Startups Stack Exchange Archive

What exactly is an “account executive”?

• posted by: john mangual on 2016-01-05
• tagged: sales, growth, communication
• score: 4

Every now and then I look at job listings for stuff I am qualified for (or not). A very common role I see is account executive (such as here). Can someone explain to me what they do?

Here is one sample taken from a job listing. Truthfully I don’t care particularly about this one just in general:

In your role, you will:

• Be responsible for achieving a monthly/quarterly quota
• Work closely with your Sales Development Reps to acquire new leads
• Proactively generate new pipeline opportunities
• Negotiate and close deals
• Manage sales pipeline
• Continuously improve sales process

To someone in sales, these must be self-explanatory, but I am a coder, so these are new concepts for me. What is going on here? What do these phrases mean?

negotiate and close deals or what is the sales pipeline and how do we manage it? and there is a quota so this has to be done fairly consistently.

It sounds like this job is a good for someone who is persuasive or at least able to reason with the client. This is a very different skill set for a hacker.

Thanks for explaining this to someone from the other side. To my defense, I have seen the CEO and CTO of different companies argue with one another, so I guess these misunderstanding may happen on their level too.

Answer 8678

• posted by: zazaalaza on 2016-03-07
• score: 3

Most of this is just corporate mumbo-jumbo. Please excuse my overly blunt explanations.

• Be responsible for achieving a monthly/quarterly quota

  Your team has to sell X widgets in a month/quarter and you're responsible for it

• Work closely with your Sales Development Reps to acquire new leads

  Make sure that you're team always has a list of companies to call. (we don't pay them for sitting around)

• Proactively generate new pipeline opportunities

  Those companies you're sales team is calling? Do everything in order to turn them into clients

• Negotiate and close deals

  Make the clients sign the contract (preferably with our extra clauses and fees included). Closed deal = signed contract

• Manage sales pipeline

  If something in the above process goes wrong - You have to fix it (basically the pipeline refers to the process of acquiring new clients)

• Continuously improve sales process

  Make sure this process gets better, faster and cheaper over time.

At the core these are the things that these activities entail.

Here is an example (simple) sales pipeline with some metrics:

From 13 generated pipeline opportunities only 1 is a won deal. In average it takes 93 days to negotiate and close this deal. We need someone to manage the pipeline so the metrics get better and better.

Answer 8270

• posted by: Denis de Bernardy on 2016-01-06
• score: 1

When your sales team reaches a certain size it can make sense to specialize what it’s doing. You’d then typically have:

• sales development reps chase and warm new leads
• account executives close warm leads
• account managers farm existing clients

The specific role names and task lists differ from a company to the next. The job description you posted fits somewhere between a closer (“negotiate and close deals”), a farmer (“generate new pipeline opportunities”), and a manager (“continuously improve the sales process”).

It sounds like this job is a good for someone who is persuasive or at least able to reason with the client. This is a very different skill set for a hacker.

Actually, it’s not unless you’re selling low-tech stuff.

When you sell high-tech stuff your buyer will usually be someone technical, and closing the latter mostly has to do with articulating how the solution you’re putting forward will solve their problem. The kicker often comes when it becomes clear to them it’ll cost them less or take less time than doing it themselves. Engineers tend to be much better at this than non-engineers.

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