Account Executive - Services

Job Description

As the Account Executive, you will own the overall services strategy and support teams to drive incremental services growth. You will work closely with the Account Team to develop opportunities and drive them to closure, growing our Recurring Revenue business. Your role ensures customers receive efficient support coverage and professional services aligned with their encouraged outcomes. You will engage specialist teams to improve the sales process and partner optimally with Customer Success to boost services adoption. By leveraging customer and data insights, you will identify and manage opportunities across a diverse account mix to expand service coverage and impact. Building and sustaining strong, long-term customer relationships, you will collaborate to develop demand for new services aligned with customer business needs and upsell or cross-sell additional solutions during new and renewal pursuits. Staying advised about industry trends, market dynamics, and competitive landscapes, you will align your efforts to accounts, territories, and segments.

What You'll Do

Lead sophisticated, high-value deals by crafting tailored service solutions and negotiating terms with customers, while coordinating accounts within large or strategically significant regions to drive customer happiness and develop long-term service partnerships. Your role involves engaging service buyers and influencers by connecting business struggles to meaningful implications and tailoring messaging to reflect broader value and vitality. You will sustain committed champions and economic buyers, effectively clearing hurdles in the paper process and recasting decision criteria around measurable outcomes. Leading discovery efforts, you will develop approaches that showcase Cisco’s distinctive value and implement plans to ensure alignment with customer expectations and uphold agreed-upon standards. You will drive the use of customer and market data to elevate conversations, delivering insights that advise decision-making and optimize service outcomes. Facilitating initiatives that promote accountability across teams, you will ensure all customer interactions reflect agreed service standards. Offering expertise to account teams, you will help develop service offering approaches via account planning and promote expansion through lifecycle selling. You will lead cross-team knowledge sharing on market trends, technology, and Cisco services, aligning collective expertise with customer needs and service strategy while applying an outcomes-based end-to-end selling approach. Advising strategies across teams, you will foster partnerships that improve Cisco’s ability to meet customer needs and drive growth. Additionally, you will lead initiatives to improve sales process difficulty and accurate forecasting, conduct customer engagements with the credibility required to align every interaction with Cisco’s and the customer’s mutual strategic objectives, and build excellent relationships within customer accounts while influencing account managers, specialists, and channels.

What Is Required

• Niche focus on new and renew upsell of Premium Services, integrating them into buying programs, including Point of Sale and Uncovered Product Attach.
• Customer engagement and accountability with approximately 60% external customer or internal/external account team interaction.
• Strong relationship-building skills with customers, partners, and Account Teams to qualify opportunities and identify customer challenges.
• Active participation in the internal sales process, starting with Strategic Account Planning, including the Adoption Accountability Plan, and concluding at deal closure.
• Majority of time spent on new opportunities and upselling services during renewal cycles to improve customer value.
• 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.
• Ability to manage medium to high complexity sales cycles, with deal lengths averaging 6 to 18 months and deal sizes ranging from 500K to over 5M.
• Success measured by offer penetration, including Premium, New Technical, Multi-Year, or Incubation Services.

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.