Education Consultant

Greenhouse Learning, an in-home tutoring service serving the greater Bristol area, is looking for an Education Consultant, working on a self-employed contract to join the team. The role involves the crucial activity where we meet the students and their parents for the first time. This session is vital in us understanding the needs of the students and also to get the customer’s buy-in to the programme with Greenhouse Learning.

The output of this session is a set of notes that subsequently will be typed up and sent to the Greenhouse Learning office.

The other output of the meeting is a strong sense of optimism and satisfaction that they are in good hands with a local, professional and friendly organisation.

Conversion at this consultation, from a prospect to an actual, signed-up customer is normally over 90%. It’s not a hard-sell session at all, the parents and the students have expressed a clear interest in our service and have been told about the pricing and as such this session is about gathering information, confirming their commitment and completing the necessary admin. And again, reassuring that they are in good hands. It is important though to be able to be very confident in explaining the benefits of our service and the value we bring, and therefore why we are at a higher price point than some of our competitors.

As the business has expanded, we need to increase our team of Education Consultants who are able to carry out the consultation on behalf of the business to enable us to keep up with demand. There is some seasonality linked to holidays and the academic timetable, but on peak times we expect to be doing 5-10 consultations per week.

The role of the Education Consultant is to sign up new customers by conducting initial consultations in students’ homes.

**Main Activities of Education Consultant**:

- Lead the consultation which will uncover the needs for the student via discussions with all involved parties. It will be very important to let the parents/carers and students talk and really listen to what the child needs and what is important to all of them.
- As the representative of Greenhouse Learning, demonstrate the quality of service they should expect and to clarify the benefits of using Greenhouse Learning. The consultant will be able to follow a tried and tested defined process which will be described in full during induction and training.
- Completing post consultation forms, thinking about what the family responded well to and what didn’t go well in order to continually improve performance and keep a high conversion rate of prospects into clients. It’s important to make sure families are left with a warm, positive impression of Greenhouse Learning as experts who can give their child or teenager the support they need.

**Knowledge/ Skills/ Experience**
- Previous experience in education an advantage - teaching or tutoring. Must have a strong knowledge of the education system
- Previous sales experience an advantage
- Comfortable with conversations around pricing
- Work well alone, as-well-as in a team environment
- Computer literate - meetings are done over Zoom or another platform of your choice
- Willing to work evenings and weekends by arrangement - this work will primarily be on evenings and weekends, when parents and children/teenagers are available outside school hours.

**Behaviours / Competencies**
- Strong organization, planning and follow-up skills.
- Confident, friendly, outgoing manner. Able to relate to lots of different people from different backgrounds and with different outlooks.
- Strong listening skills. Able to spend more time listening than talking, and empathising with parents.
- Professional and credible as an Educational Consultant with a strong knowledge of the education system.
- Commercially astute and business-like
- Ability to communicate with a variety of personalities and age groups.
- Ability to manage the dynamics of families, student’s views vs. parent’s views etc.
- Self-starter, able to think on their feet and show initiative
- Dependable and trustworthy to deliver against the standards set by Greenhouse Learning.

**Training**
- You will receive some detailed notes with tips and advice. You will also have guideline notes on the key most important questions to ask, and the key benefits to mention when explaining the value in our service.
- You will also have access to video examples of previous consultations done to give you an idea of how it should all work.
- You will then go through as many example scenarios as you need to until you feel comfortable and ready to get started.

**Remuneration structure and detail**
- Due to the nature and variability of demand, the Education Consultants will be independent self-employed contractors rather than having contracts of employment.
- We pay £50 per consultation, regardless of whether you close the sale or not, although we do expect a focus on continual improvement to make sure conversion rat