Sales & Customer Success

Account Manager Job Description

An Account Manager protects and grows a portfolio of customer relationships by understanding priorities, coordinating delivery, resolving commercial risks, and finding justified expansion opportunities.

Define the account segment, revenue basis, service hand-offs, renewal ownership, and growth target before publishing the role.

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Replace bracketed details, remove anything that is not genuinely required, and obtain the appropriate internal approval before advertising.

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Account Manager

Location: [Location or working arrangement]
Employment type: [Full-time or part-time]
Reports to: [Head of Account Management or Commercial Director]

About the role

[Company name] is seeking an Account Manager to own relationships across [portfolio]. You will understand customer priorities, coordinate commitments across internal teams, manage commercial reviews and risk, and develop expansion where it creates genuine customer value.

What you will be responsible for

Build account plans covering stakeholders, objectives, services, commitments, revenue, risk, and growth hypotheses.
Run purposeful reviews that connect delivery evidence with the customer’s priorities and agreed next actions.
Coordinate service issues and escalations with clear ownership while avoiding promises outside approved authority.
Manage assigned renewal, pricing, contract, forecast, and expansion activity with finance and commercial colleagues.
Develop relationships beyond a single contact and maintain accurate account, decision, and opportunity records.
Represent customer evidence internally and explain product, delivery, or commercial constraints honestly in return.

What success looks like

Customers understand delivered value, open commitments, and who owns the next action.
Renewal and revenue risks become visible early enough for a realistic response.
Expansion opportunities are supported by customer need and stakeholder access, not hopeful forecast labels.

Essential qualifications

Experience managing business customers, client accounts, services, or commercially important relationships.
Strong stakeholder mapping, meeting, written communication, negotiation, and follow-through skills.
Ability to understand contracts, revenue, service evidence, and commercial risk within delegated authority.
Confidence coordinating delivery and escalation across teams without owning every operational task.
Reliable CRM, forecast, account-plan, and commitment-record discipline.

Preferred qualifications

Experience with [customer segment, sector, service model, contract type, or product category].
Ownership of renewals, upsell, cross-sell, pricing, or margin improvement.
Experience recovering an at-risk relationship or expanding a multi-stakeholder account.

Tools and working knowledge

CRM and account-planning system
Contract, billing, revenue, and service-reporting tools
Presentation, meeting, customer-feedback, and collaboration platforms

Package: [Add base range, currency, variable-pay basis, portfolio or quota rules, payment timing, travel expectations, and benefits.]

[Company name] will discuss reasonable adjustments for the hiring process, customer meetings, travel, communication, and workplace arrangements.

How to apply

Apply through [method] with an example of how you retained, recovered, or responsibly grew a customer relationship.

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Account Manager

Location: [Location or working arrangement]

Employment type: [Full-time or part-time]

Reports to: [Head of Account Management or Commercial Director]

About the role
[Company name] is seeking an Account Manager to own relationships across [portfolio]. You will understand customer priorities, coordinate commitments across internal teams, manage commercial reviews and risk, and develop expansion where it creates genuine customer value.

What you will be responsible for
- Build account plans covering stakeholders, objectives, services, commitments, revenue, risk, and growth hypotheses.
- Run purposeful reviews that connect delivery evidence with the customer’s priorities and agreed next actions.
- Coordinate service issues and escalations with clear ownership while avoiding promises outside approved authority.
- Manage assigned renewal, pricing, contract, forecast, and expansion activity with finance and commercial colleagues.
- Develop relationships beyond a single contact and maintain accurate account, decision, and opportunity records.
- Represent customer evidence internally and explain product, delivery, or commercial constraints honestly in return.

What success looks like
- Customers understand delivered value, open commitments, and who owns the next action.
- Renewal and revenue risks become visible early enough for a realistic response.
- Expansion opportunities are supported by customer need and stakeholder access, not hopeful forecast labels.

Essential qualifications
- Experience managing business customers, client accounts, services, or commercially important relationships.
- Strong stakeholder mapping, meeting, written communication, negotiation, and follow-through skills.
- Ability to understand contracts, revenue, service evidence, and commercial risk within delegated authority.
- Confidence coordinating delivery and escalation across teams without owning every operational task.
- Reliable CRM, forecast, account-plan, and commitment-record discipline.

Preferred qualifications
- Experience with [customer segment, sector, service model, contract type, or product category].
- Ownership of renewals, upsell, cross-sell, pricing, or margin improvement.
- Experience recovering an at-risk relationship or expanding a multi-stakeholder account.

Tools and working knowledge
- CRM and account-planning system
- Contract, billing, revenue, and service-reporting tools
- Presentation, meeting, customer-feedback, and collaboration platforms

Package: [Add base range, currency, variable-pay basis, portfolio or quota rules, payment timing, travel expectations, and benefits.]

