Chief Sales Officer, OpenClassroom
Salary not provided
Mid and Senior level
Paris
Online programs and free-access courses
Be an early applicant
Online programs and free-access courses
1001+ employees
B2CEducationTrainingSaaS
Be an early applicant
Salary not provided
Mid and Senior level
Paris
1001+ employees
B2CEducationTrainingSaaS
Company mission
OpenClass's mission is to make education accessible.
Role
Who you are
- You bring a powerful blend of leadership, strategic thinking, and operational expertise, making you an ideal fit for driving growth and innovation at OpenClassrooms. Ideally, a strong understanding of the education, vocational training, corporate learning, apprenticeship and ed-tech markets would further complement your skill set
- Leadership and Team Management:
- Proven success in leading diverse, high-performing teams while fostering collaboration, accountability, and innovation
- Ability to inspire trust, influence external and internal stakeholders at all levels, and drive organizational change while ensuring alignment with company-wide goals
- Skilled at balancing short-term delivery with long-term strategic goals, empowering teams to excel in dynamic environments
- Sales Expertise and Operations:
- Strong business acumen and proven track record of developing and executing strategies that drive growth across B2B and B2C markets
- Demonstrated ability to optimize commercial operations, increase client engagement, be client facing, generate next frontier opportunities, and enhance brand visibility
- Customer Services Excellence
- Skill in designing and managing scalable customer service processes to enhance satisfaction, retention, and loyalty
- Proficient in managing pre-sales and post-sales customer support functions to ensure high levels of service, addressing inquiries, and resolving issues efficiently
- Ability to optimize customer journeys, leveraging feedback and data to continuously improve customer-facing operations
- Operational Excellence
- Expertise in designing scalable processes, leveraging technology, automation, and AI, and data insights to streamline workflows and improve efficiency
- Skilled at implementing best practices that enhance productivity, quality, and competitive advantage
- Strategic Vision and Innovation:
- Strong ability to navigate complex challenges and craft creative solutions, notably using gen AI
- Adept at aligning short-term execution with long-term goals to deliver measurable outcomes
- Experience in managing reputation and influencing regulatory environments to position the company as a key industry leader
- Data-Driven Approach: Proficient in using data to inform decision-making, identify opportunities, and measure performance effectively
- Adaptability and Change Leadership:
- Thrive in dynamic, fast-paced settings, demonstrating resilience and adaptability while leading teams through transformation
- Entrepreneurial mindset with a focus on driving impactful change in a scale-up environment
- C2 level in French
- At least C1 level in English (C2 highly recommended)
What the job involves
- As Chief Sales Officer for French-speaking markets in the short term, adding the US scope in the long term, you will play a pivotal role in driving OpenClassrooms' growth and covering approximately 30 million euros of bookings per year
- Reporting directly to the CEO, you will join the executive leadership team, shaping our commercial strategy and contributing to our global impact
- This position combines strategic vision with operational execution
- Your mission is to make education more accessible by maximizing the number of student enrollees, employer clients, and bookings growth across the employer (B2B), student (B2C), and social programs (B2G) segments
- You will lead a diverse team of approximately 30 professionals while fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement
- Sales strategy and sales execution: developing a strong commercial strategy and excellent AI powered sales engine to maximize orders and bookings, with strong unit economics and efficiency, covering for employers, students and social programs scopes, with a high spectrum of employers sizing from small businesses, start up, scale up, mid market up to enterprise accounts, at first in France then globally in the long term
- Enrollment strategy and delivery: leading streamlined processes and supporting student orientation, admission, contractualization, and apprenticeship matching to maximize the number of quality student enrollees and close bookings on all lines of business, shorten conversion cycles, improve conversion rates and optimize unit economics
- Team Leadership: building and inspiring high performing and efficient sales & student teams, fostering collaboration, a growth mindset, and ensuring excellence in delivery in alignment with company goals
- Develop and execute a comprehensive commercial strategy with a specific focus on proactive outbound sales activities to drive bookings growth across employers, students and social programs segments, targeting organizations ranging from small businesses, startups and scale-ups to large enterprises, to sell apprenticeship and reskilling programs
- Establish ambitious sales targets and ensure accountability through robust tracking of pipeline and sales activity, forecasting, and performance management processes, and sales training
- Ensure high level of renewal and upselling/cross selling, and implement customer success strategy to maximize customer satisfaction
- Use insights from Data & BI to empower the sales operations team on data driven insights to optimize bookings, pipeline velocity and conversion
- Develop and leverage strategic influence networks with key stakeholders and decision-makers to align commercial objectives with market opportunities
- Apply a deep understanding of relevant regulatory, institutional, and labor market dynamics to ensure sales strategies are informed, compliant, and market-relevant
- Oversee streamlined enrollment processes to maximize student admissions and orientation, contractualization, and apprenticeship matching
- Manage all pre-sales student and employer facing support to provide a fast and high quality service and a superior level of satisfaction to our future clients (email, phone, chat, etc.)
