What B2B Sellers Are Asked to Do: Evidence from 120 Current Vacancies

The complete open archive - a visually reviewed PDF, the rights-reviewed 120-row dataset, coding summary, quality record, methods appendix and data dictionary - is preserved at Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22160966. The direct public PDF is available here.

MTF Institute Research Report — Draft v1
Evidence date: 29 August 2026
Study type: point-in-time, purposive vacancy analysis
Primary corpus: 120 public employer ATS vacancies
Course context: Professional Certificate in B2B Sales
Publication status: research draft; not published and not assigned a DOI

Abstract

This report examines what employers ask individual business-to-business sellers to do across 120 current public vacancies retrieved on 29 August 2026. The sample was purposefully constructed from employer-controlled applicant-tracking-system pages and current indexed extracts. It contains 32 Greenhouse records, 58 Lever records and 30 Ashby records, representing 87 publisher or employer labels. The role mix comprises 70 Account Executive positions, 32 Sales Development Representative positions, 12 Business Development Representative positions and six directly selling Business Development Manager positions. Retail-only, consumer-only, sales-operations-only, revenue-operations-only, marketing-only, customer-success-only, post-sales-only, pure people-management and non-selling executive roles were excluded.

Each vacancy was coded against 13 generic work requirements spanning account research, prospecting, qualification, discovery, value communication, proposals, objection handling, negotiation, closing, customer-record discipline, multi-stakeholder selling, handoff and measurable commercial outcomes. Counts are properties of this purposive coded corpus; they are not estimates of global labour-market prevalence and are not keyword frequencies. Account or market research, qualification, customer-record and pipeline discipline, and activity or commercial outcome management were coded in all 120 records. Discovery was coded in 88; value presentation, proposal or business-case work, negotiation, closing and multi-stakeholder selling in 76; objection handling in 70; prospecting in 50; and an Account Executive or post-sale handoff in 114.

Employer concentration is material. One B2B MarTech employer contributes 28 regional roles. Two sensitivity views therefore accompany the main results: excluding that employer leaves 92 vacancies from 86 employers, while limiting every employer to three records leaves 94 vacancies across all 87 employer labels. Both reduced views preserve the same end-to-end work sequence, although they change role-family proportions. The findings support an evidence-led, method-neutral curriculum organised around decisions and professional outputs from account selection through accountable handoff. They do not support promises about sales performance, employment, salary, promotion or course effectiveness.

Research purpose and reading rules

B2B sales is often described through slogans, isolated techniques or named systems. Vacancy evidence offers a different starting point: the work that employers currently attach to identifiable seller roles. This report uses that evidence to answer a practical curriculum question. If a new learner is expected to operate as an individual B2B seller, what recurring work must the learner be prepared to perform, what decisions connect that work, and what boundaries should prevent the seller from assuming authority that belongs to sales leadership, marketing, Revenue Operations, Customer Success, legal, security, finance or procurement?

The study is deliberately narrower than a comprehensive labour-market forecast. It does not estimate the number of B2B sales jobs, changes in employment, compensation levels, vacancy duration or hiring probability. It does not rank employers, compare applicant-tracking systems or evaluate the quality of an employer's sales process. It also does not infer that a requirement appearing in a coded row is equally important in every sector, account size or sales motion. The evidence is used to establish a defensible work sequence and a set of teachable responsibilities, not a universal operating model.

Four reading rules are essential.

First, the unit of observation is an accepted vacancy, not an individual worker, firm or completed sale. A vacancy describes an employer's intended role at one point in time. It cannot show what the eventual employee will spend most time doing, whether the employer's process is effective, or which activities cause commercial outcomes.

Second, the sample is purposive. Search queries targeted current public pages for Account Executive, Sales Development, Business Development and closely equivalent B2B selling roles. The resulting counts should be read as documented coverage within this corpus. A count such as 76 for negotiation means that 76 accepted rows were assigned the negotiation code under the stated functional coding rule. It does not mean that exactly 63.3% of all B2B sellers negotiate.

Third, role-family coding was functional. Account Executive rows were coded for full-cycle deal work when the B2B and new-business screen passed; SDR and BDR rows were coded for pipeline creation, qualification, record discipline and opportunity handoff; Business Development Manager rows were retained only when direct selling was supported. Some repeated patterns therefore arise from the coding design. The analysis does not present them as independent word counts extracted from vacancy prose.

Fourth, interpretation is separated from observation. Tables identify exact corpus counts. The narrative then explains what those counts may imply for role preparation and curriculum design, subject to the sample's limitations. Where the evidence cannot answer a question, the report says so.

Research questions

The study addresses six questions.

RQ1. What seller role families are represented in the accepted vacancy corpus? This establishes whether the sample reflects pipeline-generation work, full-cycle selling, or a mixture of both.

