Account Executive
Note: Open to exceeding this range for exceptional candidates with extensive market experience.
Job Description:
The Account Executive owns new revenue at Smart Panda Tools. You will run the full sales cycle for a portfolio of prospective institutions, from sourcing and qualifying through to a signed agreement, carrying a new-business quota for the Student Mobility Suite. Our buyers are universities, and the decision to adopt new infrastructure moves through academic, administrative, and IT leadership together, so this is a consultative, multi-stakeholder role rather than a transactional closing one.
You will partner with SDRs and Marketing to build pipeline, with Solutions Engineering to run evaluations and demos, and with leadership to keep an accurate forecast. The work rewards someone who wants to understand how a registrar’s office and an enrollment team operate before proposing a change, and who can map what the Suite does to the systems and processes an institution already runs.
Why Join Us?
Smart Panda Tools builds the enterprise infrastructure that higher education institutions rely on to modernize transcript evaluation, automate credit articulation, and protect their academic authority. Our Student Mobility Suite is used by nearly 250 universities to process millions of transcripts without replacing the systems those institutions already depend on.
We are a team of higher education veterans, engineers, and enrollment operations experts. Many of us have sat in the Registrar’s chair, managed enterprise IT systems, and built the infrastructure to connect them. We build the technology we wish we had.
The people who thrive here care deeply about operational detail and student outcomes. They want to understand why institutions work the way they do before building something to improve it. They bring strong opinions while remaining curious, and design for the specific rather than the generic.
Administrative friction should never obstruct the path to great education.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own the Full Sales Cycle: Source, qualify, and close new institutional business for the Student Mobility Suite. Run each opportunity from first conversation to signed agreement, and carry the new-revenue quota that comes with it.
- Navigate the Buying Committee: Lead sales cycles that move through academic, administrative, and IT leadership together: Registrars, VPs of Enrollment, Provosts, and CIOs. Keep a multi-stakeholder committee aligned on the problem and the value across a long institutional decision.
- Speak the Operational Language: Learn where the manual bottlenecks and transcript backlogs sit in a registrar’s office before you pitch. Position the Suite in the context of the institution’s existing system of record, rather than selling a generic feature list.
- Run an Accurate Pipeline: Maintain a disciplined, CRM-driven pipeline that gives leadership clear visibility into deal health and forecast. Keep the numbers honest so the business can plan on them.
- Partner Across the Team: Work with SDRs and Marketing to build and prioritize pipeline, with Solutions Engineering to run technical evaluations, and with Product to feed back what institutions want and need. Bring the reality of the field into the rest of the company.
- Represent Us in the Market: Stay current on higher education trends, enrollment pressures, and competitive movements, and represent Smart Panda credibly in front of institutional leaders and at sector events.
Required Qualifications:
- 5+ years of full-cycle, closing B2B sales experience, preferably in SaaS or within the higher education market
- A proven record of meeting or exceeding a new-business quota
- Experience running complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles with long decision timelines
- Strong discovery, consultative selling, presentation, and negotiation skills
- Ability to understand a complex software platform and articulate its value in the context of a prospect’s specific operational environment
- Proficiency with CRM software (Pipedrive experience is a plus)
- Self-motivated and able to work independently in a remote environment
- Bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, or a related field, or equivalent experience
Nice to Have:
- Direct experience selling into higher education, or having worked inside a college or university (registrar, enrollment, or IT)
- Familiarity with transcript evaluation, transfer credit articulation, or enrollment management workflows
- Experience selling to buying committees that span both academic and IT leadership