[Company name] will discuss reasonable adjustments for the hiring process, customer meetings, travel, communication, and workplace arrangements.

How to apply
Apply through [method] with an example of how you retained, recovered, or responsibly grew a customer relationship.

Performance expectations

What good performance looks like

Use these outcomes to replace vague activity lists with the evidence the hiring manager expects to see after the person joins.

Account plans and reviews lead to named customer and internal actions rather than presentation-only activity.

Retention, renewal, revenue, margin, satisfaction, and risk are interpreted together for the portfolio model.

Customer commitments are recorded accurately and escalated when delivery or commercial reality changes.

Hiring-manager intake

Questions to settle before advertising

Record specific answers so sourcing, screening, and interview decisions use the same definition of the role.

1
How many accounts, how much revenue, and which customer segments will this person own?
2
Who owns onboarding, adoption, support, renewal, expansion, pricing, collections, and service delivery?
3
Which decisions can the Account Manager make without commercial or operational approval?
4
How are retention, growth, margin, customer health, and relationship quality measured?
5
What travel, on-site presence, time-zone coverage, or out-of-hours escalation is genuinely required?

Evaluation criteria

Evidence to use in a Account Manager scorecard

Agree the criteria before interviews begin, then score examples against the same evidence standard.

Criterion

Useful evidence

Concern to explore

Account judgement

Balances customer priorities, delivery evidence, commercial value, stakeholder influence, and risk.

Equates a friendly primary contact with a healthy, defensible account.

Commercial ownership

Maintains a supportable forecast and understands the assumptions behind retention, margin, and expansion.

Adds optimistic upsell values without customer evidence or decision access.

Cross-functional leadership

Clarifies commitments, owners, dates, constraints, and escalation without blaming internal teams.

Promises outcomes before confirming feasibility or forwards customer problems without context.

Structured interview

Account Manager interview questions and strong signals

Ask the same core questions in the same order, then use follow-ups to understand the candidate’s individual contribution.

Tell me about an account that looked healthy but contained an unseen renewal risk.

Strong answer signal

Shows how the risk was found, validated, escalated, addressed, and reflected in the forecast.

How do you respond when a customer requests something your organisation cannot deliver?

Strong answer signal

Clarifies the need, avoids false commitment, explores approved alternatives, and preserves a useful relationship.

Describe an expansion you decided not to pursue.

Strong answer signal

Recognises poor fit, readiness, delivery capacity, economics, trust, or long-term customer-value concerns.

Related titles

Check the scope behind the title

Client Relationship Manager — may emphasise service coordination and retention over direct revenue growth.

Strategic Account Manager — usually owns fewer, larger, more complex customer relationships.

Customer Success Manager — commonly focuses on adoption and outcomes, although renewal and expansion ownership varies.

Common hiring mistakes

Problems to remove before publishing

Combining new-logo sales, onboarding, support, delivery, collections, renewal, and growth without clear priorities.

Using customer satisfaction as the only measure when contract, usage, stakeholder, and commercial evidence matters.

Leaving portfolio size, travel, inherited risks, and variable-pay calculation undisclosed.

Continue the hiring workflow

Related roles and recruiter resources

Related job descriptions

Account Executive Customer Success Manager Sales Manager Sales Operations Manager

Helpful recruiter resources

Recruitment Account Management Software

Connect client relationships, vacancies, deals, and follow-up records.

Client Feedback Management Workflow

Capture customer decisions, concerns, owners, and next actions.

Recruitment Fee Calculator

Check fee assumptions when an account opens a new hiring requirement.

Client Feedback Tracking

Improve how recruitment teams collect and act on client feedback.

Source and review notes

How this template was prepared

Language: International English
Prepared by: ATZ CRM Editorial Team
Review: ATZ CRM Recruitment Editorial Review
Last reviewed: 2026-08-05

O*NET: Sales Representatives of Services

Reference for occupation tasks, knowledge, skills, abilities, and work activities.

ESCO: occupations and skills

Reference for internationally recognised occupation and skills terminology.

Qualifications, compensation, licences, working conditions, and equal-opportunity wording must be checked for the role and location before use.

Recruiter questions

Account Manager job description FAQs

What should an Account Manager job description include?

State the portfolio, customer segment, revenue basis, renewal and growth ownership, service hand-offs, decision authority, travel, systems, and balanced performance measures.

What is the difference between an Account Manager and an Account Executive?

Account Executives usually win new business and close initial deals. Account Managers commonly retain and grow existing customers, though some roles combine both.

Should Account Managers own renewals?

Often, but not always. Explain who negotiates, approves pricing, prepares contracts, forecasts, and carries the renewal target so candidates understand the commercial remit.