Head of Sales

About Nectir

Nectir is the secure AI infrastructure purpose-built for schools. Nectir AI provides 24/7 personalized learning support grounded in course content, without compromising trust, outcomes, or academic integrity. Nectir AI can be integrated into existing Learning Management Systems and is fully FERPA- and SOC 2-compliant. Trusted by 80,000 students across 100+ campuses, Nectir is backed by independent, peer-reviewed research demonstrating a 7.5% campuswide GPA increase. Nectir has raised $18.5M from leading investors including Rethink Impact, Long Journey Ventures, and Entrada Ventures.

About the Role

We're looking for a Head of Sales to turn Nectir's campus-by-campus traction into a repeatable enterprise sales motion. You'll inherit a team of two Account Executives and one SDR and grow it to 12–14 people, while building the playbook, coverage model, and forecasting discipline that make revenue in higher education predictable rather than relationship-dependent.

One thing we want to be upfront about, because it shapes the job: our CEO personally opens and runs our largest multi-campus system opportunities, and she will continue to. Provosts and presidents want the founder in the room for those conversations, and the research behind our platform is hers to tell. Your job is to make her more effective in them, make them forecastable alongside everything else, and build the team and motion that scales around them. The right person reads that as leverage: the CEO opens doors some sales leaders spend a year earning.

This role reports to our CEO and partners closely with Marketing, Revenue Operations, Product, and Customer Success.

What You'll Do

Own Revenue and Bookings

• Own and be accountable for team revenue targets and bookings

• Define and manage team quotas, territories, and pipeline requirements

• Build the coverage model that takes us from a three-person team to a 12–14 person revenue engine

• Serve as executive sponsor on key opportunities and support AEs through complex, multi-stakeholder deals

Partner with Our CEO on System Deals

• Define clear rules of engagement: which accounts are founder-led, which are team-led, and how the team supports both

• Make founder-led opportunities visible and forecastable, with the same stage discipline as every other deal

• Extract what's repeatable from the founder motion; the executive vision narrative, the multi-campus pricing model, the pilot-to-system expansion path, and teach it to AEs running single-campus deals

• Bring your own executive relationships and open doors of your own

Build and Scale the Sales Team

• Assess the existing team early and honestly, and invest where the upside is

• Hire, onboard, and ramp roughly ten Account Executives and SDRs over the next year

• Coach the team on enterprise selling and the realities of higher-ed buying; committees, faculty senates, procurement, budget calendars, RFP cycles

• Build a culture of accountability, candor, and continuous improvement

Establish a Repeatable Sales Motion

• Build and scale the sales playbook: ICP and account tiering, messaging and positioning, stage definitions with real exit criteria, and qualification standards

• Develop a discovery framework for Provost, VP of Academic Affairs, and CIO buyers

• Build objection handling for the conversations that actually decide these deals; academic integrity, FERPA and student data privacy, faculty resistance, and why not the LMS vendor's built-in AI

• Set pricing guardrails and ensure consistent execution across the team

Bring Discipline to Forecasting and Pipeline

• Establish and enforce forecasting discipline you can defend with the assumptions exposed

• Monitor pipeline health, deal progression, and stage conversion rates

• Partner with Revenue Operations on CRM hygiene, funnel efficiency, reporting, and attribution

• Partner with Demand Generation on target accounts, ICP alignment, and pipeline quality, and hold the team to a real self-sourced contribution rather than inbound dependence

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

• 8–12+ years of enterprise or consultative sales experience in edtech

• Proven success selling to Provosts, VPs of Academic Affairs, Deans, or Presidents

• Experience building, coaching, and leading a high-performing sales team, including making and defending hard performance calls

• Strong track record of meeting or exceeding revenue targets

• Experience managing complex, multi-stakeholder deals with real operational rigor and forecasting discipline

• Comfortable working alongside a founder who sells. You treat CEO-led deals as leverage, not as territory, and you don't need to own every logo to own the number

• Motivated by improving outcomes in higher education

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience scaling sales in a Series A to Series B environment, arriving before RevOps, before a marketing SLA, and before a playbook exists, and treating building those as the job rather than a blocker

• Experience selling AI, analytics, or learning technology platforms

• Experience taking a founder-led motion and making it teachable to a team

What Success Looks Like in This Role

• New ARR reaches $10M by December 2027, with $4.5M of that coming from new logos

• Within 60 days, you've assessed the inherited team honestly; by month 9, all three are performing at 80%+ of quota or have been thoughtfully transitioned and backfilled

• Within 90 days, rules of engagement for founder-led and team-led accounts are written, agreed, and working, and by month 6, every deal in the business sits in one forecast

• By day 90, a documented sales motion exists that a new AE can ramp on, proven by two new hires reaching first closed-won within 60 days

• The team grows to 12–14 people by December 31, 2027, each reaching full quota productivity within six months of start, with zero regretted attrition among your first-year hires

• By the end of Q1 2027, your quarterly closed-deal and pipeline forecast lands within ±10% of actuals

• By month 12, at least two elements of the founder-led motion are documented and being run by AEs on single-campus deals

Working at Nectir

We're a startup, which means the work moves fast, but the impact is real. You will not be a small cog in a big machine here — you'll be the one building the machine itself.

This role is critical to scaling the company from early traction to predictable, repeatable revenue growth. You'll define how we build and lead a world-class sales organization, scale relationships with higher education institutions, convert demand into consistent revenue, and create a durable foundation for long-term growth.

We care about doing this the right way. We sell an AI product to institutions responsible for students' futures, which means we don't oversell, we don't cut corners on privacy or academic integrity, and we'd rather lose a deal than compromise an institution's trust. We're looking for a sales leader who feels the same way.

Your leadership will directly shape how the company grows and expands its impact across higher education.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary and OTE

• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision (for US-based roles only)

• 401k with employer match (for US-based roles only)

• Unlimited PTO

• Equity (stock options), so you share in what we're building

• Flexible, remote-first work environment