- Implement AI-powered scalable solutions that improve conversion rates, optimize unit economics, reduce costs, and ensure an exceptional customer experience
- Design and implement best-in-class sales operations, training, leveraging technology notably AI and agentic orchestration to optimize efficiency (managing inbound and outbound interactions with both employers and students) and ensure data-driven decision-making and execution
- Drive higher contributions margins, optimize unit economics, continuously improve processes and automate to maximize productivity and scale effectively in dynamic market conditions
- Collaborate with other C-level executives to align commercial initiatives with organizational priorities and long-term strategy
- Represent sales insights in board meetings, contributing to strategic discussions with investors and stakeholders
- Partners across regions (including the US) to share best practices, unify processes, tools, and platforms to prepare for global alignment
- Achieve and exceed orders and bookings targets across segments (employers, students, and social programs)
- Improve sales pipeline velocity and conversion, as well as forecast accuracy
- Optimize contribution margins, sales cost per enrollee, sales cost per contract, conversion rates, and lead times
- KEY METRICS:
- Orders
- Bookings
- # of enrollees
- Avg booking per enrollee
- Cost of sales per enrollee
- Avg contract size
- Cost of sales per contract
- # renewal rate
- € renewal rate
- Suggested performance tracking of sub team activities:
- Employers: calls, meetings, # leads, lead conversion rate, # opportunities, win rate, time to win
- Students: fulfilment rate, visitors, new members, active members, student prospects, applicants, candidates, declared matches, confirmed matches, employer prospects, apprentice seekers, # calls, # meetings, # emails, # applicants per agent, # candidates per agent, # enrollees per agent
- Social programs: orders, fulfilment rate, calls, meetings, # leads, lead conversion rate, # opportunities, win rate, time to win
- This role reports to the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Pierre Dubuc
- The role will currently have a team of c. 30 with direct reports encompassing 1 Apprenticeship Sales Director, 1 Sales Operations Director, 1 Individual Student Sales Manager and 1 Enrollment Manager. The organization is subject to evolutions in the future
- This role will partner with other C level executives, as a key member of the top management team and integral to the success of the business overall
Application process
- First of all, you should read our online course about the OpenClassrooms mission, vision and culture
- Your journey will then start with a phone interview with our search firm
- We plan some online meetings and ideally in person ones as follow :
- Jennifer Bos, Chief Human Resources Officer (45 minutes)
- Pierre Dubuc, CEO (1 hr)
- Case studies to be done at home or at the office (3 hours)
- Interview with 2 members of the C-team
- One of our board members (1hr)
- If you reach the final round, you will be asked to provide us with at least 5 x 360° professional references
Our take
OpenClassrooms can trace its roots back to the moment that the advent of the internet burst open new education-to-employment pathways beyond traditional degrees and in-person professional training.
The company is now a category leader working with over 1500 companies as partners and its own courses that help users find work quickly at the biggest organisations in the world.
OpenClassrooms guarantees its users that they will find a job after taking their course and they are now looking to extend this offer in the gigantic North American market.
In France, people qualify for public subsidies that can fund professional education programs like OpenClassrooms courses. Those benefits will not necessarily be available in the company’s target areas of expansion and it will be interesting to see if their courses receive enthusiastic uptake all the same.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
B Corporation
Top investors
-13% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Apr 2021
$80m
SERIES C
May 2018
$60m
SERIES B
Total funding: $149.7m
Company benefits
- "Remote First" Policy
- Flexible timetables
- Medical Insurance
- Meal vouchers for all working days
- Free gym subscription
- Travel expenses
- Unlimited days off and a 1.000€ premium once a year for 15+ days off taken (after one year of seniority)
- A Macbook / PC and everything you need to be productive
Company HQ
Pont-de-Flandre, Paris, France
Leadership
Pierre Dubuc
(Co-Founder & CEO)Dubuc founded the precursor to OpenClassrooms in 2001 when he was just 11!
Salary benchmarks
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