RQ2. Which generic B2B sales responsibilities are represented, and in how many accepted vacancies? The question covers account or market research, prospecting, qualification, discovery, value communication, proposal work, objection handling, negotiation, closing, record and pipeline discipline, multi-stakeholder work, handoff, and commercial outcome management.

RQ3. How are those responsibilities connected as an end-to-end professional workflow? Counts alone do not show sequence. The role-analysis package is therefore used to interpret the coded requirements as a chain of decisions and outputs from offer orientation and account selection through close and handoff.

RQ4. How much do source-platform and employer concentration affect the findings? Lever accounts for 58 records and one employer accounts for 28. The report compares the full sample with an exclusion view and a three-record-per-employer cap.

RQ5. What can the evidence responsibly support for curriculum design? The focus is observable seller capability, realistic decisions, professional artifacts and authority boundaries. The report does not treat the data as evidence of course effectiveness.

RQ6. What claims should remain out of scope? The accepted rights and claims review excludes guaranteed sales results, employment outcomes, regulated advice, third-party method certification, authority to bind an organisation, and unqualified legal or privacy instruction.

Method

Study design

The research is a cross-sectional content analysis of current public vacancy metadata and short paraphrased derived facts. Retrieval took place on 29 August 2026. The study used employer-controlled Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby pages or their current indexed extracts. The design was selected for reproducibility and rights discipline: each accepted row retains a public URL, publisher or employer, title, location field, retrieval date, current-status signal, short derived fact, coded skills, deduplication key, rights classification and limitation. Full vacancy bodies were not stored in the report.

The evidence chain has three layers. The first is the 120-row vacancy file. The second is a deterministic coding summary containing role, platform, location and skill counts plus sensitivity views. The third comprises accepted role, portfolio and rights analyses. Those analyses define the individual-contributor seller boundary, compare the proposed learning scope with adjacent MTF programs, and identify legal, privacy, intellectual-property and claims controls. No live provider, publishing or orchestration state was used to prepare this report.

Search strategy

Three public queries formed the main vacancy discovery route:

  1. site:boards.greenhouse.io ("Account Executive" OR "Business Development" OR "Sales Development Representative") B2B
  2. site:jobs.lever.co ("Account Executive" OR "Sales Development Representative" OR "Business Development Representative" OR "Business Development Manager") B2B
  3. site:jobs.ashbyhq.com ("Account Executive" OR "Sales Development Representative" OR "Business Development Representative") (B2B OR SaaS) "Apply for this Job"

The searches were designed to retrieve current employer ATS pages rather than secondary job-board copies. Results were screened manually against the accepted decision rule, canonicalised to an employer ATS URL and deduplicated. Tracking parameters were removed where a stable job identifier was clear. A Workable search was used as a coverage check but was not needed for the final accepted corpus. This avoids mixing records with inconsistent evidence depth solely to increase the count.

Inclusion criteria

A record was accepted only when five conditions were met.

  1. The position belonged to an individual-contributor or player-seller family, such as Account Executive, Sales Development Representative, Business Development Representative, or a Business Development Manager with direct selling work.
  2. The employer sold to organisations, or the current page or indexed extract explicitly located the role in B2B, SaaS, enterprise, commercial, corporate, wholesale, partner or new-business work.
  3. The job included a material part of the sales process: account research, outreach, qualification, discovery, presentation or demonstration, proposal preparation, objection work, negotiation, closing, pipeline management or handoff.
  4. A point-in-time current-status signal was available. The role page resolved and exposed an application route, or a live employer board listed the role with an individual URL.
  5. The source was publicly accessible without authentication or an attempt to bypass access controls.

These conditions aim to keep the sample centred on actual seller work. A familiar title was not sufficient when the surrounding evidence placed the job outside B2B new business.

Exclusion criteria

The screen removed retail-only and consumer-only sales roles, store positions, sales-support roles without selling ownership, Sales Operations and Revenue Operations roles, marketing-only jobs, Customer Success-only jobs, post-sales-only account positions, pure people managers, and senior leaders without direct selling. Account-management and expansion positions were excluded unless the accepted evidence supported new-business or direct closing responsibility. The boundary also removed roles whose main task was legal drafting, contract administration, marketing-campaign execution, post-sale adoption or sales-system governance.

The exclusions matter for interpretation. The report does not describe the full commercial organisation. It describes an individual seller's bounded contribution within that organisation.

Current-status rule

“Current” means that a public ATS status signal was observed on the retrieval date. For most records, the employer role page resolved and presented an Apply or application route. For current employer boards, the role appeared with an individual link. This is a stronger signal than an undated third-party snippet but is not permanent. Vacancies may close, be revised or redirect after 29 August 2026. The source appendix provides the original URLs so that a later reader can repeat a status check, while the report preserves the point-in-time nature of the evidence.

Deduplication

Two independent identity checks were applied. The primary deduplication key was the lowercase combination publisher_employer|job_title|location. Canonical URL was the secondary key. Duplicate search hits, duplicated application routes, tracking variants, employer-board mirrors and general category pages without a stable job identity were removed. The accepted file contains 120 rows, 120 unique URLs and 120 unique deduplication keys.

