Business Development Associate

TL;DR Version:

Who: A sales enthusiast with a go-getter approach, good communication skills, and a high interest in guiding and counselling candidates.

What: Provide guidance and a pleasant user experience to all the prospective applicants who apply for various programs at Kraftshala.

Why: If you are excited about driving growth for a start-up by converting your leads into customers and generating revenue/leads for the business, this is the role for you.

About us: Kraftshala is on a mission to help a million students launch their careers in marketing, sales, and more. We’ve already helped thousands of students launch their marketing careers in companies like Performics, Sokrati, GroupM, Nykaa, Tata Cliq, Coursera and are looking to add hundreds of thousands more in the coming decade.

Kraftshala is backed by a number of eminent investors including ex-unicorn startup founders and CXOs of global giants

Role Description:

• Convert student inquiries and leads into successful admissions by providing personalized guidance and support throughout the application process.
• Counsel prospective students, apprising them of program features, pedagogy, curriculum, and any other relevant information.
• Clarify questions and concerns pertaining to course offerings, program selection, and career planning to assist students in making informed decisions.
• Collaborate with the marketing team, providing feedback to help drive traffic, generate leads, and optimize marketing strategies for maximum impact.
• Actively track and follow up on potential leads to ensure prompt communication and maximize conversion rates.
• Maintain accurate reports/data to track admissions data, and performance metrics, and provide regular updates to the Admissions Head.
• Stay up-to-date with admissions policies, procedures, and industry trends to provide accurate information.
• Representing the organization professionally and building rapport.

Must-Have Skills:

• 0-2 years of experience in consultative sales. (We are not too fussed about the number of years. Experience is simply a proxy for capability, which is what we really care for)
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to connect and engage with the candidates and other stakeholders.
• High levels of emotional intelligence, in particular empathy and listening ability
• Ability to impact and convince with speaking and writing skills
• Results focus: The drive to meet targets, follow up proactively, change course when needed, and persevere in the face of obstacles.
• Ability to multitask while managing operations effectively with good attention to detail.
• Strong organizational and time management skills, with the ability to handle multiple tasks and meet deadlines.
• Strong communication skills in both English and Hindi, with the ability to deliver information effectively and persuasively
• Functional knowledge of Microsoft Office tools, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Good-To-Haves:

Experience in consultative selling.

What is the recruitment process:

As a small team, it’s imperative that we get to know each other before taking the leap. We want to ensure you succeed in your role within our team. Each conversation with us will last about 40-60 minutes.

• Setting Expectations: This will be a call to understand your profile briefly and share the details of the further selection process.
• Technical Exercise: This is a specific assessment designed to evaluate your fit for this role 
• Technical Interviews 1 & 2: This will be a conversation with one of our current Admissions team members wherein you can expect to be evaluated on your sales skills and other competencies needed for the job (mentioned above).
• Culture Fit Conversation: A conversation with the Founder to see if there is a fit with the Kraftshala Kode.
• Extending an offer: If all goes well, we will extend an offer mentioning the relevant details.

Location:

Delhi

About Us:

We are Kraftshala. We are an online skilling institution committed to playing the long game of building a transformative educational experience for the masses. We call this ‘Scaling with Soul’.

Scaling with Soul, to us, means we always prioritise student outcomes– specifically our Placement Rate (percentage of students placed)- over other metrics, such as number of enrolments or company valuation in the coming year.

This is, of course, easier said than done. There are painful choices to be made at every stage, from admissions to training to placements, that wouldn’t have been needed were we willing to give up on either of high quality or scale.

But in the long run, we believe that our obsession over these student outcomes will earn Kraftshala the trust of Indian students, their families, recruiters and the broader ecosystem.

That’s why we make each of our Placement Reports public, capturing how many students are placed in each batch, in what companies, at what salaries etc.

We don’t need to. None of our competitors do (though we’d be happy to be proven wrong and have more educators join us!). Simply put, we have tasted the benefits of an education model grounded in high quality paired with the transparency of student outcomes and now cannot imagine doing it any other way.

We are not the largest in terms of enrollments. Nowhere close, actually. Not yet.

However, we are proud to be one of the largest, if not the largest already, in terms of actual, verifiable placements.

And in terms of Placement Rate, the metric that matters most to us, we are the absolute best in edtech. In the last 4 years, we have placed more than 2000+ students with a Placement Rate of 94% (and improving).

This is our long game- to Scale with Soul. We invite you to join us for the play. 

Funding:

Kraftshala is backed by a number of eminent investors, including:

• Phanindra Sama and Sudhakar Pasupunuri, co-founders at Redbus and early investors in unicorns like Unacademy
• Amit Kumar Agarwal, Saurabh Garg and Akhil Gupta, co-founders at Nobroker.com (the world’s largest NoBrokerage Property Site and India’s first realty startup unicorn)
• Sujayathi Ali, Co-founder at ShopUp and Voonik
• Doreswamy Nandkishore (Former Fortune 100 CEO, Head of Asia, Oceania, Africa for Nestlé S.A. and Professor, ISB)
• Pallav Jain and Sarfaraz Khimani (co-CEOs of Performics, India's largest SEO/ performance marketing agencies.

What do we value (the Kraftshala Kode):

Kraftshala is on a mission to become the largest career launchpad in the world.

Team Kraftshala is for the ambitious, the forever-learners, and most of all, for those who live to add value to others. In a world where education companies often lose sight of their core, we aim to Scale with Soul, to offer greater value to each stakeholder (including our team) everyday we get bigger.

Joining Kraftshala now means becoming part of a story still in its early chapters- one you’ll help shape with your ideas, actions, and leadership. Here are things we care for: 

• We seek a value-adding mindset in prospective team mates. Folks who demonstrate a capacity to understand their users' needs and are willing to go the extra mile to deliver on that, fit right in.  
• We value problem solving skills. We look at problems objectively, work backwards from the user, solve for root causes and optimise for their long-term good instead of our short-term gain. We don’t let processes or hierarchies get in the way of adding value.
• We believe speed matters enormously in business. We value people who move with urgency, have a bias for action and are willing to take calculated risks in the face of uncertainty.
• We look for people with high learning agility, those truth seekers who pursue the best data, ideas, and solutions with rigour and open mindedness, and are constantly working to become better today than yesterday.
• We admire people with ambition & courage to take on large goals. We are seeking to build a team of self-starters who demonstrate high ownership.
• We aim for consistency and reliability and expect the same from others. Predictability just makes everyone’s life a lot smoother.
• We believe people who demonstrate candour with care are the most effective: real, open and direct in communication, while still being highly empathetic.
• We have learnt that Scaling with Soul requires frugality. Resource constraints help sharpen focus and breed inventiveness.
• We are practical optimists. Our team strongly believes in a better future and takes joy and pride in the fact that we are playing our part to make that future a reality.