Role · Sales / Commercial
Account Manager
Owns the customer relationship and the commercial decisions inside it — what to bid, what to charge, what to concede and what to walk away from. Judged on revenue, but the margin is where the job is actually done.
Also called: Sales manager · Business development manager · Key account manager · Commercial manager · Field sales
- Sits in
- Sales / Commercial
- Reports to
- Sales director or commercial director
- Owns these steps
- Reviewing and issuing the quotation, Negotiation and revised offers
- Measured on
- Quote Conversion Rate, Gross Margin
What the job actually is
The account manager owns a set of customers and everything commercial that happens with them: which enquiries are worth chasing, what price goes on the quotation, what gets conceded in negotiation, and when to decline work that the company would be worse off having.
The role is usually measured on revenue, which is the wrong half of the story. Revenue can be bought with discount, and often is. The account manager's real output is the margin the company keeps and whether the customer is still there in three years — neither of which appears on a monthly sales report.
In smaller companies this is the same person as the commercial manager and sometimes as the managing director. In larger ones it splits into new business, key accounts and commercial, and the negotiation authority sits at a different level from the relationship.
Responsibilities
- Own a portfolio of accounts and the revenue and margin from them.
- Make bid/no-bid decisions on incoming enquiries, and be able to justify the no-bids.
- Set prices and approve quotations within a delegated authority.
- Review quotations before issue for the delivery promise and the commercial terms, not the arithmetic.
- Lead negotiations, and get concessions approved before agreeing them rather than after.
- Ensure everything agreed verbally reaches a revised quotation and then the order.
- Forecast the pipeline honestly enough that operations can plan capacity against it.
- Record why orders are won and lost.
- Handle escalations, complaints and the commercial side of a quality failure.
- Support credit control on overdue accounts without becoming the collector.
A typical day
A realistic one, including the interruptions.
- 07:30Read the overnight portal notifications; a key account has issued an RFQ with a nine-day response window.
- 08:30Quote review with the estimator on four jobs. Approve three; hold one because the lead time has not been confirmed by planning.
- 09:30Prepare for a price challenge call — establish the floor, the contribution at three price points, and what each concession would cost.
- 10:30Customer call. They want 12% off. Offer a larger batch at a lower unit price instead, and a volume commitment as the alternative.
- 11:30Write up the outcome, ask the coordinator to issue a revised quotation with the conditions attached.
- 12:30Drive to a customer site for an afternoon review meeting.
- 14:00Quarterly review at the customer: performance on delivery, two open quality issues, next year's programme volumes.
- 16:00Debrief the delivery complaint with operations on the phone from the car park. Agree what will be said and by when.
- 17:00Update the forecast: one order pulled forward, one slipped a quarter, one lost on lead time — recorded as such.
Documents they handle
- Request for Quotation (RFQ)The buyer's request for a price against a defined specification and quantity. Every field on it is an instruction to the estimator, and the ones that are missing cost the most.
- QuotationThe supplier's formal offer: this specification, this price, these terms, valid until this date. In most cases it becomes a contract the moment the customer accepts it, without anyone signing anything.
- Purchase Order (PO)The buyer's instruction to supply. It usually forms the contract, it usually attaches the buyer's own terms, and its number is the key that every later document — including your invoice — has to match.
- Credit NoteA document reducing or cancelling an invoice that has already been issued. It is the only correct way to fix an invoice — and its reason code is the most honest report a company has about where the quote-to-cash chain is failing.
Systems they work in
- CRM — pipeline, quotes, activity, win/loss reasons
- ERP for pricing history, order book and account performance
- Customer procurement portals
- Forecasting and reporting tools
Skills that matter
- Commercial judgement: knowing what an order is worth beyond its value
- Negotiation, specifically trading rather than conceding
- Enough technical understanding to be credible with the customer's engineers
- Reading a contract well enough to spot the clause that matters
- Honest forecasting, including forecasting losses
- Saying no to work the company should not take, and explaining why internally
- Managing the internal relationship with operations, whose capacity every promise spends
Who they work with
- Estimator / Cost Engineer — Cost floors, requotes, and which assumptions the customer must be told about.
