Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
A good EdTech salesperson is not one type of person.
Someone selling a £3,000 annual licence to individual schools needs a different rhythm from someone selling a six figure platform to a university, trust or government body.
Before you write the job description, get clear on the sale.
Who is the buyer?
Who uses the product?
What is the average contract value?
How long is the sales cycle?
Is the person expected to generate their own pipeline?
Will they inherit accounts?
How much travel is involved?
Are they selling a proven product or helping to work out the sales motion?
These questions matter more than whether a candidate has the word EdTech somewhere on their CV.
Strong sales candidates can sound convincing. That is part of the job.
Your interview needs to get underneath the pitch.
Ask for specific examples of targets, conversion rates, deal sizes, sales cycles and results. Ask what they personally did to win a difficult deal. Ask about a deal they lost and what they changed afterwards.
Good answers have detail.
Weak answers stay vague, move quickly to team achievements or rely on big brand names.
You are not looking for a perfect record. You are looking for someone who understands why they won, why they lost and how they improve.
EdTech sales often involve several people with different priorities.
A teacher may care about workload and classroom use.
A school leader may care about outcomes, evidence and budget.
IT may care about integration, security and data.
A trust leader may care about consistency across several schools.
A good salesperson can work across those views without giving everyone the same pitch.
Ask the candidate to map the likely stakeholders in one of your real deals. Then ask how they would change the conversation for each person.
This tells you far more than asking whether they have sold to schools before.
Education experience can be very useful, especially when the product is complex, the customer is cautious or credibility with educators matters.
But it should not become lazy shorthand for competence.
A candidate from another SaaS sector may bring excellent discovery skills, forecasting discipline and experience building a repeatable sales process.
A former teacher may understand the customer deeply but still need to learn commercial selling.
Neither profile is automatically better.
The question is what knowledge can be learned and what capability you need on day one.
Pipeline hygiene is not glamorous. Neither is forecasting.
Both matter.
Ask candidates how they manage their CRM, qualify opportunities, decide where to spend time and forecast a quarter.
A salesperson who is brilliant in a room but cannot manage a pipeline can create a lot of noise and very little predictability.
For an EdTech startup, that can become expensive quickly.
One of the best ways to assess a salesperson is to let them do something close to the real job.
Give them a short product brief and a realistic customer scenario.
Then ask them to run the opening part of a discovery call.
Do not score them on whether they know every detail of your product.
Score the questions they ask.
Do they try to understand the problem before pitching?
Do they identify who else matters in the decision?
Can they listen?
Can they challenge an assumption politely?
Do they connect the problem to commercial value?
That is much closer to the work you are hiring them to do.
The fastest way to make an EdTech sales search difficult is to ask for everything.
Five years of EdTech.
A network of school leaders.
Enterprise SaaS experience.
A perfect record against quota.
Experience in your exact product category.
Experience selling to your exact customer.
And the salary of someone two levels below.
Decide what is essential and what is teachable.
A strong brief creates a stronger candidate pool.
At RecruitHer, we usually encourage hiring teams to separate three things: evidence of sales ability, knowledge of the customer and knowledge of the product category.
Very few candidates will arrive with all three at exactly the same level.
Your job is to decide which gap you are willing to develop.
A good EdTech salesperson can build trust without becoming passive.
They can ask useful questions without turning every call into a product demo.
They understand targets and process.
They can learn the education context quickly.
And they know that selling into education is rarely about one persuasive conversation. It is about understanding a problem, building confidence across several stakeholders and helping a customer make a decision.
If you are hiring an EdTech salesperson and the brief feels harder than the role itself, RecruitHer can help you work out what you really need before the search starts.
Look for evidence of sales performance, strong discovery, stakeholder management, pipeline discipline and the ability to learn the education context. Sector experience alone is not enough.
Not always. The answer depends on the complexity of the product, the customer and how much education knowledge already exists inside the team.
Use a realistic customer scenario and ask the candidate to run part of a discovery call. Score the quality of their questions, listening, commercial judgement and ability to map the buying group.
Emilia Kruszewska is an EdTech recruiter and headhunter at RecruitHer, working with EdTech companies on commercial and leadership hiring.