One CLEAR employer-board record was retained because the live board exposed the exact Enterprise Account Executive title and location even though the evidence was represented through a board URL. This exception is recorded in the methodology rather than hidden.

Rights and expression controls

The evidence file preserves factual metadata and short paraphrased derived facts. It does not reproduce vacancy bodies, employer templates, interview questions, internal documents, screenshots or logos. Every row carries a rights classification stating that the source is a public employer ATS page, that no authentication was used and that quotation was minimised. The report's source appendix lists only the record identifier, employer, title and link.

Generic work terms such as account research, discovery, qualification, proposal, negotiation and handoff are used descriptively. The report does not adopt a proprietary sales method, reproduce a third-party checklist or claim endorsement. Occupational information from O*NET is attributed under the applicable licence in the attribution section.

Coding framework

Thirteen functional codes were applied.

Code Requirement represented
S01 Account, territory or market research
S02 Multi-channel prospecting
S03 Lead or opportunity qualification
S04 Discovery and needs analysis
S05 Value presentation or product demonstration
S06 Proposal or business case
S07 Objection handling
S08 Negotiation and contracting
S09 Closing
S10 CRM, pipeline and forecasting discipline
S11 Multi-stakeholder selling
S12 Account Executive or post-sale handoff
S13 Activity, quota or commercial outcome management

The coding is a curriculum-oriented functional classification, not automated natural-language counting. It asks whether the accepted role represents a work requirement that a prepared seller would need to perform. This distinction explains why S01, S03, S10 and S13 appear in all rows: these were treated as structural requirements across the accepted role families after the B2B seller screen. A reader should not reinterpret those values as proof that every original posting used the same terms.

Quality controls

The accepted package was checked for row count, field completeness and uniqueness. It contains 120 data rows across 13 required fields, with no missing required values, 120 unique URLs, 120 unique deduplication keys and one retrieval date. The sample includes 87 distinct publisher or employer labels and three ATS families. File hashes were recorded in the evidence package.

The role-analysis package supplied a separate method-neutral task chain, recurring decisions, work situations, professional outputs and boundary map. The portfolio package supplied a non-duplication screen and rights controls. These packages were used for interpretation, not to inflate the vacancy counts.

Sample profile

Role families

Role family Count Share of 120
Account Executive 70 58.3%
Sales Development Representative 32 26.7%
Business Development Representative 12 10.0%
Direct-selling Business Development Manager 6 5.0%
Total 120 100.0%

The corpus is weighted toward Account Executive positions. That weighting is useful for observing full-cycle deal responsibilities, but it should not be mistaken for the global distribution of seller roles. Forty-four rows are SDR or BDR positions, and six are direct-selling Business Development Manager positions. The sample therefore contains both opportunity-creation and opportunity-progression work.

The boundary between SDR and BDR titles is not treated as universal. Employers may use those labels differently. The analysis preserves the advertised title but interprets both as pipeline-generation families where the accepted evidence supports research, outreach, qualification, record discipline and handoff. Similarly, “Business Development Manager” was not accepted as a management role by title alone; only six positions with direct selling responsibility remained.

ATS platforms

ATS family Count Share of 120
Greenhouse 32 26.7%
Lever 58 48.3%
Ashby 30 25.0%
Total 120 100.0%

Lever supplies almost half the records. This platform distribution reflects the discovery method and the employers retrieved, not the composition of the B2B sales labour market. ATS family should therefore be treated as a source characteristic, not an occupational variable.

Employer concentration

The corpus contains 87 employer or publisher labels. Insider One contributes 28 regional roles, equal to 23.3% of the full sample. No other employer approaches that concentration. The regional listings add geographic variety and show how one B2B MarTech employer deploys similar seller families across markets, but they also make the full-sample counts sensitive to one organisation's role architecture.

This concentration is not corrected by pretending the records are identical. Each listing has a distinct role URL, market or title and passed the accepted screen. Instead, the report discloses the concentration and provides two reduced views.

Location evidence

Seventy-three records contain a location in the accepted indexed evidence. Forty-seven do not. Missing locations were recorded as “not stated in indexed result” rather than inferred from an employer's headquarters, domain, compensation language or nearby vacancy. The report does not use geography for prevalence claims because the missingness is substantial and the sample is not geographically balanced.

Findings

Exact coded counts

Code Work requirement Count Share of 120
S01 Account, territory or market research 120 100.0%
S02 Multi-channel prospecting 50 41.7%
S03 Lead or opportunity qualification 120 100.0%
S04 Discovery and needs analysis 88 73.3%
S05 Value presentation or product demonstration 76 63.3%
S06 Proposal or business case 76 63.3%
S07 Objection handling 70 58.3%
S08 Negotiation and contracting 76 63.3%
S09 Closing 76 63.3%
S10 CRM, pipeline and forecasting discipline 120 100.0%
S11 Multi-stakeholder selling 76 63.3%
S12 Account Executive or post-sale handoff 114 95.0%
S13 Activity, quota or commercial outcome management 120 100.0%

These values are the complete set of accepted coded counts. They are not adjusted, weighted or projected. Their strongest use is to identify a common workflow backbone and the role-family differences within it.

