Center Manager (Acting Head of Sales) - Education field

About Arrowster

Arrowster is an AI-powered study abroad consulting firm, supporting Vietnamese students on their journey to apply for international universities, scholarships, and pre-departure. We operate across multiple markets (US, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan) with a network of 100+ direct partner universities, mentors who graduated from Harvard, Oxford, and UPenn, and an engineering team from Wall Street.

About the Role

The Founding Sales Lead will be the first person to fully own Arrowster's sales funnel in the Vietnam market — not managing from the top down, but living inside the funnel every day: picking up the phone, joining Zoom consultations with parents, closing tough deals, and coaching our current team of 5 counselors into stronger operators.

This is not a traditional manager role. If you want to sit and review dashboards while the team executes targets you set, this is not the right fit. We need a true player-coach — someone who still closes 30-40% of high-stake deals with their own hands, and simultaneously builds the playbook that lets the team scale.

Arrowster is lean. The current sales counselor team is 5 people. The right person will walk with Arrowster through the scaling phase over the next 12 months — from 5 to 10-15 counselors, from product-market fit to a repeatable revenue engine.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Personal selling — not oversight

▸ Directly close HNW family cases, top-tier high school students, and deals with significant scholarship stakes.

▸ Personally handle 30-40% of top-tier consultations in the first 6 months.

▸ Represent Arrowster at info sessions, high school workshops, and major events.

Own the sales funnel & revenue target

▸ Accountable for monthly and quarterly contracts and revenue.

▸ Manage the end-to-end funnel: lead → MQL → SQL → consultation → contract → onboarding.

▸ Forecast weekly / monthly / quarterly revenue with high accuracy.

▸ Partner with Marketing to feedback on lead quality and optimize conversion by channel (TikTok, Paid Ads, Club Seeding, KOL).

Coach the current 5-counselor team

▸ Sit in on counselor consultations and deliver real-time feedback.

▸ Design the sales playbook: consultation scripts, objection handling, closing techniques — drawn from your own experience closing deals.

▸ Set individual and team KPIs, review weekly.

▸ Build the internal talent pipeline as we scale (Junior Counselor → Senior → Team Lead).

Sales operations & CRM ownership

▸ Own Zoho CRM: pipeline hygiene, stage definition, automation rules, reporting dashboards.

▸ Integrate with Slack (via Zoho Flow) to ensure full team transparency.

▸ Build a data hygiene culture across the team.

Cross-functional partnership

▸ Marketing: feedback loop on lead quality, propose campaigns based on sales insights.

▸ Product / Consulting Delivery: ensure sales commitments align with delivery capability.

▸ Finance: pricing strategy, discount policy, refund handling.

▸ HR: workforce planning for the sales team across application seasons.

Reporting & strategy

▸ Report directly to the CEO / Founder — weekly syncs on pipeline, blockers, and learnings.

▸ Contribute to long-term business strategy as the team scales: product mix, new markets, pricing tiers.

CANDIDATE REQUIREMENTS

Must-have

▸ Study abroad background (Bachelor's or Master's degree obtained overseas)

▸ 4-7 years of sales experience in the Education / EdTech / Study Abroad / High-ticket B2C

▸ At least 1-2 years leading a small team (3-6 people) — no need for 15+ team leadership experience.

▸ Proven track record of meeting / exceeding targets with concrete numbers (revenue, conversion rate, team performance).

▸ Still hands-on closing deals in the past 12 months

▸ Business-fluent English + native Vietnamese.

▸ Proficient in CRM (Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce) and data-driven decision making.

▸ Based in HCMC or willing to relocate to HCMC full-time.

Nice-to-have

▸ Prior experience at large study abroad agencies (IDP, EF, Sun Education, INEC, Hotcourses) or an EdTech scale-up.

▸ Understanding of Vietnamese parents psychology in the study abroad decision (cost, safety, ROI, university reputation).

▸ Personal network with high school counselors / international schools.

▸ Experience running admission events, university fairs, or info sessions of 100+ attendees.

Personal traits

▸ Player-coach mindset — enjoy closing deals, don't see it as a downgrade from a management role.

▸ High ownership — no blaming leads, marketing, or the market.

▸ Comfortable with chaos — startup is lean, playbook is not complete, sometimes you have to improvise.

▸ Coachable — willing to learn SYNAPSE and Application Lab frameworks.

▸ Long-term thinker — see each student as a 4-year journey, not a one-off transaction.