Account Executive job description

B2B sales — Account Executive
Owns small and mid-size deals end to end against a personal quota.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Prospecting
- Account Research and Targeting — You build your own target list for a territory, rank it by fit and timing, and can defend that ranking with evidence when a manager challenges any single account.
- Outbound Prospecting — You sustain a personal outbound number quarter after quarter, diagnose a falling reply rate from your own data, and change the channel mix to fix it.
- Cold Outreach Messaging — You adapt tone and framing per persona and channel, hold a reply rate at or above the team benchmark, and rewrite a failing message from the replies it drew.
- Discovery and Qualification — You disqualify deals early on your own evidence, uncover the business consequence behind a stated requirement, and your qualified deals close at team-average rate.
- Inbound Lead Handling — You convert inbound interest into qualified opportunity at or above team rate, and can say from your own records which sources convert and which waste time.
- Referral and Network Development — You ask satisfied customers for introductions as a habit, and generate a measurable share of your own meetings from referrals each quarter.

Deal Management
- Solution Demonstration — You demo to a mixed audience, change the flow live when interest in the room moves, and close the session with a confirmed next step.
- Buying Committee Mapping — You name the likely blocker on a live deal before it blocks you, and secure access to an economic buyer without needing help from your main contact.
- Champion Development — You test the power of a champion by asking them to do something real, such as arranging a meeting, and you act on the answer when they cannot.
- Sales Objection Handling — You separate the stated objection from the real one by asking rather than asserting, and can point to deals you saved by doing exactly that.
- Commercial Negotiation — You plan a negotiation before entering it, including your walk-away, your tradeables, and the alternatives open to the buyer, and you hold price under pressure.
- Proposal and Business Case Writing — You build a quantified business case from numbers the customer supplied, agree the assumptions with them in writing, and it survives their finance review.
- CRM Pipeline Hygiene — You arrive at a pipeline review needing no cleanup: your dates, values, and next steps hold up when somebody else reads them cold.
- Competitive Positioning — You reframe the evaluation criteria in your favour before a requirements document is written, and can point to deals won that way.

Customer Success
- Customer Onboarding Handover — You can run the handover for accounts with several stakeholders and a non-standard scope, and stay involved until delivery confirms they have what they need. Delivery colleagues rarely have to come back to you for missing context.
- Account Relationship Management — You can build trust with the people who decide and the people who use, and describe how each account really makes a decision. You hear about changes from the customer before they show up in the numbers.
- Renewal and Churn Prevention — You can run a straightforward renewal from first conversation to signature, checking usage and open issues beforehand. You start early enough that a delay does not turn into a lapsed contract.
- Upsell and Cross-Sell — You can find growth in an account nobody had flagged, build the case for it and close it without straining the existing relationship. You can also say when an account should not be sold anything more.
- Customer Escalation Handling — You can own a routine complaint end to end, agree who is doing what internally, and tell the customer what will happen and when. You leave a record so the same issue is not investigated twice.

Commercial
- Pricing and Discount Discipline — You can hold a price under pressure and trade a concession for something in return, closing inside the band without escalating. Your deals do not need repeated approvals to get over the line.
- Territory and Account Planning — You can divide a territory by real potential rather than by company size, and set aside accounts that will not repay the effort. You can show how last quarter's plan changed where your time went.
- Sales Contract Literacy — You can run a deal on the standard paper, recognise the clauses customers commonly push on, and prepare the redlines legal will expect. You know which changes you may not agree to on your own.
- Sales Forecasting — You can produce your own forecast for a period and say what has to happen for each deal to close. You keep what you hope will land separate from what you would commit to.

Sales Leadership
- Deal Coaching — You can sit in on another seller's call and give them specific feedback on what you heard. You describe what actually happened rather than telling them what you would have done.
- Sales Enablement — You can keep sales material tidy and current, collect the questions new sellers keep asking, and help run an onboarding session someone else designed.
- Quota and Territory Design — You can gather what quota setting needs, such as account counts, past performance and territory boundaries, and check the data is right before anyone builds on it.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can break a small piece of work into tasks, sequence them, and run it to a date you agreed, escalating risks before they become slips.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own tasks with reasonable accuracy and deliver at a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself the accountable party for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put the checks in place to prove it, and hold back a release that misses the bar.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into tractable pieces, weigh the options against evidence, and explain the tradeoff you chose.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently across the systems and tools your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Technical Writing — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a runbook, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a cadence that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can identify a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can onboard someone onto your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.