Business Development Manager (Higher Education Assessments)

Be a part of Acuity Insights’ startup-to-scaleup journey as our first Business Development Manager. In this role, you’ll explore new revenue pathways for our admissions solutions, tapping into the growing institutional-level interest in holistic admissions to help all programs select applicants with the highest potential to thrive.

This role is ideal for a purpose-driven professional with first-hand knowledge of the dynamics of higher education institutions and their committees, key influencers, and decision-makers, talent for building and nurturing relationships over time, the ability to lead high-level strategic conversations, an entrepreneurial mindset and a knack for identifying future potential.

The Big Picture

Imagine a world powered by everyone’s full potential. 

At Acuity Insights, it’s the future we envision and strive to build. 

Our company was founded on the need for a higher education admissions method that looks beyond academic performance and considers the whole student—their unique qualities, experiences, and strengths. 

Today, our solutions help discover, nurture and realize potential, supporting holistic success from admissions to graduation for students, education programs, and higher education institutions across North America, the U.K., Australia and Saudi Arabia.

Our core assessment product, Casper, provides education programs with a more holistic view of applicants by evaluating their soft skills. Incorporating Casper's insights into the admissions process results in a larger applicant pool ensures student success, and graduates better professionals. Since 2014, Casper has been adopted by over 600 higher education programs, and more than 1 million applicants have registered to take the test.   

With our core education program management solution, One45, we help medical schools and other health professions programs optimize the complex processes and critical components of their curriculum and student assessments to generate data-driven insights needed to graduate competent future healthcare professionals. 

With our fast-growing data and insights solution, Analytics, we leverage critical integrations with our data warehouse and powerful dashboards to provide medical schools with deep insights and intelligence on student and program performance, powering real-time decision-making and continuous quality improvement.

Opportunity & Impact

Historically, our product, sales, and marketing initiatives have focused on serving individual programs, like medical, health sciences, teachers, engineering, and business schools. 

However, a recent surge in institution-level interest in Casper suggests an untapped market and revenue opportunity. 

As our Business Development Manager, you will explore this unchartered market potential for our admissions assessment products, validate the hypothesis of increased institutional engagement, and determine revenue pathways for enterprise-level selling. You’ll also identify and pursue other institutional-level opportunities that can drive business growth.

In this hands-on role, you get to engage and drive conversations with inbound and marketing-generated central admissions leads and experiment with creating and executing your own outbound campaigns targeting central admissions prospects, gauging interest and opportunity in Casper adoption at the institutional level.

You’ll leverage your relationship-building and communication skills to develop relationships and hold strategic conversations with the highest-level admissions leaders, leading voices, and principal influences within the higher education institutions and the industry to develop a deep understanding of what drives their interest.

When you see the potential for a deal, you’ll also drive new sales opportunities, actively leading and managing the process of selling our assessment products to institutions from start to finish. You’ll guide these prospects through a sales process and leverage your experience and creativity to establish best practices for calls and product demos. 

You’ll bring your insights and recommendations back to our business leaders to inform new revenue pathways for our business that expand our reach beyond individual programs and into broader, institution-wide adoption. 

In this multi-faceted role, you also get to lead, explore, create and build in other impactful ways: 

• Own the relationships between Acuity Insights and institution partners and define a process for managing these relationships. 
• Develop and implement a process for selling our suite of assessment products to higher education institutions.

• Define our enterprise-level selling messaging and positioning and create a simplified value proposition based on insights you gain from conversations and conferences.
• Share insights and feedback with cross-functional teams and work collaboratively to determine how our solutions meet institutional-level needs. 
• As the first Business Development Manager, shape and set the standard for the role and how it drives value and impacts growth for the business. 

You’ll work remotely from Canada, report to Leanne Newell (VP of Revenue), be a valued Sales team member, and collaborate closely with team members from adjacent functions, such as Research, Product, Marketing, Customer Success and Revenue Operations.

To thrive in this role, you:

• Bring experience working within or selling to higher education institutions and have developed knowledge of how they operate and the types of challenges they face.
• Led strategic conversations with high-level higher education leaders and have the natural ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities and engage and influence decision-makers
• Have experience working independently and in ambiguity, the creativity to find different pathways forward within an opportunity, the discipline to establish tracking success of new initiatives, and the persistence to drive forward when a plan doesn’t work out as you hoped for.
• Managed a large volume of communications that you had to follow up on, maintaining persistence even when responses were delayed.
• Welcome the chance to attend conferences and make onsite visits to prospective customers in the U.S. and Canada once per quarter on average to develop business and leads in person.

