It was right before Easter in 2021 when a colleague approached me with the question, “What are your career plans?”. I immediately replied, I want to be an entrepreneur, be self-employed & do my own thing. He countered by saying I know, but right now, in the next 2–3 years, what do you want to do? And then he showed me his phone with a typed message (our office floor gossip is insane) ‘do you want to be an AE?’
No time passed and my immediate response was ‘NO’…. ‘absolutely not!’
Here’s why:
Account Executives at my former employer are the kings, if, and only if, they reach their quota.On the other side of the medal, Account Executives are responsible for everything. Not only dealing with their clients, finding their challenges and obstacles, a fitting solution to ease their pain, and actually selling it to them. This would be a normal sales role. Additionally, they have to solve implementation problems, and customer support issues, create reference stories and take care of wrong invoices and bookings. All of this could still be acceptable to gain trust and improve the customer relationship. However, they also have to please all internal systems: keep the CRM straight and up-to-date, and manage not only the forecast but additional, superficial planning templates that barely ever yield any results. Nominate and invite customers to events, and webinars, to speak as references, all of which could be done by other departments, e.g. Marketing, Support, Sales Operations just to name a few. All of this has to be done while keeping the customer and especially management happy while dealing with the quota pressure and delivering results.
That is why my initial response was very clear, as I saw the role and accompanying responsibilities as not very desirable.However, while I very much enjoyed my former Presales job, I have to be honest: I was fully in my comfort zone and my colleague not only knew it but called me out on it. So I got lured in, carefully considered and got clear on what I wanted to learn as the next stepping stone in my professional life. The result: I decided to go for it and apply anyway. After a surprisingly great internal recruiting process, I became a LE (large enterprise) AE. The mother of all sales jobs at my former employer.
Job Description on my LinkedIn profile.
I hit the ground running. Being well connected internally through my previous 5 years of working in Presales, and knowing most of my customers already, I had inherited a transformational deal that needed closing. With a great manager by my side and support from experienced colleagues, I did my best in learning all about the deal, creating a close plan for my big ticket, and getting to know all of my customers.
My first quarter was probably the steepest learning curve I had in my life so far.In week one I had my first close plan meeting with the CIO of one of my country’s biggest corporations. Starting in week 2 we had weekly, hours-long contract and business case negotiations with several representatives from this customer. This went on for 8 weeks. I did my best to structure the whole process not only for my customer but also internally. The customer was tough, getting support internally was not the main issue either, rather getting the correct and true answers. We went through all contract supplements paragraph by paragraph, which yielded an abundance of open questions. These needed to be cleared by either our legal, product management, solution management (to this day I do not understand the difference), sales management, or actually customer success/support. It was frustrating, but probably one of the most instructive periods in my career. At the same time, I was able to close some smaller deals with my additional customers and get to know the process of finalizing a formal offer (again internally & externally), negotiating a final price, and closing the deal.
At around 8pm, my customer handed me the signed contracts outside their HQs.
In the end, the entire team, consisting of at least 25+ names I listed in the winning announcement, got what we worked for. And even though we were selling SaaS software and digital processes I got the old-school experience of driving over to the customer and picking up several hundred pages of signed contract paper, driving back to the office, ringing the bell, and let's be honest, getting hammered in the office.
Find out in Part IV why I changed and decided to leave this role.
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