What 921 Account Executive Job Postings Actually Ask For

We pulled every open posting from 52 companies' public Greenhouse job boards, kept the 921 whose title names an account executive or sales representative role, and counted how many mention each of 44 terms at least once.

The number beside each term is the share of postings that mention it — not how often it appears. A posting that says “quota” nine times counts once, the same as one that says it in passing.

At 921 postings the 95% margin of error is roughly ±3 points on a mid-range figure, so treat the ordering as meaningful and small gaps as noise.

A methodology is named more often than the CRM. MEDDIC or MEDDPICC appears in 33.8% of these postings, against 29.2% for Salesforce. It is also about 3 times as common as Challenger (10%) and well ahead of SPIN (5.6%) and Sandler (2.1%). If you carry one framework on your resume, the corpus says which one.

The rest of the sales stack barely registers. Outside Salesforce and a generic mention of “CRM” (15%), no named tool clears 4.7% — Sales Navigator 4.7%, Clari 3.6%, ZoomInfo 3.5%, Gong 1.4%, Salesloft 0.9%, HubSpot 0.8%. Candidates list their stack in detail; employers mostly do not ask for it.

BANT appears in 0 of the 921 postings. The qualification framework taught in most entry-level sales training is named by nobody here. “Win rate” fares little better at 1 posting.

What employers do lead with is the motion. Pipeline (65.5%), prospecting (53.9%), quota (47.6%), forecasting (44.2%) and negotiation (44%) all outrank every tool and every methodology. Executive engagement — selling to C-level — is in 37%.

Check your resume with the free ATS resume checker to see which of these terms it already uses, and which the posting you are applying to expects.

Source. The Greenhouse job board API, which companies expose so their listings can be embedded on their own sites. No scraping and no private data. Any figure here can be re-derived from that endpoint; the collector and analyzer are in the repository.

Selection. Matched on the title alone, requiring “account executive” or “sales representative.” Leadership and pre-sales titles are excluded — manager, director, VP, head of, sales engineer — so the sample is individual-contributor closers, whose postings ask for different things than a sales manager's would. “Enterprise sales” was deliberately not used as a match: it added postings that were almost entirely sales engineers, managers and directors, while “Enterprise Account Executive” is already caught by the primary pattern.

Deduplication. The same role posted to several offices returns several near-identical records. Postings were deduped on company, normalized title and content length — the same rule used across every study in this series.

Counting. Document frequency: the share of postings mentioning a term at least once. Three terms are matched narrowly because the bare word was materially dirty. “Closing” drops from 57.7% to 23% once a deal object is required, since “closing date” and “closing the loop” are not the sales stage. “New logos” drops from 30.0% to 17.6% when narrowed to “net new logos.” “Discovery” drops from 23.0% to 2.1% when it must be a discovery call, meeting or process.

Terms we could not measure honestly, and left out. Outreach, the sales engagement platform, is unmeasurable by regex here: 13.6% of postings contain the word but only about 6% survive a case-sensitive match, and the remainder is generic “customer outreach.” Sentence-initial capitals make case no help either. Apollo was dropped because Apollo GraphQL appears in this corpus, and Chorus because it reached 0.4%. A figure that cannot be trusted is worse than a missing row.

Limits worth stating. These are 52 mostly US technology companies hiring through one ATS vendor. They are not a random sample of sales jobs, and the mix skews to well-funded SaaS product companies. Terms outside the 44-term list are not counted, so absence here is not evidence of absence in the market. It is a snapshot of open roles on 2026-09-09, not a trend.