

• High Conviction: The ideal candidate will possess a daring and decisive mindset, ready to take bold steps to meet the challenges of delivering increasingly powerful AI technology to businesses and consumers. They will show a high level of conviction in their strategic choices, encouraging innovative thinking, and fostering an environment where calculated risks are taken to drive growth and advance the organization's mission.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand your customer’s priorities and help them achieve their vision for using our models to improve their internal productivity and AI strategy. You build strong relationships with executives and professionals across functions and serve as a trusted advisor.

• Have a passion for or deep curiosity in artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in a way that benefits humanity. You’re excited to educate our customers on AI and how to plan for the future.

• Are a builder. You are excited to impact how our company operates and scales. Your passion is building strong systems and processes from the ground up and executing them with precision.

• Are excited by new challenges. You don’t have the answers to every question up front, but the process of solving them invigorates you. Bespoke issues requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you. You’re willing to experiment with new solutions.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go to market best practices and raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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