Account Executive job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Demo to a mixed audience, change the flow live when interest in the room moves, and close the session with a confirmed next step.
- 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.
- Test the power of a champion by asking them to do something real, such as arranging a meeting, and act on the answer when they cannot.
- Plan a negotiation before entering it, including your walk-away, tradeables and the buyer's alternatives, and hold your price at the floor when the buyer asks for a discount outside the band.
- Build a quantified business case from numbers the customer supplied, agree the assumptions with them in writing, and get it through their finance review.
- Run the handover for accounts with several stakeholders and non-standard scope, and stay involved until delivery confirms it has what it needs.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Sales Development Representative level (level 1 of 5) or equivalent

REQUIRED SKILLS
Prospecting
- Account Research and Targeting — You can build your own target list for your assigned territory, rank it by fit and timing, and defend that ranking with evidence when a manager challenges any single account.
- Outbound Prospecting — You can 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 can 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 can disqualify deals early on your own evidence, uncover the business consequence behind a stated requirement, and close your qualified deals at the team-average rate.
- Inbound Lead Handling — You can convert inbound interest into qualified opportunity at or above the team rate, and say from your own records which sources convert and which return no qualified opportunity.
- Referral and Network Development — You can 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 can 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 can 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 can test the power of a champion by asking them to do something real, such as arranging a meeting, and act on the answer when they cannot.
- Sales Objection Handling — You can separate the stated objection from the real one by asking rather than asserting, and point to deals you saved by doing exactly that.
- Commercial Negotiation — You can plan a negotiation before entering it, including your walk-away, tradeables and the buyer's alternatives, and hold your price at the floor when the buyer asks for a discount outside the band.
- Proposal and Business Case Writing — You can build a quantified business case from numbers the customer supplied, agree the assumptions with them in writing, and get it through their finance review.
- CRM Pipeline Hygiene — You can arrive at a pipeline review needing no cleanup: your dates, values, and next steps match the CRM record when a reviewer checks them without asking you.
- Competitive Positioning — You can reframe the evaluation criteria in your favor before a requirements document is written, and point to deals won that way.
- Product and Solution Expertise — You can recommend a product configuration for a typical deal and say which of the buyer's requirements it does not meet.
- Closing and Purchase Agreement — You can ask for the decision once the buyer's stated conditions are met, and agree dates for signature and start.

Account Management
- Customer Onboarding Handover — You can run the handover for accounts with several stakeholders and non-standard scope, and stay involved until delivery confirms it has what it needs.
- Account Relationship Management — You can keep a named contact among both the people who decide and the people who use the product, and describe how each account makes its decisions.
- Renewal and Churn Prevention — You can run a straightforward renewal from first conversation to signature, checking usage and open issues beforehand and starting early enough to avoid a lapse.
- Upsell and Cross-Sell — You can find growth in an account nobody had flagged and close it without straining the relationship, and say when an account should not be sold more.

Commercial
- Territory and Account Planning — You can rank the accounts in your own patch by real potential rather than company size, and set aside accounts that will not repay the effort.
- Sales Contract Review — You can run a deal on standard paper and prepare the redlines legal expects, agreeing only the changes your authority allows.
- Sales Forecasting — You can produce your own forecast for a period, stating what must happen for each deal to close and separating hoped-for deals from committed ones.

Sales Leadership
- Deal Coaching — You can sit in on another seller's call and give specific feedback on what you heard, describing what happened rather than what you would have done.
- Sales Enablement — You can update or remove sales material that conflicts with the current product or price list, 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 against the source system before anyone builds on it.
- Sales Team Hiring and Performance — You can take part in a candidate interview by asking the questions assigned to you and writing down what the candidate said.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can organize a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep 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 accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into pieces and weigh the options for each against the evidence.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently with the tools and methods 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.
- Writing & Documentation — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, 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 frequency that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can help someone new settle into 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.