A universal coded backbone in this corpus

S01, S03, S10 and S13 were assigned to all 120 records. Under the functional coding rule, every accepted seller role involves some form of account or market orientation, qualification, disciplined customer-record or pipeline work, and measurable activity or commercial outcomes. This does not mean that every vacancy gave equal space to those responsibilities. It means that each accepted role family was defined in a way that requires them.

For preparation purposes, this backbone has an important implication. A learner cannot be equipped only with customer-facing communication techniques. The learner must also know how to decide where to focus, determine whether work should advance, preserve evidence in a customer record and explain progress or risk in terms that another professional can inspect. These are connected responsibilities. Weak research produces weak qualification; weak qualification distorts pipeline records; inaccurate records weaken forecasts and internal decisions.

The backbone also helps differentiate individual selling from adjacent functions. The seller uses the organisation's systems and definitions accurately but does not own CRM architecture, territory design, team quotas or consolidated forecast governance. A course can teach record quality and forecast rationale without becoming a Revenue Operations or sales-management program.

Prospecting and pipeline creation

S02 appears in 50 records. The count aligns with the 44 SDR and BDR roles plus six direct-selling Business Development Manager roles under the coding scheme. These roles foreground pipeline creation: researching organisations, identifying plausible contacts, preparing relevant outreach, qualifying interest and transferring sales-ready context.

The appropriate interpretation is not that prospecting belongs only to those 50 jobs. Several full-cycle Account Executive postings may include self-sourcing or account planning. The coding summary, however, assigned the prospecting code conservatively by role-family function. The count should therefore be read as a clearly represented pipeline-generation block, not a ceiling on prospecting responsibility across the corpus.

For professional preparation, the evidence supports a sequence that begins before message writing. Sellers need to define an approved market, identify evidence of fit or change, separate public facts from hypotheses, choose a permitted channel, state a relevant reason for contact, and record the result. Outreach should not depend on fabricated personalisation, hidden data collection or pressure. A responsible sequence also includes stop and preference handling.

Qualification as a decision discipline

S03 appears in all 120 records. In the accepted role framework, qualification is not a single form or a memorised acronym. It is a repeatable decision about whether evidence supports advancing, nurturing, referring, pausing or disqualifying an opportunity.

This decision requires more than interest. Relevant evidence may concern fit, problem importance, access to stakeholders, timing, constraints, a plausible decision path and the cost of continued seller effort. Qualification also remains revisable. A positive initial response can weaken when decision access is absent; a weak early signal can strengthen when new evidence emerges.

Because the study avoids proprietary methods, curriculum design should teach an original evidence record with explicit fields and decision rules. A learner should be able to identify what is known, what is inferred, what is missing and which uncertainty matters next. The quality of the rationale matters more than reproducing a brand-specific checklist.

Discovery and problem framing

S04 appears in 88 records. This total comprises the full-cycle Account Executive and direct-selling Business Development Manager roles plus BDR roles coded for needs framing. Discovery is therefore widely represented beyond final-stage closers, but it is not assigned to every SDR row.

Discovery should be understood as evidence development, not conversational performance alone. The seller prepares hypotheses, asks questions that reduce important uncertainty, listens accurately, separates current state from desired state, tests the materiality of a problem, identifies constraints and obtains customer validation. A meeting produces an inspectable record: statements, observations, hypotheses, contradictions, unknowns and follow-up owners.

This distinction protects against two common errors. The first is treating a friendly conversation as evidence of a qualified opportunity. The second is converting a buyer statement into an inflated quantified claim without confirmation. The accepted role analysis requires fact, assumption and hypothesis to remain distinct. A curriculum should assess that distinction directly.

Value communication, demonstrations and proposals

S05 and S06 each appear in 76 records. These are the 70 Account Executive and six direct-selling Business Development Manager roles under the functional coding scheme. The same group is responsible for connecting customer evidence to a defensible offer, designing a presentation or demonstration around stakeholder decisions, and producing a proposal or business case that another professional can review.

The counts support a coherent progression. Discovery identifies needs, constraints and success measures. Need-to-capability mapping then selects only the relevant parts of the approved offer. A value hypothesis explains expected operational or financial benefit while keeping assumptions visible. A demonstration or presentation provides evidence related to the buyer's decision. A proposal records scope, price, assumptions, risks, approvals and next steps.

The report does not infer that every role uses the same document, financial model or demonstration format. Physical products, professional services and software differ. The transferable capability is disciplined mapping: verified need to relevant capability, capability to evidence, evidence to decision, and decision to approved commercial terms. Unsupported competitor comparisons and invented outcome claims remain outside the evidence-led approach.

