Mid-Market Account Executive

Overview

You're selling Gong's AI-powered revenue intelligence platform to mid-market companies—think 200-2000 employees with sales teams of 20-100 reps. You run full-cycle deals from first call to close, navigating conversations with CROs, VPs of Sales, RevOps leaders, and occasionally IT/security. Most deals involve proving ROI, running a technical evaluation, and building consensus across multiple departments.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage private (Series D+, likely unicorn valuation)

Size: 2,463 employees

Growth: Actively expanding mid-market team in NYC under new leadership, suggesting strategic push into this segment

Market Position: Category leader in revenue intelligence—established brand with strong recognition in enterprise, now investing in mid-market penetration

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40-50% Inbound - Mix of demo requests from marketing campaigns, G2 research, and conference leads. Quality varies—some are ready to buy, others are early-stage tire-kickers
• 40-50% Outbound - You're expected to self-source through cold calling, LinkedIn outreach, and sequences to target accounts. The brand helps but mid-market is more price-sensitive than enterprise
• 10% Referrals/Existing customer expansion - Some leads come from enterprise accounts spinning out divisions or customers referring similar-sized companies

SDR/AE Structure: Likely dedicated SDRs for some inbound qualification, but you're expected to do significant self-sourcing in mid-market. This isn't fully fed.

SE Support: Shared Solutions Engineer pool for technical demos and POC support—you'll need to schedule them in advance for key calls

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Chorus.ai (Zoominfo), Clari, Outreach (Kaia), smaller players like Jiminny and Avoma

How They Differentiate: Gong has the most mature AI and largest dataset (proprietary "revenue signals"), plus the strongest brand recognition. The platform is more comprehensive than point solutions.

Common Objections:

• "Too expensive for our stage" (mid-market price sensitivity)
• "We already use Chorus/Clari" (switching costs)
• "Our reps won't use another tool" (adoption concerns)
• "Can't we just use Zoom recordings?" (DIY mentality)

Win Themes: AI quality, depth of analytics, proven ROI with similar-sized companies, ecosystem integrations (Salesforce, Outreach, Salesloft)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active Deals (40%) | Prospecting (35%) | Internal/Admin (25%)

Key Activities

• Discovery calls with revenue leaders: You're asking about team size, tech stack, current coaching/QA process, pain points around forecast accuracy and rep performance. These are 30-45 minute calls where you're qualifying budget, authority, need, and timeline.
• Multi-threaded follow-up: After initial interest, you're chasing multiple stakeholders—RevOps wants to see data governance, IT wants security docs, the CRO wants executive alignment. You're coordinating calendars, sending follow-ups, and keeping deals moving through Slack, email, and calls.
• Running or coordinating demos: Either you're doing high-level business value demos yourself, or you're bringing in an SE for deep technical walkthroughs. You're tailoring the story to their specific use cases (coaching, deal inspection, forecasting).
• Managing POCs and trials: Some deals require 2-4 week pilots where a subset of their team uses Gong. You're checking in regularly, troubleshooting adoption issues, and collecting feedback to build your business case.
• Building business cases and ROI models: You're creating decks showing cost of missed quota, cost of bad hires, value of shortening ramp time. Mid-market buyers need to see the math.
• Outbound prospecting: Building target account lists, researching companies on LinkedIn, sending personalized sequences, making 20-30 cold calls per week to supplement inbound flow.
• Internal coordination: Weekly forecast calls, deal reviews with your manager, syncing with marketing on campaign performance, updating Salesforce (constantly), coordinating with legal/finance on contracts.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Long cycles with multiple stalls: Deals regularly push quarters because a key stakeholder goes dark, budget gets frozen, or they decide to evaluate two more vendors. You'll have 15-20 active opps but only 3-4 actually closing each quarter.
• Price pressure in mid-market: These companies don't have enterprise budgets. You'll negotiate hard on price, deal with procurement squeezing you on terms, and lose deals to "we'll revisit next year."
• Self-sourcing grind: Unlike enterprise AEs who get fed, you're doing significant outbound work. That means hours of research, cold calling into skeptical prospects, and low response rates.
• Complex stakeholder management: You need revenue leaders excited, RevOps confident in implementation, IT comfortable with security, and finance convinced of ROI. One skeptic can kill the deal.
• Proving ROI is subjective: Unlike transactional tools, revenue intelligence value is harder to quantify. You're selling "better coaching" and "forecast accuracy"—benefits that take quarters to materialize.

What Success Looks Like

• Closing 12-16 deals per year at $50-150K ACV each
• Maintaining 3-4x pipeline coverage (you need $3-4M in pipeline to hit a $1M quota)
• Win rate around 20-25% (1 in 4-5 qualified opportunities closes)
• Average deal cycle of 90-120 days from first meeting to signed contract

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• CRO or VP of Sales (economic buyer, cares about team performance and forecast accuracy)
• Head of Revenue Operations (technical buyer, cares about implementation, integrations, and data quality)
• Occasionally Head of Sales Enablement (user/champion, cares about coaching workflows)

What They Care About:

• Rep productivity: Are my AEs having the right conversations? Where are deals getting stuck?
• Forecast accuracy: Can I trust my team's pipeline? Where's the risk?
• Onboarding and ramp time: How do I get new hires productive faster?
• Coaching scalability: I can't listen to every call—how do I coach 30+ reps effectively?
• Implementation effort: How long until we're live? Do we need dedicated resources?
• Adoption risk: Will my reps actually use this or will it collect dust?

Requirements

• 3-5+ years full-cycle B2B SaaS sales experience, ideally selling to revenue leaders or in the sales/RevOps tech space
• Proven track record hitting/exceeding quota in a consultative sales environment
• Experience managing complex deals with 3+ stakeholders and 90+ day cycles
• Comfortable with self-sourcing and outbound prospecting—this isn't a fully-fed role
• Strong business acumen to build ROI cases and speak to revenue metrics
• Ability to navigate technical conversations (integrations, security, data architecture) with support from SEs
• CRM hygiene and pipeline management discipline (Salesforce proficiency expected)
• Based in or willing to relocate to NYC (role appears to be in-office or hybrid)