One of seven role studies in the ATS Resume Keyword Study — 3,518 job postings from 81 companies, counted term by term.
Most sales resume advice is about tools. The postings are mostly about method.
Individual-contributor closers at 52 companies · collected 2026-09-09 · sales managers and sales engineers left out · Updated September 28, 2026 · By ZoeVera
One posting can ask for a framework, a segment or a tool this aggregate barely shows. Paste it with your resume and see which of its terms you never use.
Check My Resume →Or read the marketing postings, where pipeline is also the metric
Every qualification and selling framework we counted, and how each compares with the one named most.
| Methodology | Postings | Share | Against MEDDIC |
|---|---|---|---|
| MEDDIC / MEDDPICC | 311 | 33.8% ±3.1 | — |
| Force Management / Command of the Message | 137 | 14.9% ±2.3 | 1 for every 2 |
| value selling | 119 | 12.9% ±2.2 | 1 for every 3 |
| Challenger | 92 | 10% ±1.9 | 1 for every 3 |
| SPIN | 52 | 5.6% ±1.5 | 1 for every 6 |
| solution selling | 30 | 3.3% ±1.2 | 1 for every 10 |
| Sandler | 19 | 2.1% ±0.9 | 1 for every 16 |
| BANT | 0 | 0% ±0 | never named |
A methodology is named more often than the CRM. MEDDIC / MEDDPICC appears in 33.8% of these postings, against 29.2% for Salesforce. If you carry one framework on your resume, this is the one the corpus points to — and if you have run a MEDDPICC deal review, say so in those words.
BANT appears in 0 of the 921 postings. The qualification framework taught in most entry-level sales training is named by nobody here. Sandler, another training-course staple, is in 19.
The methodology table above is real for this corpus and narrow beyond it. These are 52 technology companies hiring through one ATS vendor, overwhelmingly SaaS — 49.6% of the postings say so outright. MEDDIC was built for exactly that kind of complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise software sale, so its dominance here is close to a definition.
Sales outside technology is absent from this sample. Medical device, industrial, financial services, advertising, real estate and channel-led distribution sales are not represented, and those are the markets where BANT, Sandler and consultative frameworks remain in active use. A reading of “BANT is dead” taken from this page into a non-tech interview would be wrong and would sound it.
The safe use of this data is the narrow one: if you are applying to SaaS account executive roles, MEDDIC is the framework those postings name most.
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%.
Not the rest of the sales stack. 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%.
Quota, more than attainment. Quota is named in 47.6%, quota attainment in 8.5%, President's Club in 1.6%, and win rate in 1 posting. The postings state the target; they rarely ask how you did against it. Your resume should answer that anyway, with the number.
Share of the 921 postings mentioning each term, with its 95% interval.
01enterprise
70.9% ±2.9
02pipeline
65.5% ±3.1
03prospecting
53.9% ±3.2
04SaaS
49.6% ±3.2
05quota
47.6% ±3.2
06forecasting
44.2% ±3.2
07negotiation
44% ±3.2
08C-level / executive engagement
37% ±3.1
09MEDDIC / MEDDPICC
33.8% ±3.1
10outbound
29.5% ±2.9
11Salesforce
29.2% ±2.9
12closing deals
23% ±2.7
13channel / partner
21.5% ±2.7
14net new logos
17.6% ±2.5
15CRM (generic)
15% ±2.3
16Force Management / Command of the Message
14.9% ±2.3
17territory planning
14.7% ±2.3
18mid-market
13.5% ±2.2
19value selling
12.9% ±2.2
20multithreading
11.9% ±2.1
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| prospecting | 496 | 53.9% | ±3.2 |
| negotiation | 405 | 44% | ±3.2 |
| C-level / executive engagement | 341 | 37% | ±3.1 |
| outbound | 272 | 29.5% | ±2.9 |
| closing deals | 212 | 23% | ±2.7 |
| channel / partner | 198 | 21.5% | ±2.7 |
| territory planning | 135 | 14.7% | ±2.3 |
| multithreading | 110 | 11.9% | ±2.1 |
| upsell / cross-sell | 109 | 11.8% | ±2.1 |
| cold calling / outbound | 46 | 5% | ±1.4 |
| land and expand | 46 | 5% | ±1.4 |
