Director of Sales Development
Job Description:
The Director of Sales Development opens the first conversation. You will generate qualified pipeline for Smart Panda Tools by researching higher education institutions, reaching the people who own transcript evaluation, transfer credit, and enrollment challenges, and starting the conversations that turn into partnerships. You are the front door to our Student Mobility Suite.
This role will build and lead our sales development function from the ground up. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for a leader who wants to shape how we generate pipeline for a mission-driven EdTech company. You will partner directly with Marketing and Sales: following up on inbound interest, running targeted outbound, and handing off qualified opportunities with the context that lets a colleague walk into the first meeting already informed. You will not work from generic templates. You will learn why a given institution works the way it does, and reach out about the problem in front of them. Beyond hitting targets, you will help build the top-of-funnel motion that scales with our growth.
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 200 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. If that resonates, we’d like to work with you.
Key Responsibilities:
- Outbound Prospecting: Research institutions and identify the right stakeholders (Registrars, VPs of Enrollment, CIOs, Provosts). Run targeted outbound across email, phone, and LinkedIn, grounded in each institution’s specific situation rather than a mass template. You are the first impression of Smart Panda Tools.
- Lead Qualification: Engage both inbound and outbound leads, understand their operational goals and enrollment challenges, and determine genuine fit. Qualify for a real problem our infrastructure solves, not just interest, so the team spends its time where the value is clear.
- Meeting Setting and Handoff: Book qualified discovery meetings for our Account Executives and ensure a clean handoff. Capture the context of every conversation so your colleague walks into the first call already understanding the institution’s situation.
- Pipeline and CRM Discipline: Own the accuracy of your activity and early-stage pipeline in the CRM. Hit outreach and meeting targets consistently, and give leadership clear, honest visibility into top-of-funnel health and conversion.
- Market and Messaging Intelligence: Design, launch, and continuously refine outbound and inbound prospecting playbooks tailored to education buyers.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Marketing & RevOps to align on lead scoring, campaign follow-up, and messaging that resonates with education decision-makers
Required Qualifications:
- 7+ years of sales development, business development, or comparable customer-facing experience, or a strong entry-level candidate eager to build a sales career
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to write outreach that sounds human and specific rather than automated
- Comfort balancing consistent outreach volume with genuine research and personalization
- Curiosity and resilience: willing to learn a complex domain and to keep going through the noes that come before the yeses
- Self-motivated, organized, and able to work independently in a remote environment
- Proficiency with, or the ability to quickly learn, CRM and sales engagement tools (Pipedrive experience is a plus)
- Bachelor’s degree
Preferred Qualifications:
- Direct experience selling into, or working within, higher education institutions or EdTech companies.
- Familiarity with transcript evaluation, transfer credit articulation, or enrollment management workflows.
- Experience with outbound sequencing tools and pre-call research.
- Understanding of institutional buying committees that include both academic leadership and IT leadership.