Sr. Manager, Sales Development & Revenue Enablement

Overview

You'll build and run the sales enablement function at Honorlock—a 147-person online proctoring company selling to higher education institutions. Your main job is making the sales development team (SDRs/BDRs) better at generating pipeline, which means training them, analyzing where things break, and working across departments to fix process problems. You report to sales leadership and spend time coaching reps, building playbooks, and tracking conversion metrics.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Private, established (147 employees)

Size: 147 employees

Growth: Actively hiring for revenue roles, indicating expansion mode

Market Position: Established player in a controversial but necessary category—online proctoring is divisive with students but required by institutions for exam integrity

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 30-40% Inbound - higher ed institutions researching proctoring solutions, some from content/conferences
• 60-70% Outbound - cold calling/emailing deans, provosts, department heads at universities
• Small percentage from referrals/existing customer expansion

SDR/AE Structure: You're managing the SDR/BDR team that feeds pipeline to AEs

SE Support: Likely shared SE resources for technical demos once deals progress

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: ProctorU, Proctorio, Examity, Respondus—crowded space with established players

How They Differentiate: Combination of live proctors + AI tools (some competitors are AI-only or human-only)

Common Objections: Student privacy concerns, cost vs alternatives, implementation complexity, student pushback

Win Themes: Comprehensive approach, support quality, detection capabilities

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Coaching/Training (35%) | Pipeline Analysis (25%) | Program Development (25%) | Cross-functional Work (15%)

Key Activities

• 1-on-1 Coaching SDRs/BDRs: You listen to their calls, review email sequences, and help them get better at booking meetings with higher ed administrators who are skeptical about proctoring software. Lots of call shadowing and feedback sessions.
• Building & Updating Playbooks: You create scripts, objection handling guides, and persona-based messaging for different buyer types (IT directors vs academic deans vs compliance officers). This changes as you learn what works.
• Pipeline Analysis: You dig into Salesforce data to figure out where conversion rates drop—are reps booking meetings but AEs can't close them? Are certain schools/segments converting better? You present findings to leadership.
• Running Onboarding: When new SDRs start, you train them on the product (what proctoring features matter), the buyer personas, and the sales process. You also run ongoing training sessions when performance dips or product changes.
• Cross-functional Coordination: You work with product/marketing to get updated battle cards, with AEs to understand what qualified actually means, and with CS to learn why customers churn (so SDRs can avoid those prospects).

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're coaching SDRs in a tough space: Online proctoring is controversial. Students hate it, there are privacy concerns, and your reps face objections about surveillance and equity. You need to help them handle emotionally charged conversations without getting defensive.
• Limited budget/resources: At 147 people, you're probably a team of one or two building everything from scratch. You won't have fancy enablement tools or a big budget for training vendors—you're recording Loom videos and building decks yourself.
• Measuring your impact is fuzzy: Did meetings booked go up because of your training, or because marketing got better leads? You'll need to prove ROI to get headcount/budget, but attribution is messy.
• Balancing coaching with admin: You'll spend more time in spreadsheets and Salesforce than you'd like. Pipeline reports, conversion analysis, and CRM hygiene audits eat up time you'd rather spend coaching reps.

What Success Looks Like

• Team conversion rates improve: Meeting book rate goes from 15% to 20%, or meeting-to-SQL rate improves after your coaching/process changes
• Ramp time decreases: New SDRs hit quota faster after you build better onboarding
• Pipeline quality gets better: AEs stop complaining about unqualified meetings, closed-won rate from SDR-sourced opps increases

Who You're Enabling Sales To

Primary Buyers (that SDRs prospect into):

• Academic Affairs VPs, Provosts, Deans (care about academic integrity)
• IT Directors, LMS Administrators (care about integration/implementation)
• Compliance Officers (care about accessibility, privacy, FERPA)
• Faculty/Department Heads (end users who have to adopt it)

What They Care About:

• Exam integrity and preventing cheating without creating bad student experiences
• Privacy/surveillance concerns—especially post-pandemic heightened scrutiny
• Integration with their LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L)
• Cost vs alternatives (some schools just use lockdown browsers or trust-based systems)
• Student accessibility and equity considerations

Requirements

• Experience building sales enablement programs from scratch or scaling them at a <500 person company
• Prior SDR/BDR management or coaching experience—you need to understand cold outbound
• Strong data/analytics skills—you're in Salesforce/Excel daily doing conversion analysis
• Comfortable with controversial/sensitive product positioning—you need to help reps navigate pushback on surveillance/privacy
• Ability to work across departments—you'll coordinate with product, marketing, CS, AEs constantly
• Higher ed or edtech experience is a major plus (understanding academic calendars, procurement cycles, buyer personas)
• Proven ability to create training content (videos, playbooks, scripts) without big budgets or team support