SaaS Sales Executive job description example

Many clients of us (fast growing tech companies) are looking for SaaS sales executives.

Sales executives, also called account executives or sales managers, in tech companies have different requirements than in other companies like established traditional companies. Tech sales execs usually sell either an unproven product, in an unproven market or both at the same time. There are also big differences in business model and selling arguments of for example a SaaS compared to a eg one off services or commodities.

Three basic but key questions to ask yourself when making the sales exec job description:
❓ What is it they will be selling? =product
❓ Where will they be selling it? =market
❓ Who will they be selling it to? =buyer

Must haves in the job description:
👉 Job title: key words of the role (eg sales executive), region (eg EMEA), and additional info like ‘SaaS’ or ‘Lead’
👉 Location: country, region (including travel?) and indicate if (partly) remote
👉 About: your company’s mission, team and culture
👉 Responsibilities: farming vs hunting, lead development vs deal closing activities, sales management, sales enablement
👉 Requirements: experience years, tech sales skills, market experience, languages, network
👉 Benefits: the pay range (in a growing number of European countries this is now a legal requirement, see below), incentive scheme, stock options, goodies, company fun
👉 Learn more: include links to company culture page, core values,  the mission, the team, overview with customers

Also take into account possible synonyms of the job title for which candidates might be searching online: Account Executive, Sales Manager and Sales Representative (although less used in the tech world).

What changed in 2026: you have to name the money

The biggest change to job descriptions in years is not a matter of style, it is that you are now obliged to put a number in them. Article 5 of the EU Pay Transparency Directive gives applicants the right to receive "the initial pay or its range, based on objective, gender-neutral criteria, to be attributed for the position concerned", and it says that information must reach them "such as in a published job vacancy notice, prior to the job interview or otherwise" - Directive (EU) 2023/970. The same article bans two other habits outright: asking applicants about their pay history, and writing job titles or adverts that are not gender-neutral.

The catch is that enforcement is fragmented, and anyone telling you the rules snapped into place everywhere on one date is wrong. The transposition deadline was 7 June 2026, and on the day itself only four member states had full implementing law in force: Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta - Remote Work Europe's transposition tracker. Poland moved early on the recruitment rules specifically, which have applied there since 24 December 2025 - Littler. The Netherlands, where the example below is based, missed the deadline and pushed implementation to 1 January 2027, a delay the European Commission explicitly refused to bless - Loyens & Loeff.

So what does that mean for the job description you are writing today? The Directive has been Union law since 8 June 2026, but it is not directly enforceable against a private employer until national law is in force, which is why a Dutch startup is not technically in breach yet and a Polish one is. That distinction is close to useless in practice for an EMEA req. You are advertising one role into a dozen jurisdictions at once, some of which already require the range and all of which will inside a year or two, and you cannot sensibly publish a band for your Warsaw applicants and hide it from your Amsterdam ones. Write to the strictest rule and be done with it:

👉 Pay: state the initial pay or the range, built on objective, gender-neutral criteria, in the advert itself
👉 Pay history: do not ask what they earn now, and take the question out of your screening script and your application form
👉 Language: keep the job title and the copy gender-neutral, and run the process in a non-discriminatory way

That third point is the one that quietly breaks templates like this one. An earlier version of the example below asked for someone who was "a European, African or Middle Eastern native". That is a nationality test wearing a market-knowledge costume, and it is exactly what Article 5(3) means by a recruitment process that undermines the right to equal pay. The same trap catches "native English speaker" (say fluent instead), "recent graduate" (an age proxy) and "salesman". What you actually want is legitimate and easy to write down: the right to work somewhere you can employ them, the languages the job genuinely needs, and real experience of the markets they will sell into. Ask for that instead, because it is both lawful and a better filter.

Setting a pay band you can defend

"Objective, gender-neutral criteria" is harder for a sales role than for any other job in your company, because the number a candidate cares about is mostly not the one you control. Publish the base alone and you look stingy. Publish only the OTE and you look like you are hiding the split. Publish both, plus the quota, and you have told a good rep everything they need to judge the offer in about four seconds, which is the entire point.

