Account Executive

Overview

You sell Xactly's sales performance management platform to mid-market and enterprise companies (500-5000+ employees). You're navigating multi-stakeholder deals involving finance, sales leadership, and IT, replacing either homegrown spreadsheet systems or competing SPM vendors. You own the full sales cycle from discovery through contract signature.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Mature/Established (public company, 893 employees)

Size: ~900 employees globally

Growth: Steady enterprise growth, competing in established category with both legacy and newer vendors

Market Position: Long-time player with deep data assets, fighting perception of being "legacy" while defending against newer, simpler tools

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% SDR-generated meetings (mix of inbound and outbound)
• 30% Self-sourced from existing relationships, referrals, LinkedIn network
• 20% Marketing events, webinars, content downloads that you work directly
• 10% Expansion/cross-sell from existing accounts

SDR/AE Structure: SDRs book qualified meetings, AEs own from discovery forward

SE Support: Sales Engineers join after initial discovery - critical for demos, technical evaluation, and POC phases

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: CaptivateIQ and Spiff (modern challengers), Varicent and SAP Commissions (legacy), QuotaPath (SMB), homegrown Excel/Sheets systems (biggest competitor)

How They Differentiate: 20+ years of sales performance data, AI-powered forecasting and insights, enterprise-grade compliance and audit capabilities, broader platform (not just comp)

Common Objections: "Too expensive vs newer tools", "We're fine with spreadsheets", "Just implemented [competitor] last year", "Build vs buy - our dev team can do this", "Seems like overkill for our size"

Win Themes: Scalability and complexity handling, data accuracy and audit trail, AI/predictive capabilities, proven track record with similar companies

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active Deal Management (40%) | Discovery & Demos (25%) | Prospecting (20%) | Internal Coordination (15%)

Key Activities

• Discovery Calls: Uncovering current process, team size, pain points, timeline, and budget. You need to understand their comp plan complexity, how many reps they have, who touches the data today, what breaks during quarter-end.
• Multi-Stakeholder Navigation: Building consensus between finance (wants accuracy and control), sales leadership (wants transparency and fewer disputes), and IT (wants security and integration). These groups often have conflicting priorities.
• Demo Coordination: Working with SEs to show relevant features - territory management, quota planning, commission calculations, forecasting. Tailoring demos to their specific comp structures.
• Deal Progression: Chasing down stakeholders for next steps, navigating procurement and legal reviews, building business cases with finance on ROI (time savings, error reduction), managing technical evaluations and POCs.
• Forecasting and Pipeline Management: Keeping Salesforce updated, justifying your forecast to your manager, explaining why deals are slipping (they will), managing a pipeline of 15-25 active opportunities.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Deals slip constantly - "we'll decide by end of quarter" usually means 2-3 months later. Comp system changes are not urgent for most companies.
• Multi-threading is critical but exhausting - you need finance, sales ops, IT, and exec sponsor all aligned. One person leaving or changing priorities can stall everything.
• ROI justification is tough - you're selling efficiency and accuracy, which is harder to quantify than revenue-generating tools
• Price pressure is real - newer competitors undercut on price, and procurement beats you up on discounting
• Long cycles mean you need 3-4x pipeline to feel safe, and you won't see commission on deals for months after you start them
• Technical complexity - you need to understand sales comp plans, territory carving, quota relief, accelerators, etc. to have credible conversations

What Success Looks Like

• Closing $800K-$1.2M in new ACV annually (typically 4-8 deals depending on size)
• Maintaining 3-4x pipeline coverage of your quarterly number
• 25-30% win rate on qualified opportunities
• Average deal size of $100K-150K ACV
• Keeping deals moving - average time in stage metrics matter

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• CFO / VP Finance (economic buyer, cares about compliance and accuracy)
• CRO / VP Sales (power user, cares about rep trust and dispute reduction)
• Director/VP Sales Operations or Revenue Operations (day-to-day user, cares about time savings and ease of use)
• IT/Systems (technical buyer, cares about security, integration, scalability)

What They Care About:

• Finance: Audit trail, SOX compliance, accuracy of calculations, close process efficiency
• Sales Leadership: Transparency for reps, reducing comp disputes, motivating the right behaviors
• Sales Ops: Time savings (hours per month on comp admin), fewer errors, easier plan changes
• IT: Integration with Salesforce/other CRM, data security, user provisioning, support model
• All: Price, implementation timeline and risk, change management impact on team

Requirements

• 3-5+ years selling complex B2B SaaS to enterprise buyers
• Experience navigating multi-stakeholder deals with finance, ops, and IT buyers
• Ability to understand and discuss sales compensation, territory management, and sales operations concepts credibly
• Proven ability to manage 4-8 month sales cycles without losing momentum
• Strong business case building skills - quantifying ROI, building executive presentations
• Salesforce proficiency and pipeline discipline
• Comfortable with technical complexity - working with SEs, understanding integrations and data flows
• Resilience with deal slippage and procurement delays