Objection handling

S07 appears in 70 records, corresponding to the Account Executive group in the functional coding design. The count should not be read as proof that no BDR or Business Development Manager handles concerns. It indicates that objection handling was explicitly represented as part of full-cycle Account Executive responsibility in this corpus model.

An objection can reflect several underlying conditions: an evidence gap, a misunderstood requirement, a risk concern, a competing priority, a stakeholder conflict, a weak value case, a process constraint or a genuine lack of fit. Treating every objection as resistance to overcome would be inconsistent with the study's evidence and authority boundaries.

Preparation should therefore focus on diagnosis and response quality. The learner identifies the concern, checks understanding, distinguishes a resolvable information need from a valid stop condition, provides only approved evidence and records the outcome. When the issue belongs to security, legal, finance or delivery, the seller coordinates the correct owner rather than improvising an answer.

Negotiation, contracting and closing

S08 and S09 each appear in 76 records: the 70 Account Executive and six direct-selling Business Development Manager positions. O*NET occupational evidence independently supports negotiation of sales terms and contract or payment details as seller work, while the accepted role analysis places clear limits around authority.

The curriculum implication is a bounded commercial decision process. Before a negotiation, the seller should clarify interests, variables, priorities, evidence, approval limits, possible exchanges, escalation points and conditions for pausing or walking away. During the interaction, concessions should not be reactive gifts. A proposed change in price, scope, timing or service should be evaluated for reciprocal value and internal approval.

Contracting is not legal practice. The seller can gather requirements, explain approved commercial intent, maintain an issue log and route questions. Authorised legal, finance, security, privacy and procurement owners retain their respective decisions. Closing likewise means a verified agreement or a clearly recorded loss or no-decision outcome. It does not justify manufactured urgency, unauthorised signatures, hidden conditions or optimistic stage inflation.

Multi-stakeholder selling

S11 appears in 76 records, again representing the direct-closing role group. B2B decisions commonly require coordination among users, business sponsors, technical evaluators, finance, security, privacy, legal, procurement and executive participants. The seller's task is not to assign fixed personality labels. It is to understand each participant's interests, evidence needs, authority and role in the decision process.

A stakeholder map should therefore distinguish observed evidence from assumptions. A friendly contact may be a useful guide without having budget or approval authority. A technical evaluator may validate fit without owning the commercial decision. Procurement may govern process without owning the business need. The seller must plan how information and decisions move among these participants while respecting the buyer's procedures.

This work also has an internal side. The seller coordinates sales engineering, product, delivery, finance, legal or leadership support when evidence shows that specialist input is needed. Resource requests should be concise, timely and tied to a specific buyer decision.

Handoff and continuity

S12 appears in 114 records. The six direct-selling Business Development Manager roles were not assigned this code in the original coding template; all Account Executive, SDR and BDR records were. The handoff type differs by role. SDR and BDR positions transfer qualified context to an Account Executive. Account Executives transfer approved customer commitments, risks and open items to delivery or Customer Success.

The high count supports continuity as a core seller capability. A handoff is not a calendar invitation or a claim that the next team now owns every problem. It is a structured transfer of goals, scope, stakeholders, commitments, assumptions, risks, timing, approvals and unresolved questions. The receiving owner must be able to understand what the customer expects and which statements were authorised.

This capability reduces context loss, but the vacancy data cannot measure the operational effect of a specific handoff practice. The defensible conclusion is that handoff work is represented across 114 accepted roles and should be taught and assessed as an observable output.

CRM, pipeline, forecasting and outcome discipline

S10 and S13 appear in all 120 records. Seller preparation must therefore include accurate use of the operating system, not just private notes. A seller should maintain current stage evidence, contacts, next steps, dates, risks, dependencies and outcome rationale. Records should distinguish customer evidence from seller optimism.

The adjacent-function boundary remains important. Revenue Operations or Sales Operations owns shared definitions, system administration, routing, dashboards, integrations and process governance. Sales leadership owns team targets, performance management and consolidated forecasts. The individual seller owns truthful and timely evidence about assigned work.

Forecasting at seller level should be taught as a reasoned assessment rather than a promise. A forecast rationale identifies evidence, timing, decision dependencies, risks and confidence. A stalled deal with no mutual next step should not look healthier because the seller prefers the outcome.

Sensitivity analysis

View 1: excluding the largest employer

Removing the 28 Insider One records leaves 92 vacancies from 86 employers.

Code Full sample Excluding Insider One
S01 120 92
S02 50 38
S03 120 92
S04 88 71
S05 76 60
S06 76 60
S07 70 54
S08 76 60
S09 76 60
S10 120 92
S11 76 60
S12 114 86
S13 120 92

The reduced role mix is 54 Account Executive, 21 SDR, 11 BDR and six direct-selling Business Development Manager positions. The counts fall because 28 rows are removed, but every stage of the identified workflow remains represented. The backbone codes remain present in all 92 records under the same functional coding rule. Discovery remains in 71, direct value/proposal/negotiation/close work in 60, objection handling in 54 and handoff in 86.

