Some people assume that a great SMB closer just needs a longer runway to become a great enterprise AE. Sure, it's a bigger territory, longer sales cycle but the same instincts. In reality, enterprise selling is a different skill completely. The job stops being about demoing and closing as quickly as possible and starts being about holding a long, political process together without dropping a thread, and staying curious enough about the buyer that you never have to fake the pitch.
Good enterprise AEs don't spray outreach across a whole org chart. They are more targeted. Ideally they're going after the person who can release budget, as well as someone a level below that person and working both angles at once. This could look like a C-level person and a VP or Manager. The outreach message is just 2-3 sentences long (executives won't read anything longer) and focuses entirely on what the executive personally gets by bringing something new in. Bringing in a new tool is risky and busy people don't take that risk for a feature list. If an AE can't say in two sentences what an executive wins by saying yes, they haven't done the work yet.
A strong AE will spend the first call listening and asking a lot of questions instead of going straight to a demo or a pitch deck. They ask what's changing at the company, what needs to be different a year from now, and then let the buyer talk. Most of what a good AE learns about a deal comes from this one conversation, because (ideally) it's the only point in the whole relationship where the buyer doesn't feel like they're being sold to yet. Once it starts to feel like a process, people get careful about what they say.
The AEs who are still leaning on a script at this point, or running through BANT in order, are the ones commoditizing themselves out of the gate. Buyers can feel a script. But when an AE is curious about the actual state of a business, it's hard to sound fake.
A good enterprise AE never demos the whole product. They show the narrow slice that maps exactly to what they heard on that first call, because showing everything invites the room to start pricing out the features they'll never use. Before the big group demo happens, they'll have already had shorter conversations with whoever's championing the deal internally, asking what should get shown and who else needs to be in the room. By the time the real demo happens, the buyer's team already helped build it.
Good AEs keep pilots small and tightly scoped, usually just a few actual users, and never the executive sponsor who won't be logging in every day anyways. They define what success looks like together with the buyer instead of letting people wander through the product with no clear tasks. And before the pilot even starts, the AE has already been thinking about signature timelines so the deal doesn't stall.
Good enterprise AEs ask more than they tell, and they're comfortable saying "I don't know, let me find out" instead of bluffing an answer. When a buyer asks if they've dealt with something like this before, they don't reach for a vague answer. They tell a specific story, have a back and forth, which earns a buyer's trust. Vague confidence feels salesy, but a specific, (even if imperfect) story feels real.
Good enterprise AEs know their pipeline math cold. They know how many qualified opportunities need to be in play, at what close rate, to hit this quarter's quota, and they work backward from that number every week instead of hoping enough deals land in time. Part of that is knowing what a healthy close rate actually looks like, usually somewhere in the 20-35% range of qualified opportunities. They also think about expansion from day one. A deal that starts at $100K and doesn't grow toward $300K or more within a year or two is really just a one-time high-priced sale. And they don't go cold on opportunities that didn't close. Some lost enterprise deals will come back around within a year or two once budget or timing shifts, so a strong AE knows which accounts to not write off.
A strong enterprise AE will be a strong project manager. Once a deal gets real, they're the one holding the timeline together, sending the champion regular updates on where things stand and what's blocking progress instead of letting momentum stall. Before a pilot even starts, they've already worked backward from a signature date, so there's a plan and timeline they're working against. They own this and keep things moving.
That discipline carries into the paperwork too. A good AE will understand how to handle procurement, not let things stall during the redline process and knows who the real signatory is before anything gets routed. None of that is glamorous.
They also don't wait for silence to become a problem. Right after a demo, a good AE is already checking in with their champion for a raw read on how it landed, because there's almost always someone internally who could quietly kill the deal, and the earlier that person surfaces, the easier they are to deal with. The same instinct applies if a deal goes quiet for a couple of weeks. Instead of waiting it out, they'll reach back in and offer to get in front of whoever's holding things up. This can feel slow, but a good AE stays deliberate and overcommunicative through the process anyway.
Enterprise deals are slow, political, and expensive to get wrong. A good AE is the difference between a deal that closes on time and one that quietly stalls out for a quarter because nobody was properly driving it. None of what actually makes someone good at this is loud. It's quiet and disciplined, spread out over months.
This is what the job actually looks like day to day, past the resume and the pitch. If you're building out your GTM team and want to talk through what this looks like for your specific hire, that's the exact conversation I have with founders every week. Let's talk.
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