Senior Account Executive job description

B2B sales — Senior Account Executive
Runs complex multi-stakeholder deals and mentors newer sellers.

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 run discovery across several stakeholders in one account, reconcile conflicting accounts of the problem, and rescue deals qualified on the wrong basis.
- 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 cultivate a personal network of buyers and partners over time, and can name several closed deals that began as an introduction you earned.

Deal Management
- Solution Demonstration — You lead demos on complex or competitive deals, orchestrate a specialist alongside you, and prepare individual attendees before the session.
- Buying Committee Mapping — You navigate committees spanning divisions or geographies, and can show how you changed the deal plan after a reorganisation or a sponsor change.
- Champion Development — You develop more than one champion on a large deal, prepare them for internal opposition, and recover the deal when one of them leaves mid-cycle.
- Sales Objection Handling — You handle objections raised by a hostile stakeholder in front of the committee, and keep the deal moving without conceding commercially.
- Commercial Negotiation — You lead negotiations involving procurement or legal, structure multi-year or multi-product terms, and close without eroding the margin of the deal.
- Proposal and Business Case Writing — You write proposals for deals spanning several workstreams or legal entities, and shape them so the document works unaccompanied in a board paper.
- CRM Pipeline Hygiene — You spot the data problems across a pipeline you do not own, chase the specific records that distort the number, and explain why they matter.
- Competitive Positioning — You lead displacement deals, plan against the likely counter-moves of a specific incumbent, and brief the team on what worked and what did not.

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 hold senior relationships in complex or political accounts and warm up one that has gone cold. You bring the right internal people into the relationship so it does not depend on you alone.
- Renewal and Churn Prevention — You can see risk months ahead from usage, sponsor changes and support history, and put a plan in place that changes the outcome. You recover renewals others had already given up on.
- Upsell and Cross-Sell — You can expand into parts of a large customer where you have no sponsor, and structure the terms so the original contract stays intact. You show others how to find room in accounts they thought were finished.
- Customer Escalation Handling — You can hold a seriously angry customer, pull support, delivery and product together without needing a manager to convene them, and close the loop once the fix lands. You separate what went wrong from who is at fault.

Commercial
- Pricing and Discount Discipline — You can structure complex or multi-year pricing, judge when an exception is genuinely worth making, and put that case to whoever approves it. You notice when discounting across the team is drifting and say so.
- Territory and Account Planning — You can plan a complex territory or a handful of large accounts, with a written view of buying centres, competitors and the order the work happens in. You review other people's plans and make them sharper.
- Sales Contract Literacy — You can negotiate the usual commercial terms yourself and judge which customer edits are harmless and which are not. You involve legal at the point it still helps rather than at signature.
- Sales Forecasting — You can commit a number and land within a narrow margin of it, and name the specific reason when you miss. You call a deal lost early instead of carrying it into the next quarter.

Sales Leadership
- Deal Coaching — You can coach a seller through a live deal, agree the next actions with them and follow up on whether they happened. The seller leaves the review knowing what to do rather than feeling judged.
- Sales Enablement — You can produce a piece of enablement material, such as an objection guide or a competitor summary, and check it against what the product actually does. You try it with a seller before publishing it.
- 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 run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.