Client Partner, Cialfo

What This Role Is

Across Southeast Asia, school counselors are the single point of contact between a student's ambition and the university system that will decide their future. Most of them are doing this work manually — tracking hundreds of applications in spreadsheets, chasing document deadlines by email, and making recommendations without the data to back them. When that system breaks down, it isn't a productivity problem. It's a missed deadline that closes a door a student spent years working toward.

Cialfo exists to close that gap, and how well that gap gets closed depends on two things happening at once: schools already on the platform getting real value out of it, and new schools discovering that this is the platform their counseling team actually needs.

That is what this role owns. You are the person a portfolio of high schools across Southeast Asia trusts to make Cialfo work for them, and you are also the person who walks into a school that has never heard of Cialfo and makes the case for why that should change. Saige, our AI layer, is live, and part of what you own is making sure both existing and new schools actually adopt it rather than let it sit unused.

You own the renewal and growth of an existing book of schools, and the identification and close of new ones, across the region — in roughly equal measure.

What Makes This Role Different

Most account management roles in EdTech ask you to defend a territory. Most new-business roles ask you to build one from nothing. This role asks you to do both at once — which means you never fully switch off the instinct that wins new logos, and you never fully switch off the instinct that keeps existing ones.

The Manifest ecosystem gives you something a standalone vendor doesn't have: when a school's ambitions extend beyond counseling — university outreach or student placement pathways — you can point to Explore or Kaaiser as part of the same infrastructure, rather than referring the school elsewhere. That's true whether you're renewing a five-year client or closing a first-time one. No competitor in this market holds that full arc.

The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Cialfo is growing. That gap is the argument for why now is the right time to be inside a school's counseling office, not outside it.

What You Own

Existing school relationships across Southeast Asia

• Own the renewal and health of a defined portfolio of high school accounts
• Build direct relationships with counselors, IT teams, and school leadership — not just your primary point of contact
• Identify and resolve account risk before it becomes churn

New school acquisition across Southeast Asia

• Build and work a pipeline of prospective schools across the region
• Own the full sales cycle from first conversation to signed contract
• Translate Cialfo's platform value into terms that land with a counseling team meeting it for the first time

Onboarding and platform adoption

• Lead onboarding and training tailored to each stakeholder group, from counselors to senior leadership, whether the school is new or renewing
• Drive adoption of Saige and other newer product features against each school's actual counseling workflow
• Ensure every stakeholder group understands the platform well enough to rely on it during peak application season

Account growth and expansion

• Build account-specific growth plans using engagement and outcome data, not general upsell targets
• Identify where a school's needs extend into other parts of the Manifest ecosystem and translate that into commercial opportunity
• Present renewal and expansion proposals with the credibility of someone who has actually used the data

Client operations

• Keep account records, interaction history, and pipeline status current in the CRM
• Translate recurring client feedback into structured input for the product team

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where the Cialfo Southeast Asia client success and growth function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

In the first three months, you know your existing portfolio well enough to have a point of view on which accounts are healthy, and you've started building a real pipeline of prospective schools rather than a list of names.

By six months, your existing accounts show visibly higher adoption of features like Saige than when you started, and you've closed or are close to closing your first new schools.

By twelve months, you've built a portfolio that runs on trust rather than maintenance, and a track record of new schools who chose Cialfo because of how you made the case to them. What you built — on both sides of the book — outlasts the individual deals.

The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You've spent the better part of five years or more in customer success, account management, business development, or client-facing strategic consulting, ideally with exposure to SaaS, EdTech, or B2B technology sold into schools or comparable institutions. You've done both sides of this job before — closing new business and running an existing book — and you don't think of them as different skill sets, just different conversations.

You read data and use it to make decisions about an account before the client asks you to, not after. You track what a portfolio is worth today and what it should be worth, and you build the case to close that gap yourself — whether that gap is a renewal at risk or a school that hasn't signed yet.

You're comfortable moving between a counselor who's never used a CRM and a head of school who wants a strategic conversation about outcomes — and you adjust your approach for each without losing credibility with either.

You're a native Vietnamese speaker, fluent in English, comfortable moving between both depending on who's in the room — whether that's a counselor in Ho Chi Minh City or a regional stakeholder working in English.

This is a role with a defined book of accounts, an open territory of prospects, and real autonomy in how you manage both. You don't need someone checking in on your renewal strategy or your pipeline weekly, and you're comfortable being the first and last line of defense on a relationship that spans multiple time zones.

You're coachable. This function is still being refined, and the person who thrives here treats feedback as part of getting better at the job, not as a threat to how they already do it.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Cialfo is building for schools across this region and your first reaction was that you already know exactly which relationships you'd deepen and which doors you'd knock on first. That's the person this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility — connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically, the relationships you build with schools across Southeast Asia — new and existing — are what turn Cialfo from a platform some schools use into the platform this region's counseling teams choose by default.

Cialfo is part of Manifest Global — a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.