This result supports robustness of the workflow sequence, not statistical invariance. It shows that the main interpretation does not depend on retaining the largest employer. It does not correct all sampling bias or establish population estimates.

View 2: maximum three records per employer

A second view retains at most three vacancies per employer. It contains 94 records across all 87 employer labels.

Code Full sample Employer cap of three
S01 120 94
S02 50 39
S03 120 94
S04 88 73
S05 76 61
S06 76 61
S07 70 55
S08 76 61
S09 76 61
S10 120 94
S11 76 61
S12 114 88
S13 120 94

The capped role mix is 55 Account Executive, 21 SDR, 12 BDR and six direct-selling Business Development Manager positions. Sixty-one records retain the direct-closing block and 88 retain handoff responsibility.

Again, this is a sensitivity view rather than a weighted estimate. Selecting the first three records within each employer group is a transparent cap, not a claim that each employer should receive equal labour-market weight. Its value is diagnostic: the core interpretation survives a strong reduction in the largest employer's influence.

What the sensitivity views do and do not show

Both views preserve the same ordered capability set: research, qualification, discovery, value communication, proposal, negotiation, closing, customer-record discipline and handoff. They also preserve role variation between pipeline-generation and direct-closing positions. This consistency justifies using the workflow as a curriculum coverage frame.

The sensitivity views do not demonstrate representativeness by geography, industry, company size or deal complexity. They do not address employers whose vacancies were not indexed, roles advertised in other languages, closed roles, private recruitment or employers using different ATS platforms. They should be read as transparent checks on one observed concentration problem.

Interpretation as an end-to-end seller workflow

The accepted role analysis translates the coded requirements into a sequence of professional decisions. The sequence begins with offer and market orientation, proceeds through territory and account planning, account and contact research, outreach, qualification, discovery, stakeholder and buying-process mapping, solution and value design, validation or demonstration, business case and proposal, commercial shaping, procurement/security/legal coordination, negotiation and decision, close and order accuracy, and accountable handoff. CRM, pipeline and forecast discipline run throughout.

This sequence should not be mistaken for a rigid linear funnel. B2B work is iterative. Discovery may reveal a new stakeholder. A technical review may change the scope. Procurement may expose an approval dependency. A proposal may return the seller to problem framing. A responsible seller updates the evidence, stage, risks and next step rather than forcing the opportunity through predetermined labels.

The workflow is also a decision architecture. At each stage, the seller needs a question that determines the next action:

  • Which accounts merit scarce attention, and on what evidence?
  • Is there enough lawful and relevant information to make contact?
  • Should the opportunity advance, pause, nurture, refer or close?
  • Which question would reduce the most important uncertainty?
  • Is the problem material, solvable and mutually understood?
  • Which stakeholders and approvals are required?
  • What evidence supports the value hypothesis?
  • Which commercial variables are within authority?
  • What condition requires specialist review or escalation?
  • Is the order consistent with the approved scope and commitments?
  • What must the next owner receive to continue responsibly?

This architecture avoids over-reliance on scripts. A script can help a novice prepare, but it cannot replace judgement about evidence, relevance, authority or risk.

Seller-controlled outputs

The workflow becomes assessable when connected to professional artifacts. The accepted role package identifies candidates such as an account-priority scorecard, account research brief, outreach sequence, qualification record, discovery plan and evidence record, problem statement, stakeholder map, buying-process map, need-to-capability map, value hypothesis, demonstration plan, business case, proposal checklist, negotiation preparation sheet, commercial approval request, due-diligence tracker, pipeline review board, negotiation log, mutual action plan, close checklist, forecast rationale, CRM data-quality checklist, handoff brief, commitment register and win/loss/no-decision review.

These are candidate outputs, not all mandatory products of every role. Curriculum selection should avoid duplicating the same underlying document under multiple names. Each chosen artifact needs a clear owner, purpose, realistic completed example, instructions and a quality checklist. The artifact is valuable only when it supports a decision and can be used by another professional.

Authority boundaries

The same evidence that supports seller capability also supports clear limits.

  • Sales leadership owns organisation-level strategy, territories, quotas, staffing, coaching and policy-level commercial authority.
  • Revenue Operations or Sales Operations owns shared process definitions, system design, dashboards, routing, integrations and governance.
  • Marketing owns positioning governance, campaigns, brand and demand systems.
  • Customer Success and delivery own post-transition implementation, adoption, technical health and structured value realisation.
  • Legal, privacy, security and finance owners retain legal advice, risk acceptance, specialist assessment, credit, tax, accounting, margin and exception decisions.
  • Buyer procurement and authorised approvers retain supplier evaluation, bid rules, purchase orders, contract administration and purchase authority.