To thrive in our work environment, you are:

• Caring toward people, whether they are team members or external partners. You take time to listen, understand and empathize. You don’t hesitate to provide constructive feedback and enjoy sharing your knowledge and perspective to help others learn and grow.
• Curious by nature and open to possibilities and different viewpoints. You like exploring, experimenting, asking questions, listening, and learning from other people’s points of view. 
• Driven to help realize our vision and mission, problem-solve independently and with your team members and collaborators, continuously seeking to grow your knowledge and improve your skills and practices. 
• Resilient, you keep going, bounce back from challenges, and welcome and embrace the change necessary to scale our company.
• Self-aware, knowing your strengths, gaps, emotions and values, fueling continuous personal and professional growth.
• Motivated by purposeful work that has a meaningful impact and aligns with your values and interests. 

Selection Process

We review every application. We consider all your professional experiences and how you have applied your skills and knowledge to add value and make an impact. We also look for evidence that you share our core values (caring, curious, and driven) and are interested in helping bring people's potential to life.

To ensure a fair process, you will receive equal consideration whether you apply, get introduced as a referral, or directly contact the manager or recruiter for this role.

Applicants who do not live in Canada or have a work permit will automatically be screened out.

Interview Process

We have designed our interview process to be a two-way discovery and create space for meaningful conversations.

We want to get to know you personally and professionally, understand your career journey and experiences, relevant skills, professional interests and priorities, and assess for alignment with our business needs and what we can offer you.

We also want you to have the information you need to make an informed decision about this opportunity. That’s why we encourage you to stay curious and ask questions every step of the way. 

Here are the steps you can expect:

• Application Review.  A human reviews your application for potential and fit.
• Conversation with Recruiter. Have a 60-minute phone call during which you get to share your professional journey and interests and learn in-depth about the company, culture, team, and compensation. 
• Meet the Manager. Spend 45 minutes on a video call with your potential future manager (VP of Revenue) to discuss your relevant work experiences and learn in-depth about the day-to-day of the team and role. 
• Case Study. Prepare a case study based on a previous experience you’ve had that is relevant to the role. 
• Meet the Team & Present Case Study. Present your case study to a team of 3-4 future peers and collaborators from Marketing, Sales and Research, followed by 1-1 conversations with each team member to learn more about life at Acuity Insights.
• Wait For a Decision. The Hiring Manager consolidates and evaluates feedback from the team to make a hiring decision. This typically takes 2-4 days.
• Offer & Reference Check. If we find a mutual match, we'll invite you to an offer conversation. The offer is contingent on completing a reference check. 

Compensation & Benefits

• Flexible and remote work. Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within Canada, work from abroad for up to 6 weeks per year, and configure your schedule and work hours to best suit your life. 
• Fair pay. Get paid fairly for your work with a salary aligned to your role, skill level, and job responsibilities, informed by internal pay equity and market data.   
• Prioritized rest and time off. Enjoy two weeks of disconnected vacation at year-end, self-directed vacation (people typically take 4-6 weeks per year), extra Fridays off throughout the year, and support for medical, family, or mental health needs without financial worry.
• Company equity. Become a partial owner of Acuity Insights when you join, sharing in long-term value creation and financial success through our employee stock option plan.
• Investment in your growth. Access a $3,000 yearly budget for professional and personal development.
• Save for retirement. Join our GRSP matching program through Wealthsimple. We match contributions up to 2% of your salary. 
• Support for health & wellness. Access comprehensive health benefits for yourself and your dependents through Equitable Life of Canada from Day 1 of your employment. 
• Growing your family. Take parental leave, regardless of your role in expanding your family, and receive a top-up for 16 weeks beyond EI benefits.

Working at Acuity Insights

Behind Acuity Insights, you'll find a team of 130+ caring, curious, and driven individuals dedicated to our company’s success. We collaborate remotely and occasionally co-work in person across Canada and some international locations.

We are committed to fostering a work environment where everyone feels respected, valued, and well-supported. We’ve designed our processes and policies to create a sense of community and belonging, promote equity, embrace diversity, champion inclusion and encourage work-life balance so that every individual can bring their full potential.

We recognize that every person on our team is unique and has different qualities, lived experiences, strengths and life situations. Our team's diversity is our strength. We know it contributes to a healthier work environment, enables us to build and operate a more sustainable organization, and makes us capable of delivering better business outcomes.

We encourage individuals from non-traditional backgrounds or historically marginalized and underrepresented groups to explore and apply to this role.

Thanks for considering Acuity Insights as your next employer!