Account Executive - Splunk

Influences and drives strategic decisions within Splunk customer’s buying center by leveraging SaaS and cloud expertise with cybersecurity and observability competitor and market insights. Serves as the Account Orchestrator, aligning and integrating Splunk products, services, and solutions with customers’ strategic goals and needs, driving incremental revenue growth and recurring revenue. Maintains a comprehensive understanding of Splunk’s products, services, and solutions. Liaises with other portfolio sellers to ensure adherence and alignment to GTM processes, tools, and methodologies. Owns the legal goal, creates and manages quality pipeline, develops business, negotiates, and closes the deal. Builds the sales funnel through opportunity prospecting, develops and owns opportunities through to sales completion to achieve revenue goals. Analyses data and creates forecasts to set weekly, monthly, and quarterly sales commitments. Conducts business and technical evaluations to ensure proposals meet customers’ business objectives. Identifies new land opportunities, develops proposals, and creates account plans. Closely monitors cybersecurity and observability trends, market dynamics, and competitive landscapes.

• Specialization and Focus - Specialist in Splunk solutions, services, and products
• Customer Engagement and Accountability - Primary influencer. Oversees overall customer strategy, value, and relationship. Develops deep understanding of customer business risk and opportunities to ensure value realization
• The Internal Sales Process - All deal stages. Spends most of the time between prospect/qualification and proposal of the deal
• Corporate Interlock - Low corporate interlock
• Typical Sales Cycle - Medium Sales complexity. Average length of deal is 3-6 months but can be as long as 12-18 months in more complex accounts/opportunities. Variable deal size, can be between $50K to $750K (over $1M for SP)
• Success Measures - Sustained Splunk portfolio growth, account growth, account retention, incremental annual contract value (IACV)

What You'll Do:

• Orchestrates multi-faceted, highly complex deal cycles, often involving multiple stakeholders with significant incremental revenue growth
• Typically prospects new deals with C-suite, buyers, executives at all levels
• Cultivates expert knowledge of the security, observability and cloud/SaaS market knowledge, advising customers on lifecycle adoption and alignment with customer strategic initiatives
• Anticipates evolving customer needs, leveraging specialized knowledge of customer business models, industry trends, and value drivers
• Applies competitor and customer insights to build effective account strategy and relationship map
• Identifies and interprets shifts in the security and observability competitive landscape (including competitor insights) to provide strategic recommendations to internal and external stakeholders
• Leads executive-level engagements by championing innovative, customer-first strategies that drive business transformation and long-term value realization
• Expertly navigates commercial, legal, and technical requirements and risks to realize business value
• Leads negotiations with a consultative approach by balancing competitive pricing, service levels, and contractual commitments to secure customer-first agreements
• Reviews, prioritizes, and aligns customer needs and Splunk portfolio strategy to drive significant incremental annual contract value
• Leads Splunk account planning and leverages innovative channels to identify new consumption options within Splunk while mitigating risk
• Demonstrates deep technical comprehension of technical solutions and their long-term value/ROI in customer context
• Integrates CRM data with business intelligence tools to develop scalable operational frameworks for sales process optimization and tool utilization
• Partners with other account executive resources to provide insights to Rev Ops, finance, legal, and procurement teams for cross-functional workflow enhancement
• Champions GTM-wide collaboration that influences Splunk and customer organizations

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of enterprise account sales experience.

• Proven track record of engaging and negotiating directly with CxO-level management.

• Native-level proficiency in Japanese.

• Ability to proactively drive initiatives and manage tasks effectively

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience selling to clients within the financial industry.

• Strong understanding of SaaS and cloud business models.

• Solid grasp of the latest technology trends in security and observability.

• Business-level proficiency in English communication.

• Exceptional communication skills, capable of engaging diverse customer segments.

• Demonstrated ability to solve complex business challenges for clients.

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.