Director Of Sales, Business Development And Partnerships
College For America (Southern Nh University)
College for America (CfA), a unit of Southern New Hampshire University, is a unique education model that’s sold directly to businesses. CfA was created to disrupt current higher education models by radically reducing costs, and increase access for millions of hard working, modestly paid employees who never had a chance to obtain a college degree. CfA delivers low cost, high quality college degrees using a transformative, competency-based, self-paced approach that leverages technology, community support, social networking, employers, and community-based partners. I was a founding member on the leadership team of this groundbreaking education innovator. Our objective was to partner with employers nationwide to make competency based, accredited college degrees achievable to their front line non-degreed workers. My role was to build and lead the sales team while playing an important individual contributor role with key client partners and prospects. In less than six months we built a ten person, high performing, hybrid (hunters and farmers) sales channel. Three years ago we started with no revenue, a successful 200 student pilot, and grew to almost 5000 new students and almost $10 million in revenue in the last year. We also built the corporate clients/partnerships from 20 to 120 in that three-year time frame. The key to this success was creating an innovative insight and relationship consultative selling model targeted at HR and Ops VPs in key retail, healthcare, and financial services verticals. Our success hinged on identifying and providing solutions to important business challenges at the VP and C level in our target markets. The sales team, with marketing support, successfully communicated a differentiation strategy and selling approach that positioned CfA as a unique workforce development tool. The challenge, successfully met, was to create a sales team and market approach that worked in an unusual B to B to C selling environment. .