About the Account Executive role
An Account Executive (AE) owns deals from qualified opportunity to signature: running discovery, tailoring demos, building business cases, navigating stakeholders, negotiating, and closing. In most B2B teams, AEs take over opportunities that SDRs have qualified and carry the revenue quota.
The profile changes with deal size. Transactional AEs run high-velocity cycles measured in days; mid-market AEs juggle multi-stakeholder evaluations; enterprise AEs orchestrate months-long processes with procurement and security reviews. Your posting should state segment, average deal size, cycle length, and quota so candidates can match their experience honestly.
Look for structured discovery habits and honest loss analysis. Great AEs win by understanding customer problems deeply, not by pushing features, and their pipeline discipline shows in how precisely they can describe every open deal.
Account Executive job description template
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Job brief
We are hiring an Account Executive to carry deals from qualified to signed. You will run discovery properly, shape demos around what you heard, build the business case, navigate the stakeholders who were not in the first meeting, negotiate, and close.
This suits somebody with real pipeline discipline who can describe every open deal precisely, who diagnoses before pitching, and who is honest with the forecast even in the week when honesty is unwelcome.
Responsibilities
- Own opportunities from qualification through close, carrying a revenue quota
- Run structured discovery to understand prospects' problems, priorities, and buying process
- Deliver tailored product demonstrations that connect capabilities to customer pain
- Build champions and navigate multi-stakeholder buying committees
- Create proposals and business cases that quantify value
- Negotiate pricing and terms within company guidelines
- Maintain accurate pipeline stages, next steps, and forecasts in the CRM
- Partner with SDRs on territory strategy and feedback on lead quality
- Collaborate with customer success for smooth handoffs after close
- Share market and competitor intelligence with product and marketing
Requirements and skills
- Has closed as an account executive or in another quota-carrying role
- Has hit the number across several periods, not one good quarter
- Strong in discovery, presentation, and the negotiation at the end
- Has run deals with several stakeholders and competing internal agendas
- Keeps a CRM accurate enough that a forecast built on it holds
- Writes and speaks clearly, including when the news is bad
- Resilient, coachable, and disciplined about the pipeline in a slow month
- A degree, or the sales experience that stands in for one
Nice to have
- Experience selling SaaS or in our industry
- Familiarity with sales methodologies such as MEDDIC, SPIN, or Challenger
- Experience selling to our buyer persona, such as HR or finance leaders
- A network in our target market
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