Account Executive - France & Southern Europe

Overview

You're selling Sitecore's digital experience platform (DXP) and content management system to enterprise accounts across France and Southern Europe. This is full-cycle enterprise sales—you find the accounts, build the relationships, run the technical evaluations, and close six-figure deals. You'll spend most of your time navigating IT and marketing politics at large organizations.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Mature/Private Equity-backed (acquired by EQT in 2016)

Size: 1,764 employees

Growth: Expanding regional coverage in EMEA, new business team hiring

Market Position: Established player in enterprise DXP/CMS space, competing with Adobe Experience Manager and other legacy vendors

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 30% Inbound - mostly brand recognition inquiries from enterprises evaluating DXP vendors, some content downloads
• 60% Outbound - targeted account lists, cold calling IT/marketing leaders, LinkedIn outreach to previous contacts
• 10% Partners/Referrals - system integrators like Accenture or Deloitte Digital who implement Sitecore

SDR/AE Structure: Likely self-sourcing for most of pipeline with some marketing-qualified leads from events/content

SE Support: Shared SE pool for technical demos and POCs—you'll need to schedule them carefully

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Adobe Experience Manager, Optimizely, Contentstack, headless CMS vendors

How They Differentiate: Strong .NET integration, personalization capabilities, established brand in enterprise

Common Objections: "We're already on Adobe," pricing concerns, questions about cloud vs on-prem roadmap, concerns about vendor lock-in

Win Themes: Personalization engine, developer ecosystem for .NET shops, composable architecture claims

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

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

Key Activities

• Account Research & Targeting: Identify large enterprises in France/Southern Europe that might be re-platforming their CMS or adding personalization. You're looking for digital transformation budgets and dissatisfaction with current tools.
• Cold Outreach: Call and email CMOs, VPs of Digital, IT Directors. Most won't respond. You're trying to get into active evaluations or plant seeds for future budget cycles.
• Discovery & Demos: Run discovery calls to understand their current tech stack, pain points with existing CMS, and political landscape. Coordinate with SEs for technical demos—you'll do the business case, they'll do the product walkthrough.
• Deal Management: Chase stakeholders for meetings, manage POC logistics, build business cases with ROI calculators, navigate procurement, coordinate with legal on redlines. Most deals will slip at least one quarter.
• Internal Coordination: Weekly pipeline reviews, forecast calls, deal strategy sessions. Lots of CRM updates. Partner with customer success on handoffs.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Long sales cycles mean you're constantly juggling 8-12 active opportunities at different stages while also prospecting to keep pipeline healthy 6-9 months out
• You're selling against "do nothing" as much as competitors—many prospects keep limping along with their current CMS
• POCs are resource-intensive and many don't convert. You'll lose deals after 4-5 months of work because they chose Adobe or decided to stick with WordPress
• Regional expansion role means you're building from scratch in some territories—no installed base to upsell, no warm referrals
• Technical buyers want headless/composable, marketing buyers want ease of use—you're threading that needle constantly

What Success Looks Like

• Close 4-6 new logos per year in the $150K-500K range
• Build a pipeline of 3-4x your quota across different deal stages
• Win competitive evaluations against Adobe or other tier-1 vendors
• Establish partnerships with 2-3 regional system integrators who recommend Sitecore

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• CMOs and VPs of Digital Marketing (want personalization, omnichannel capabilities)
• CIOs and IT Directors (care about architecture, integration, TCO)
• Digital Product Owners (concerned with developer experience, time-to-market)

What They Care About:

• Whether this integrates with their existing martech stack (Salesforce, Adobe Analytics, etc.)
• Total cost of ownership—licensing, implementation, ongoing maintenance
• Whether their developers can actually work with it (.NET vs other stacks)
• Personalization ROI and whether they'll actually use advanced features
• Cloud migration path if they're on-prem today

Requirements

• 5+ years selling enterprise software in France/EMEA, preferably martech or DXP
• French fluency required, English for internal communication
• Track record closing $200K+ ACV deals with 6+ month sales cycles
• Experience navigating IT and marketing buying committees
• Comfortable working autonomously in a region-building role
• Willingness to travel across France and Southern Europe 30-40%