Account Executive - Services
Role Overview:
The core aim of the Account Executive is to identify and enable Cisco Services to be able to support customers in achieving their desired business outcomes. This position focuses strongly on Lifecycle & Professional Services and Premium Attach Services; Point of Sale and Uncovered Product Attach upsell. The role drives incremental services growth through close coordination with the Account Team, developing opportunities and driving them to closure to grow Cisco’s Recurring Revenue business.
The role requires a niche focus on Premium Services, integrating them into Buying Programs, including Point of Sale and Uncovered Product Attach. The candidate will engage with customers and internal/external account teams, dedicating approximately 60% of their time to building positive relationships, qualifying opportunities, and identifying challenges. They actively participate in the internal sales process, beginning with Strategic Account Planning and the Adoption Accountability Plan, and concluding at deal closure, with a focus on new opportunities and upselling services during renewal cycles to improve customer value. The role demands high engagement and cross-functional collaboration with Account Teams, CX product management, renewals, global services sales, and other functions such as architectures and portfolio Account Executives. The candidate leads medium to high complexity sales cycles, with deal lengths averaging 6 to 18 months and deal sizes ranging from 50K to over 1M. Success in this role is measured by offer penetration, including Premium, New Technical, Multi-Year, or Incubation Services
Key Responsibilities:
- Ensure customers have efficient support coverage and professional services aligned with their encouraged outcomes. Engage specialist teams to improve the sales process and partner optimally with Customer Success to boost services adoption.
- Identify and manage opportunities across a diverse portfolio of accounts to expand services coverage and impact across new and existing customers and markets, leveraging customer and data insights.
- Build and sustain strong, long-term relationships with customers, collaborating to build demand for new services aligned with their business needs. Upsell and cross-sell additional solutions during new and renewal pursuits.
- Conduct data analysis to uncover new opportunities, understand buying propensity, service availability, and potential for unattached products. Use data to demonstrate customer needs, implicate pain points, and derive forecasts with weekly, monthly, and quarterly sales commitments.
- Stay informed about industry trends, market dynamics, and competitive landscapes, aligned to accounts, territories, and/or segments.
What You’ll Do:
- Independently lead moderately sophisticated deals, collaborating cross-functionally on proposal development and service delivery.
- Expand relationships with a broader client base of new and existing accounts, acting as a primary contact for account planning, service engagement, and support.
- Use customer and market insights to align outreach with buyers’ decision criteria and processes.
- Mobilize champions to reach economic buyers and secure budget alignment.
- Use discovery to align Cisco’s joint product and service solutions with customer challenges and opportunities.
- Apply data and market analysis to advise strategic service conversations and reinforce Cisco’s distinct value.
- Coordinate with service delivery teams to ensure customer expectations are understood and met.
- Apply services expertise across the architecture portfolio to align offerings with customer strategy and expand adoption through lifecycle selling.
- Leverage deep service and market expertise to nurture credible, consultative relationships and learn end-to-end outcomes-based selling to position offerings.
- Cultivate collaborative relationships across internal teams to align service offerings with account strategies and improve customer value.
- Apply Cisco’s sales methodologies to ensure high-quality customer engagements and forecasting. Encourage confidence in customer interactions, ensuring engagements are conducted with authority and strategic insight.
- Develop relationships within customer accounts, account managers, specialists, and channels, initially relying on senior services mentors.
Why Cisco?
At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.
Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.
We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.