Account Executive (General)

Career Area: Sales

Occupation Group: Client Support and Sales

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Account Executive (General) earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $69,650

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $71,361

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Manages communications with business clients that buy services from a company, such as advertising or banking services, or manages sales accounts. Works with a set of clients over time, and recruits new clients. Promotes products developed specifically for a client, such as an advertising campaign, or matches clients with available services or products.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Account Executive (General) is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Building Effective Relationships: Building relationships is about your ability to identify and initiate working relationships and to develop and maintain them in a way that is of mutual benefit to both yourself and the other party. Good relationships are the key to getting things done and are essential when your success is dependent on others.
• Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.
• Microsoft Office: Microsoft Office is an office suite of applications, servers, and services developed by Microsoft.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Sales: Experience selling products or services to consumers.
• Customer Service: Working experience with the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.
• Prospective Clients: Working with Prospective Clients, which are indivuals who are not yet customers, but who have the potential of becoming one.
• Sales Goals: Working experience of Sales Goals. Sales goals or targets are a specified amount of sales that a management sets for achieving or exceeding within a specified timeframe. Sales goals are apportioned among different sales units such as salespersons, franchisees, distributors, agents, etc.
• Customer Contact: Experience working with business processes and technologies that are designed to engage customers and facilitate communication by a variety of channels.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Account Executive (General) that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Sales Strategy: A sales strategy is a plan by a business or individual on how to go about selling products and services and increasing profits.
• Sales Planning: Experience setting profit-based sales targets, quotas, sales forecasting, demand management and the execution of a sales plan.
• Cross Sell: Working experience selling additional products or services to existing customers.
• Sales Prospecting: Working experience of Sales Prospecting, which is when inside sales reps make outbound calls or send outbound emails to leads in hopes of creating opportunities for account executives. Prospecting can involve cold-calling as well as reaching out to nurture leads that have gone cold.
• Articulating Value Propositions: Working experience of Articulating Value Propositions. Value proposition refers to a business or marketing statement that a company uses to summarize why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement convinces a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings will. Companies use this statement to target customers who will benefit most from using the company's products, and this helps maintain an economic moat.

Salary Boosting Skills

A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:

• Enterprise Software: Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is computer software used to satisfy the needs of an organization rather than individual users.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Account Executive
• Sales Executive
• Sales Account Executive
• Senior Account Executive
• National Account Executive

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Account Manager
• Business Development Specialist