About Silverchair

Silverchair is the premier independent platform partner for scholarly and professional publishers, dedicated to expanding the reach of the world’s most valuable knowledge. By connecting creators, publishers, and users, we amplify the impact of scholarship and enhance the accessibility of critical information. Our global teams build, maintain, and innovate platforms across the publishing lifecycle, facilitating submission, peer review, hosting, dissemination, and impact measurement.

The Silverchair Platform hosts critical research content from such prestigious publishers as Oxford University Press, the American Medical Association, and McGraw Hill, comprising more than 12 million articles and 97k books. ScholarOne Manuscripts is the world's leading scholarly workflow management platform, processing over 3 million manuscripts annually for 9,000+ journal sites and serving 1.1 million monthly active users. ScholarOne Conferences streamlines the academic conference lifecycle for 135+ conferences annually, supporting scholarly publishers and associations worldwide.

Silverchair is a remote-first organization with Silverchairians living and working in over ten countries supporting our clients and operations throughout the globe.

DEI Statement

At Silverchair, we celebrate and embrace diversity in all its forms. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment from the moment you consider joining our team. We actively encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply, believing that a variety of perspectives and experiences enriches our community, drives innovation, and strengthens our impact.

Equity and inclusion are at the core of our hiring practices, and we strive to build a team that reflects a broad spectrum of cultures, experiences, and viewpoints. We are particularly committed to increasing representation from groups historically underrepresented in technology careers. Your unique experiences and perspectives are not just welcomed but are integral to our collective success. Join us in our mission to create a culture that unites and brings out the best in all of us.

Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion at Silverchair.

Overview:

Silverchair's Business Development (“BD”) team is responsible for bringing new logos onto the Silverchair Platform, ScholarOne Manuscripts, and ScholarOne Conferences, and for negotiating the agreements that get those relationships started. The Sales Operations Manager makes that engine run efficiently — owning the systems, processes, and cross-functional coordination that let our sales owners spend more time selling and less time on administrative friction.

This is a newly created, individual contributor role reporting directly to the Chief Business Development Officer. You'll partner closely with our Salesforce Administrator, Solutions Engineering, Legal, Finance, and Marketing to optimize how we manage our CRM, respond to RFPs, close out contracts, and triage inbound interest — and you'll bring a builder's mindset to using AI tools to make all of it faster and more consistent.

Key Responsibilities:

Salesforce & Sales Systems Optimization

• Partner with Silverchair's Salesforce Administrator to continuously refine BD workflows, record types, and automation so the system reflects how we actually sell.
• Build and maintain dashboards and reports that give BD leadership and individual sellers real-time visibility into pipeline health, forecast accuracy, and performance against targets.
• Develop and document standard operating procedures for core BD processes in Salesforce — opportunity management, stage-gating, activity logging — to drive consistent adoption across the team.
• Coordinate with the Marketing team to ensure smooth flow of lead and prospect activities into Salesforce.
• Lead regular data hygiene audits, working with the Salesforce Administrator to fix root causes rather than one-off cleanups.
• Onboard new BD hires on Salesforce and the broader BD tech stack.

RFP & Proposal Management

• Project manage the RFP response and proposal development process end-to-end, working closely with the deal owner and cross-functional contributors (Solutions Engineering, Product, Legal, Finance, Marketing) to produce proposals that are accurate, on time, and clearly communicate Silverchair's value.
• In collaboration with Solutions Engineering and Marketing, maintain a centralized library of proposal content, boilerplate language, and case studies, keeping it current as our products and story evolve.
• Own the proposal calendar, keeping every open RFP visible with clear ownership and deadlines.
• Support pricing and quote accuracy ahead of proposal delivery and throughout the negotiation process.
• Coordinate final review and formatting so every proposal that goes out the door meets a consistent quality bar.

Contracting & Deal Acceleration

• Project manage the contracting process from verbal agreement through signature, coordinating with Sales, Legal, Finance, and the customer to shorten time-to-close.
• Track contract status across the active pipeline and proactively escalate stalled agreements to the right stakeholder.
• Maintain contract templates and standard language in coordination with Legal, flagging deviations that need review.

Post-Sale Hand-off

• Evaluate and continuously improve the post-sale hand-off process for every product line (ScholarOne Manuscripts, Silverchair Platform, and any other active product), closing gaps between Sales and Delivery.
• Document standard hand-off procedures and required inputs for each product type, so every deal transitions with the same level of completeness regardless of who closed it.
• Partner with Delivery, Solutions Engineering, and Finance to align on hand-off timing, ownership, and information requirements.
• Ensure smooth handoff to Marketing post-contract for announcement and communications onboarding
• Track hand-off status across active deals and flag missing information or delays before they affect implementation timelines

Lead Triage & Qualification

• Triage incoming marketing-generated leads, applying qualification criteria for fit and revenue potential.
• Directly qualify long-tail leads, gathering enough information to assess fit before routing them to the appropriate BD team member.
• Partner with Marketing to refine lead scoring and routing rules over time, informed by conversion data.

Process Improvement & AI Enablement

• Identify and pilot opportunities to apply AI tools to BD workflows — proposal drafting, lead research, meeting preparation, data entry — to improve speed and quality.
• Evaluate new sales technology and recommend adoption where it demonstrably improves BD productivity.
• Maintain AI literacy and understanding of ethical AI applications in academic publishing and scholarly communications.
• Demonstrate basic prompt engineering skills for effective AI tool utilization.
• Exercise judgment in determining when AI assistance is and is not appropriate for tasks.
• Ensure compliance with Silverchair's AI usage policies and data protection requirements.
• Collaborate effectively with AI tools while maintaining human oversight and professional standards.
• Reporting & Analytics
• Produce regular and ad hoc reporting on pipeline, forecast, win/loss, and new logo performance for BD leadership.
• Support annual and quarterly territory and target planning with data and analysis.

What You'll Bring

Experience

• 5–7 years of experience in sales operations, revenue operations, deal desk, or business operations, ideally within a B2B SaaS or technology company.
• Demonstrated experience as a Salesforce power user or administrator, including building reports and dashboards.
• Experience supporting or managing RFP/proposal processes and/or contract lifecycle management.
• Experience in scholarly publishing, academic technology, or a related information services field is a plus, but not required.

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Skills

• Advanced Salesforce proficiency (reporting, dashboards, workflow and process automation); Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification a plus.
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent deals and proposals against deadlines.
• Comfort using AI tools (e.g., Claude, Salesforce Einstein/Agentforce) to improve the efficiency and quality of sales processes.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work cross-functionally across Sales, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and Delivery.
• Strong analytical skills and Excel proficiency.
• High attention to detail, strong follow-through, and the ability to work independently.
• Comfortable working substantial overlapping hours with the Eastern Time Zone in the U.S., regardless of where you're based.

This role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on our company's growth trajectory while working with cutting-edge SaaS metrics and analytics. You'll be at the intersection of finance, operations, and strategy, providing critical insights that drive business decisions.

This role is fully remote with strong preference given to candidates in the Eastern Time Zone.

Disclaimer: At this time, we cannot sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position.

No agencies please.

Salary Range: $100,000 - $120,000

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