Anchor the band to real data rather than to what your last hire negotiated, because "what the last person accepted" is precisely the criterion the Directive is designed to break. For the Netherlands, RepVue puts the median account executive at roughly €83,000 base and €153,000 OTE, with mid-market AEs nearer €65,000 base and €118,000 OTE. On structure, the Bridge Group's SaaS AE benchmarks land close to an even split (53% base, 47% variable), a median commission of 11.5% of ACV at full attainment with most plans between 11% and 14%, and a median quota set at 4.2x OTE - Everstage's summary of the Bridge Group data.

That last ratio is the honesty check, and experienced reps apply it to your advert whether you publish it or not. A €120,000 OTE against a €500,000 quota is a normal, believable plan. The same €120,000 OTE against a €1,000,000 quota is a marketing number: at 8x, nobody in the team is hitting it, and the good candidates will work that out during the first call and price it in or walk. If your quota-to-OTE ratio is embarrassing to publish, the problem is the comp plan, not the transparency rule.

Below is the full sales executive job description example 👇

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SaaS Sales Executive | EMEA region | New business

Amsterdam / Remote
€55,000 - €65,000 base | €110,000 - €130,000 OTE (50/50 split)

About

With Hooli we are on a mission to make data processing as easy as making coffee. We have a strong brand presence in 8 international markets worldwide and we won the award for #1 software service provider in emerging markets. Our team is a versatile young bunch of people with the brightest minds we could find, from machine learning engineers to sales managers, Japanese to American, Introvert to Extravert.

Your responsibilities

We are looking for a SaaS sales executive (also known as account executive, sales manager, sales representative) to close new business deals in the EMEA region. EMEA is a relatively unexplored region for us and we have big ambitions for this market. You will sell our SaaS solution which enables customers to manage data that flows through their teams and organization. You will join a commercial team of currently 5, with 2 inside sales representatives, 2 sales executives including yourself and 1 sales team lead. The team is expanding rapidly.

Responsibilities include:

• Being the deal owner for all your new deals in the funnel
• Closing deals (80% of your time) but also some lead development and coaching of inside sales reps (20% of your time)
• Transferring deals to account management after closing
• Setting up new sales approaches like data driven sales and partnering
• Continuously providing feedback from prospects to the marketing and product teams

Requirements

• You are a creative go-getter, you love talking with customers and you quickly recognize client needs
• 2 - 4 years of experience in SaaS sales, preferably enterprise software
• Experience or strong interest in our buyers: team and department leaders of large global corporations
• Fluent in English (Spanish or French is a big plus)
• You have the right to work in the Netherlands or are based in a country where we can employ you
• You know the EMEA markets you will sell into: their buying culture, procurement habits and data regulations

Benefits

• Base of €55,000 - €65,000 depending on experience, on a 50/50 split, so €110,000 - €130,000 OTE at 100% of quota
• Quota of €500,000 in new ACV (about 4.2x OTE, the SaaS median), paid at 12% of ACV with accelerators above 100%
• Stock options
• Laptop, phone and all the hardware and software you need to do your work
• Yearly company trip to the most amazing places across the globe
• Quarterly local team activities (parties, fun activities, team building)

Learn more

Link each of these out to a real page. This is the cheapest part of the advert to get right and the part most companies leave empty.

• Company culture and core values
• The mission
• The team
• The product
• Our clients

The job description is the easy part

A job description is a filter, not a magnet. It does a good job of telling the right person they should apply and the wrong person they should not, and it does nothing at all to put itself in front of either of them. That gap matters more for SaaS sales executives than for almost any other role you will hire, because a good AE is by definition employed, hitting quota, and being courted by three other companies this quarter. They are not scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night. The people who answer your advert are, disproportionately, the people who are available, and availability is not a strong signal in sales.

Which means the advert's real job is to be the thing you point at once a conversation is already happening, in a message you sent first. Write it so it survives that: pay band visible, quota honest, the product explained in a sentence a stranger understands. Then go and find people, which is a separate discipline with its own tooling, from LinkedIn Recruiter and outbound sequencing through to AI sourcing platforms like HeroHunt.ai that shortlist and contact candidates automatically. We wrote up the approaches that actually work for this role in SaaS sales recruitment and the tools in methods and tools.

Written by Yuma Heymans (@yumahey), who built HeroHunt.ai and has spent the last few years watching fast growing tech companies try to hire the sales people who will sell their unproven product into an unproven market.

The pay transparency rules described here reflect the position in July 2026, when most member states had not yet transposed the Directive. National implementation is moving quickly and unevenly, so check the current rule in the country you are hiring into before you publish.