The seller contributes accurate evidence, coordinates the right people and makes decisions within delegated authority. A course should teach escalation as a professional skill, not as failure.

Curriculum implications

1. Organise learning around the opportunity, not departmental ownership

The strongest evidence-backed curriculum structure is one account or opportunity moving from selection to handoff. This preserves the distinction from sales leadership, Revenue Operations, marketing and Customer Success programs. Learners should repeatedly answer: what evidence-backed action should I take next, and what must be recorded or escalated?

A four-module design can group the workflow without erasing its continuity: market/account work and prospecting; qualification/discovery and stakeholder understanding; value, proposal and commercial decision work; and close, record integrity and handoff. CRM, ethical evidence handling, AI verification and authority boundaries should recur across modules rather than appear in one isolated lesson.

2. Separate account selection, prospecting, qualification and discovery

These activities are related but not interchangeable. Account selection determines where to invest attention. Prospecting opens a permitted and relevant interaction. Qualification decides whether continued effort is justified. Discovery develops evidence about the problem, impact, constraints and decision process.

Beginners often collapse these stages into “talk to the customer.” The corpus supports teaching separate outputs and exit criteria: an account-priority rationale, an outreach plan, a qualification decision and a discovery evidence record. Assessment should reward a justified decision to pause or disqualify when evidence is weak.

3. Teach evidence states explicitly

Professional seller work depends on distinguishing fact, customer statement, seller observation, hypothesis, assumption, unknown, contradiction and verified decision. That distinction should appear in account research, discovery notes, value cases, forecasts and handoffs.

AI-assisted work increases the importance of this discipline. A generated account summary or proposal draft may be useful only after source, claim, calculation, privacy and authority checks. Learners should record approved inputs, constraints, sources, edits and the final human decision. No real confidential, credential, price, contract or unnecessary personal data should enter an unapproved tool.

4. Integrate communication with commercial reasoning

The coded counts do not support a course made only of scripts, persuasion tips or closing language. Communication must be attached to research, customer evidence, value reasoning, stakeholder needs and commercial limits.

A discovery question is good when it reduces a material uncertainty. A presentation is good when it gives a stakeholder evidence for a decision. A proposal is good when scope, assumptions, value, risks and approvals remain consistent. A negotiation response is good when it protects authority and evaluates reciprocal value. A handoff is good when another owner can act without losing customer context.

5. Make customer-record discipline a repeated performance requirement

S10 appears in all 120 records under the coding model. Every substantial exercise should therefore update a seller-controlled record: evidence, stage, next step, owner, date, risk, dependency or forecast rationale. Learners should diagnose stale or contradictory records and explain the consequence for internal decisions.

The course should remain tool-neutral. It can use a CRM-like worksheet or simple record without teaching system administration, schema design, integrations or dashboards. The outcome is reliable professional use of an approved system.

6. Assess commercial numeracy without making unsupported outcome claims

Direct-closing roles need to work with price, quantity, discounts, simple costs, benefits, assumptions and sensitivity. Learners should be able to construct a transparent value hypothesis or simple benefit-cost model and show how results change when inputs change.

The numbers remain hypotheses until validated. The seller should not present a model as guaranteed customer value, financial advice or proof that a purchase will succeed. Calculations require review, and regulated valuation, tax and accounting decisions belong to qualified owners.

7. Teach multi-stakeholder work as evidence and process mapping

The curriculum should include business, user, technical, security, privacy, legal, procurement, finance and executive perspectives without turning them into stereotypes. Learners need to identify who cares about what, what evidence each participant requires, who has authority and what process dependency controls the next step.

A stakeholder label should remain a hypothesis until supported. The seller should not bypass procurement, invent an executive sponsor or treat a friendly contact as an authorised decision maker.

8. Treat objection handling and negotiation as decision work

Objections should be diagnosed rather than “defeated.” Learners can classify whether a concern reflects fit, evidence, risk, priority, process, value or authority. The response may be to provide approved evidence, ask a clarifying question, involve a specialist, revise the proposal, pause the opportunity or close it.

Negotiation preparation should identify interests, variables, authority, exchanges, approvals and stop points. Practice cases should include an attractive request outside delegated limits so that escalation is assessed.

9. Include close accuracy, loss decisions and handoff

A complete seller workflow must include clean endings. Learners should verify scope, price, approvals, signatures or order evidence and customer commitments. They should also record a reasoned loss or no-decision outcome without disguising it as an active opportunity.

The handoff should transfer objectives, scope, stakeholders, commitments, risks, timing and open items to the authorised post-sale owner. This is the course boundary: the seller preserves continuity but does not assume onboarding, adoption, renewal or implementation ownership.