| discovery calls | 19 | 2.1% | ±0.9 |
| RFP | 14 | 1.5% | ±0.8 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| pipeline | 603 | 65.5% | ±3.1 |
| quota | 438 | 47.6% | ±3.2 |
| forecasting | 407 | 44.2% | ±3.2 |
| net new logos | 162 | 17.6% | ±2.5 |
| quota attainment | 78 | 8.5% | ±1.8 |
| bookings | 73 | 7.9% | ±1.7 |
| ARR | 39 | 4.2% | ±1.3 |
| ACV | 29 | 3.1% | ±1.1 |
| President's Club | 15 | 1.6% | ±0.8 |
| win rate | 1 | 0.1% | ±0.2 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| MEDDIC / MEDDPICC | 311 | 33.8% | ±3.1 |
| Force Management / Command of the Message | 137 | 14.9% | ±2.3 |
| value selling | 119 | 12.9% | ±2.2 |
| Challenger | 92 | 10% | ±1.9 |
| SPIN | 52 | 5.6% | ±1.5 |
| solution selling | 30 | 3.3% | ±1.2 |
| Sandler | 19 | 2.1% | ±0.9 |
| BANT | 0 | 0% | ±0 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | 269 | 29.2% | ±2.9 |
| CRM (generic) | 138 | 15% | ±2.3 |
| LinkedIn Sales Navigator | 43 | 4.7% | ±1.4 |
| Clari | 33 | 3.6% | ±1.2 |
| ZoomInfo | 32 | 3.5% | ±1.2 |
| Gong | 13 | 1.4% | ±0.8 |
| Salesloft | 8 | 0.9% | ±0.6 |
| HubSpot | 7 | 0.8% | ±0.6 |
| Term | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| enterprise | 653 | 70.9% | ±2.9 |
| SaaS | 457 | 49.6% | ±3.2 |
| mid-market | 124 | 13.5% | ±2.2 |
| SMB | 44 | 4.8% | ±1.4 |
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.
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 public sector row was published until September 2026 and has been withdrawn: its pattern counted the word “federal”, which in most postings sits in the equal-opportunity line (“protected by federal, state or local laws”), not in a description of the buyer. Rechecked on a later sample, about two in three of its matches were that line. 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 43-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.
adyen · affirm · airtable · anaplan · anthropic · applovin · asana · billtrust · braze · brex · carta · checkr · cloudflare · databricks · datadog · dropbox · elastic · faire · figma · fivetran · flexport · gitlab · gusto · gympass · hellofresh · impact · intercom · justworks · klaviyo · lattice · launchdarkly · lyft · melio · mixpanel · mongodb · newrelic · okta · pagerduty · pendo · postman · pushpay · samsara · smartsheet · stripe · tide · tripadvisor · twilio · udemy · vercel · verkada · webflow · zscaler
All seven studies use the same collection and counting method, so their figures can be read side by side.
The table as it stands: 921 postings from 52 companies, 43 terms, method v1.0.
Every withdrawn row and corrected figure across the studies is listed in the corrections log. The analysis script that built this table and the collector it reads from are published as plain text.
Quote any figure on this page. If you do, link back to it so readers can see the sample and its limits rather than the number alone.
General citation
ZoeVera, “What 921 Account Executive Job Postings Actually Ask For” (method v1.0, data collected 2026-09-09). https://www.zoevera.com/resume/sales-account-executive-job-description-keywords
APA style
ZoeVera. (2026-09-09). What 921 Account Executive Job Postings Actually Ask For. https://www.zoevera.com/resume/sales-account-executive-job-description-keywords
MLA style
ZoeVera. “What 921 Account Executive Job Postings Actually Ask For.” ZoeVera, 2026-09-09, www.zoevera.com/resume/sales-account-executive-job-description-keywords.
Chicago style
ZoeVera. “What 921 Account Executive Job Postings Actually Ask For.” ZoeVera, 2026-09-09. https://www.zoevera.com/resume/sales-account-executive-job-description-keywords.
One posting can ask for a framework, a segment or a tool this aggregate barely shows. Paste it with your resume and see which of its terms you never use.
Check My Resume →Or read the marketing postings, where pipeline is also the metric
The rest of the research
This role is one corpus of seven. The study hub holds the method, every role's figures, the limits of each sample, and the full dataset as a CSV.