Overview

• Start date: As soon as possible

• Team: Partnerships. You’ll work closely with team members across the company, including senior partnership managers (focused on high-quality delivery and recurring partnerships), communications, operations and events teams.

• Reporting to: Head of Government Partnerships (focused on UK Government sales, new public sector opportunities and government partnership development)

• Visa sponsorship: Not available. You must have the right to work in the UK

• Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees are required to pass BPSS verification

• Timeline: We're aiming to make an offer to the successful candidate w/c 7th October

Apolitical is looking for a versatile Sales Manager (Government Sales) to join our fast-paced sales team. This is an exciting opportunity for someone who is assured of their ability to work with senior government stakeholders and keen to drive sales in complex public sector environments. The ideal candidate is strong in external communication and project management, and has some experience in sales and business development in the public sector. 

The focus of the role is managing sales from the UK Government and global partners, assisting on sales processes and reporting, and directing outreach campaigns to raise awareness of our government learning offer. This role directly helps achieve our mission and revenue goals by identifying sales leads, expanding our pipeline and closing deals with government partners. Target focus, motivation, organisational skills and agility are core to this role. You’ll need to be flexible, resourceful and able to juggle multiple priorities. 

Role

The New Partnerships Manager will play a key role in expanding sales and government partnerships in the UK Civil Service and public sector bodies, including:

• Approved Government Campus courses and programmes

• New learning requirements for departments and organisations 

• Opportunities for collaboration and network-building

Your role will be to manage every stage of the sales process, from lead generation to the achievement of confirmed deals and bookings. You will be strong in managing relationships with government partners and present professionally when meeting new contacts

Grow UK Government Sales

• Contribute to direct UK government revenue by owning specific deals and bookings. 

• Actively assist the management of the sales process and pipeline expansion for UK government sales.

• Maintain and manage channel partner relationships to drive opportunities.

• Own and manage a range of lead-generating activities. 

• Work with with teams across the company to deliver initiatives and revenue goals.

Commercial arrangements

• Work within contractual parameters with government contracts and channel partners.

• Apply judgment and articulate trade-offs for bespoke proposals.

• Contribute to the development of new large opportunities and proposals.

External stakeholder relationships

• Establish positive relationships with new potential customers and Learning and Development managers in government.

• Maintain and expand stakeholder relationships in target UK departments and networks.

• Establish and maintain positive stakeholder relationships with contractual channel partners.

Market and data insights

• Maintain the pipeline, using high-quality data dashboards to report key sales metrics.

• Use market intelligence to inform commercial decisions and sector insights.

• Provide customer insights from government stakeholders to inform decisions and prioritisation.

• Maintain awareness of supplier competition in the UK Civil Service and wider public sector.

Inbound enquiry management

• Provide global sales support to the wider Partnerships team, including inbound enquiry management from prospective government partners.

• Track and report data on the conversion of inbound enquiries to booked deals.

• Convert inbound enquiries to B2B sales and grow the volume of small-medium deals.

Cross-company work

• Work across teams to maximise revenue-generating opportunities and network effects.

• Contribute creatively and proactively to new initiatives and opportunities, in an agile way. 

• Grow knowledge of government sales processes and context across the business.

About you

This is a mid-level role, so we expect that you will likely have at least some experience (2+ years)in a similar role. 

This is a great fit if you…

• Can provide examples of meeting stretching sales targets or impact in a revenue-generating role (e.g. leading and assisting end-to-end deals, B2B sales or bids)

• Have helped drive business growth (e.g. where you have played a key role, from initiation to a great outcome)

• Have worked in a client-facing role or a background in working with external stakeholders and new contacts (likely including some work with senior or expert clients)

• Are commercially aware and know how to enable business goals

• Are a good communicator, verbally and in writing

• Are proactive, agile and adaptable, balancing quality with pace

• Are passionate about government capability building

This won’t be the right role if you…

• Work best with a predictable workload and a limited number of work streams or clients.  

• Are you looking for a position with direct reports. This is not a people-management position.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application.  No one at Apolitical sees the answers to these demographic questions with your application. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. To stand out in our hiring process, we encourage you to use AI judiciously and ensure that your application reflects your genuine voice and potential. We value originality and authenticity, and we're particularly interested in seeing how your unique insights can contribute to our mission.

Stages in our hiring process:

• Culture interview [45m on Google Meet]. We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for working at Apolitical. This call is about finding candidates who will add to our culture. It’s an opportunity to get to know you and for you to get to know us as an organisation, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about how we work.

• Team interview [45 on Google Meet]. We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for the role. It’s an opportunity to meet some of the people you might end up working with, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about the team and role.

• Chief Executive interview [30m on Google Meet]. We build on conversations you've had with other team members to learn about your motivations and drivers at work and within the Apolitical context.