With more than 30 years’ experience, Travelbound are the industry leaders in high quality, subject-led tours for schools, universities, colleges, and clubs. With bespoke itineraries to incredible worldwide destinations, and our exclusive Chateau du Molay in Normandy, Travelbound tailor every tour to meet your specific educational and cultural requirements. Whether it’s a history trip to New York & Washington, introducing Art & Design students to Paris, or organising orchestra and choir performance tours in Italy, every detail will be taken care of to create a truly tailormade, inspiring learning experience.
Travelbound is an exciting period of growth. We’re looking for talented people who want to think differently to create a best in industry culture, and a desire to drive change and performance.
The Role: Sales Manager
Lead the Travelbound Core sales team to deliver the brand’s revenue and margin plan across both new business and repeat bookings.
This is a people leadership role, with success achieved through a high-performing team. You will create a strong performance culture with clear expectations, regular coaching and accountability, while developing efficient sales processes that drive results. You will enjoy designing efficient, effective processes that make selling easier, and take real pride in building a high performing team that people enjoy being part of.
This is a key role for Travelbound beyond the sales floor. Working closely with Product, Commercial and Marketing, you will help shape what we sell, how we price and promote it, and how we generate demand. Acting as the voice of the customer, you will use market and competitor insights to influence decisions and drive business performance.
Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities
Team performance and capability
- Set team targets, territories and account ownership, ensuring clear performance expectations
- Lead regular pipeline reviews, 1:1s and quarterly performance and development reviews
- Monitor enquiry and sales quality, using data and CRM insights to coach and improve performance
- Recruit, onboard and develop new team members to full productivity
- Recognise success, provide constructive feedback and manage underperformance effectively
- Build a team environment that is ambitious, collaborative and enjoyable to work in
New business delivery
- Own the new business number and the conversion steps behind it: enquiry to quote, quote to option and option to confirmed
- Ensure timely lead response and consistent follow-up across all opportunities
- Manage pipeline health, reallocating inactive opportunities where needed
- Develop multi-academy trust and multi-school opportunities alongside the wider partnership approach
- Partner with Marketing to improve lead quality and campaign effectiveness
Retention and repeat growth
- Drive school retention and repeat bookings year-on-year
- Maximise early rebooking opportunities and reactivate lapsed schools
- Increase value per school through upselling, longer trips and destination growth
- Promote exceptional service and responsiveness as the foundation of long term school relationships
Sales process, data and technology
- Own HubSpot discipline for the team: stage accuracy, close dates, lost reason capture and forecast integrity
- Produce and analyse sales, pipeline and trading reports
- Deliver accurate forecasting and proactively identify risks
- Champion automation, HubSpot enhancements and AI tools to improve efficiency
- Build a culture of curiosity around technology, where the team tests, learns and adopts smarter ways of working
- Use data and insight to drive performance and continuous improvement
Commercial and cross-functional working
- Manage pricing, discounting and margin performance within agreed authority levels
- Work closely with Product, Operations, Sales Admin and Marketing to optimise performance and customer experience
- Give the wider business clear insight into market trends, competitor activity and customer feedback
- Represent the needs, challenges and strengths of the sales team across the organisation
- Champion the behaviours that reflect Experience Education’s values: curiosity, ownership, passion and progress
What we are looking for
Essential
- Proven line management of a sales team of five or more, including target setting, coaching and formal performance management
- Track record of delivering new business and customer retention in a B2B environment
- Strong commercial numeracy, with the ability to build and challenge a forecast rather than simply report one
- Experienced CRM user, able to build reports and analyse performance independently
- Demonstrable success in improving individual and team performance through coaching
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
- High emotional intelligence, resilience and empathy, with the judgement to have difficult conversations well
- Embraces change, encourages innovation and champions continuous improvement
Desirable
- Experience in school travel, group travel, education or another seasonal booking-cycle environment
- Experience leading a sales team through growth, expansion and change
- Experience in HubSpot
- Exposure to multi-academy trust, framework or key account development
Some of the benefits
- Hybrid working pattern between our office and homeworking
- Annual Bonus scheme
- Opportunities to travel overseas on familiarisation trips
- 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays and a bonus day off for your birthday; we also have a tenure based annual leave benefit, up to a maximum of an additional 5 days depending on length of service
- Global recognition and reward programme
- Access to extensive online learning resources
- In-house training opportunities
- Various employee discounts and offers, including discounted trips with our brands
- Regular social events
Diversity and inclusion
We believe that people are happier and perform best when they are able to be their true selves and that diverse teams deliver better results. We are committed to building an inclusive culture and embracing diversity in all its dimensions. This includes inspiring change through increasing awareness of unconscious bias. Together we will cultivate a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment, where everyone can flourish.
Experience Education Student Travel Group
TravelBound is a part of the Experience Education Student Travel Group, a collective of specialist brands dedicated to delivering exceptional and memorable travel experiences for schools and groups.
Our specialist brands include TravelBound, SkiBound, World Challenge, JCA, Edwin Doran and MasterClass, and they operate across 5 unique travel categories: curriculum tours; ski trips; expeditions; UK activity centres and sports tours.
