Account Manager

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 Manager earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $63,892

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $66,338

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Manages client accounts for a company. Develops and maintains communication with company clients, promotes sales and services, and works to resolve problems Accounts may be for product sales, advertising or marketing services or financial services such as banking.

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 Manager 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.
• Microsoft Excel: Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications.
• 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.
• Account Management: Account management is the management of sales and relationships with particular customers of a company.
• Customer Contact: Experience working with business processes and technologies that are designed to engage customers and facilitate communication by a variety of channels.
• Budgeting: Experience planning how the financial resources of a business or department are to be allocated during the next business period.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Account Manager that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Customer Retention: Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its customers over some specified period.
• Upselling Products and Services: Upselling is a sales technique where a seller induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale.
• Business Planning: Experience constructing a document that brings together the perspectives of many business teams including finance, human resources, intellectual property management, and marketing to create a credible understanding of the future of the company for someone who is unfamiliar with the business.
• Customer Accounts: Working experience with Customer Accounts, which often include accounting and marketing information for individual customers or business clients in a Customer Relationship Management system.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Experience analysing data about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

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 Manager
• Sales Account Manager
• Account Director
• Strategic Account Manager
• Commercial Lines Account Manager

Similar Occupations

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

• Account Executive (General)