- Inside Sales / Sales Coordinator — Enquiry priorities, quote follow-ups, and getting concessions onto revised quotations.
- Production Planner — Whether a lead time can be promised, and what an expedite would displace.
- Credit Controller — Payment behaviour, credit limits, and opening doors on overdue accounts.
- Customer purchasing — Price, terms, volumes and everything contractual.
- Customer engineering — Specifications, revisions and future programmes — usually the more valuable relationship of the two.
- Operations management — Escalations, capacity, and the consequences of what has been promised.
Where the job leads
- Account manager → Key account manager → Sales manager → Sales or commercial director
- Account manager → Commercial manager, taking on estimating and contracts
- Account manager → General management, particularly in owner-managed businesses
- Account manager → Business development, for those who prefer opening to farming
- Inside sales or estimating → Account manager, the two most common routes in
Questions this role gets asked at interview
Useful from either side of the table.
- 01A customer says a competitor is 12% cheaper. Walk me through your response.
- 02How do you decide whether to bid on an enquiry?
- 03What would you trade instead of price, and how would you value each one?
- 04How much does moving a customer from 30-day to 60-day payment terms cost, and how would you work it out?
- 05Describe a time you walked away from an order. What made it the right call?
- 06How do you forecast, and how do you handle a quarter where the forecast is going to be missed?
- 07A delivery has failed and the customer is angry. What do you do first?
- 08How do you keep operations on side when you have promised a short lead time?
Common questions
›What is the difference between an account manager and a business development manager?
Account management looks after existing customers and grows them; business development opens new ones. The skills diverge more than people expect — retention rewards patience, consistency and internal influence, while new business rewards volume of contact and tolerance of rejection. Companies that ask one person to do both usually get whichever the individual prefers.
›Should an account manager be measured on revenue or margin?
Both, weighted towards margin. Revenue alone is buyable with discount, and a target set on revenue reliably produces discounting in the last week of the quarter. Margin alone discourages the low-margin work that fills otherwise idle capacity. The pair, read together with win/loss reasons, is the honest version.
›How much technical knowledge does the role need?
Enough to hold a credible conversation with the customer's engineer and to know when a request is unreasonable. Not enough to price the job — that is the estimator's role, and account managers who cost their own work reliably discover their costs become whatever their price needs to be.
›Who should approve a price below the margin floor?
Someone other than the person who wants the order, before it is offered rather than after. Retrospective approval is not approval; it is a manager being informed of what has already been promised. The threshold matters less than the timing.
›Should the account manager chase overdue payments?
They should support collections, not run them. The account manager can open a door credit control cannot, and often knows why a payment stopped. But putting the same person on both sides of the relationship means the debt conversation loses every time there is a live opportunity — which is always.
Tools this role uses
Built for exactly this job — downloadable, self-contained, and no account required.
- Sales Pipeline & Forecast TrackerFreeTrack every sales opportunity through its stages, weight the pipeline by probability to get a forecast, see what is slipping, and measure win rate by count and by value. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
- Lead Tracker & Conversion FunnelProTrack every lead from first contact to won or lost, see which sources actually convert, catch the leads going stale before they die quietly, and print a funnel report. Nothing is uploaded.
- Customer Segmentation AnalyserProRank customers by value rather than by revenue — ABC classification, contribution after the cost of serving each account, concentration risk, dormant revenue and payment behaviour, in one printable review. Nothing is uploaded.
- Gross Margin CalculatorFreeWork out true gross margin, markup and contribution per product or job — including the direct costs people forget. Runs entirely in your browser. No installation, no account, no upload.
Reviewed 2026-08-15. Job titles, reporting lines and scope vary widely between companies — this describes the work rather than any one organisation’s job description.