Commercial Business Director at Craydel

Craydel is Africa's largest higher education platform, helping students search, get matched and enrolled to top Universities across the world! We leverage on technology, to disrupt the study abroad industry that is currently fragmented, unorganized and at often misguided by financial incentives rather than student outcomes.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Commercial Business Director

Location: Lagos
Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

• We areis seeking a Country Business Director- Nigeria to leads and manage resources while maintaining oversight and accountability.
• S/he is ultimately accountable for all aspects of the country operations and ensuring that organizational setup is adapted to the operational context. In addition, they will own and manage Craydel’s P&L in Nigeria with the support of Craydel’s leadership team based in Kenya.  

 Duties and Responsibilities 

• Operational Excellence: Craydel’s digital platform generates thousands of leads every month from various marketing campaigns. These leads are from learners who are interested in pursuing higher education abroad.
• A critical role for this position is to ensure operational excellence in maximizing lead funnel conversion rates to drive the student enrollment targets. The teams responsible for these operations are spread across 3 offices in Lagos & Abuja and consists of 1 operations manager (to be hired), 3 Team Leaders and around 25 higher education counselors.

Operational excellence would entail working with the ops manager and team leads across our various offices in Nigeria to achieve the following: 

• Give regular feedback to the marketing, product and universities teams on lead quality & campaign performance, product performance and student preferences with regards to universities
• Ensure call productivity & funnel rate conversion target achievement 
• Achieve excellence in counseling quality through a well-structured product and sales training program & regular assessments, with support from the Company’s People Operations Manager 
• Drive Improvement in Learner NPS & referrals 
• Build a high-performance, data-driven operations team 
• Ensure the annual enrollment targets achievement  

Success in High Schools:

• Craydel has successfully partnered with hundreds of high schools in Kenya that have become a long-term strategic base for access to students.
• The success in Kenya has come at the back of our Craydel Premium platform that helps students make scientific higher education decisions using our psychometric assessment, and help check eligibility for their best for courses and apply to universities seamlessly online & building a strong community of school counselors, and continuous engagement with students & parents.
• We need to now achieve similar success with high schools in Nigeria. Success in high schools in Nigeria would entail the following:  
• Gather insights from high schools in Nigeria to ensure product market fit & proposition development 
• Hire a high-performance mid-level BD manager (and eventually a BD team) to drive success with schools (school sign ups, product deployment, enrollments) 
• Work with the school team to build a strong community of high school counselors that drives continuous engagement and trust with Craydel 
• Drive continuous engagement with high school students and parents using physical career talks, webinars, events, competitions, etc. 

Brand Equity:

• Brand Trust & Credibility are key drivers of our success. Craydel is a relatively new brand in Nigeria and thus a lot of work needs to happen in terms of building brand awareness, considerations and trust.
• You will act as a brand ambassador for Craydel in Nigeria and work with Craydel’s marketing team to build a powerful brand through digital and offline marketing, building strategic partnerships, PR & events, with a strong emphasis on low cost, high value initiatives that can quickly build trust.

Strategic People Management:
As Country Business Director, you are responsible for setting the overall direction of the country operation as well as the day-to-day operational management. That means that you will:

• Ensure that the Team have clear and realistic goals and objectives
• Ensure an open and trust-based dialogue through regular coordination meetings to ensure alignment with the overall strategy
• Ensure that the country management team is effective, mutually supporting and sufficiently involved in key decision-making processes
• In collaboration with People Operation, will be responsible for the overall management of the operation, including thorough staffing plans, recruitment and development of staff 
• Travel to field offices for direct operational support and representation 

Key skills & Qualifications
To be successful as Country Business Director you must have:

• Minimum ten years’ management experience in B2C as Country Director/Senior leadership role 
• Experience representing and leading organization to external partners and authorities
• Demonstrated experience in managing country-wide teams with diverse
• Successfully managed a P&L
• Strong critical and analytical thinking skills
• Commercial acumen with proven track record of achieving success with B2C sales operations 
• Business Development skills either directly or having managed a successful BD team 
• Experience working in a start-up environment
• Ideally, have experience building strong brands in Nigeria 
• Highly organized with a high capacity to problem solve and establish priorities for self and team 
• Ability to inspire confidence and instill trust both internally and externally 
• Proven success in building strong and effective people centric teams 
• Impeccable integrity and ethics

Apply If:

• You are action oriented and fast-paced.  You can effectively balance competing priorities.
• You thrive in a start-up environment and have a track record of performing at high-growth start-ups. 
• You love to apply yourself and build from scratch.  You don’t love being told what to do and just executing.
• You are a self-starter who can take ownership and deliver results with limited supervision. 
• There is a lot to learn in the higher education industry, so you must have a growth mindset.  You are driven by continuous learning and will make the investment needed to learn constantly and quickly. 
• You are customer-focused. You enjoy building trust and meeting the needs of those you serve. 
• You love working with people and have a proven track record of building a high-performance team. 
• You are an entrepreneur at heart and have led your own business or side hustle. 
• You have unwavering integrity and a strong moral compass. 
• You think of solutions. 
• You are mission driven in life. 

Application Closing Date
7th December, 2023.