10. Use an integrated capstone, not an artifact inventory

The accepted role analysis proposes a realistic governed opportunity involving public account evidence, discovery transcripts, a stakeholder list, a simple cost or usage dataset, internal approval limits and conflicting buyer signals. The learner decides whether to advance, nurture or disqualify and prepares one decision-ready opportunity advancement memo.

This capstone is appropriate because it tests evidence quality, fact-hypothesis separation, problem and value reasoning, stakeholder judgement, commercial numeracy, forecast integrity, next-step quality and escalation. It should not require the learner to attach every course artifact. One coherent decision document is a stronger performance test than an inventory.

Rights, ethics and claims boundaries

The report supports an original, vendor-neutral approach. Generic professional terms are necessary to describe the work, but common ideas do not authorise copying a third party's expression, teaching sequence, scripts, diagrams, templates or branded system. The course should use original cases, explanations, decision tools and artifacts.

Outreach practice must remain jurisdiction-aware without presenting universal legal instructions. Learners should check organisational policy and obtain qualified guidance before real outreach, especially where subscriber type, personal data, calling rules, opt-outs or retention requirements matter. Practice can teach a checkpoint and escalation record; it should not offer legal advice.

The evidence does not support claims that a learner will close a sale, increase revenue, attain quota, obtain employment, earn a salary or gain promotion. It also does not confer authority to contact real people, process personal data, approve terms, bind an organisation or provide regulated professional advice. The observable learning outcome is the ability to prepare and justify reviewable seller work in a fictional or approved case.

Limitations

This report has ten principal limitations.

Point-in-time status. The vacancies were current according to a public ATS signal on 29 August 2026. Pages can close or change. The appendix preserves URLs for reproducibility but cannot freeze provider content.

Purposive sampling. Search terms and ATS domains were selected to produce a suitable B2B seller corpus. Inclusion probabilities are unknown. Shares and code counts are not population estimates.

Platform concentration. Lever supplies 58 records. Greenhouse and Ashby supply 32 and 30. This reflects retrieval and employer technology choices rather than occupational structure.

Employer concentration. Insider One supplies 28 regional records. The exclusion and cap views reduce this influence, but neither creates a probability sample.

Role-family coding. Repeated code patterns partly reflect the functional coding templates assigned after screening. The results should not be interpreted as independent keyword frequencies.

Sector composition. English-language technology and SaaS roles are overrepresented. The report cannot establish whether the same distribution applies to industrial products, professional services, logistics, healthcare, public-sector or other B2B contexts, even though several such contexts appear.

Geographic incompleteness. Forty-seven records lack an exact location in the indexed evidence. The study makes no geographic prevalence claim.

Vacancy intention versus enacted work. A posting states intended responsibilities. It does not observe daily activity, seller competence, organisational support, buyer behaviour or completed outcomes.

No effectiveness inference. The study does not test whether any sales practice improves revenue, conversion, retention, customer outcomes or employment. Curriculum implications are coverage recommendations, not causal claims.

Rights-preserving evidence depth. The report deliberately avoids vacancy bodies and long quotations. This limits textual nuance but protects against unnecessary reuse of employer expression. The accepted evidence file retains enough factual metadata and short derived facts for audit.

These limitations do not invalidate the study's bounded purpose. They define it. The corpus is sufficient to show that an end-to-end, evidence-led seller workflow is represented across more than 100 current vacancies and remains visible under two concentration checks. It is not sufficient to generalise exact prevalence to the global profession.

Conclusion

The 120 accepted vacancies present B2B selling as coordinated professional work rather than a single conversation skill. Across pipeline-generation and direct-closing role families, the coded corpus requires attention to account evidence, qualification, customer records, measurable outcomes, discovery, value communication, proposals, stakeholder coordination, negotiation, closing and handoff.

The most stable finding is the workflow, not any percentage. In the full sample, the complete sequence is represented. Removing the largest employer leaves 92 records and capping employers at three leaves 94; both views retain the same capability architecture. This supports a course built around evidence-backed decisions and professional outputs from account selection to accountable handoff.

The study also establishes limits. Seller preparation should not become sales-management strategy, Revenue Operations governance, marketing-campaign execution, Customer Success delivery or legal practice. The learner should be able to use approved systems accurately, coordinate specialists, work within delegated authority and preserve the difference between fact, hypothesis and decision.

A defensible curriculum should therefore teach method-neutral judgement: how to select, research, engage, qualify, discover, frame value, coordinate evidence, propose, negotiate, close, record and hand off. It should assess observable work in realistic cases and avoid claims about guaranteed commercial or career outcomes.

O*NET attribution and occupational references

This report paraphrases selected occupational information from O*NET® OnLine, including sales-term and contract/payment negotiation in the profile for Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products, 41-4012.00, updated 2026.

ONET® 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 licence. The information has been selected, paraphrased and integrated into an original MTF analysis. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed or tested this report. ONET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.

Occupational reference links:

Appendix A — Data dictionary

Field Definition
record_id Stable study identifier V001–V120.
source_family Employer ATS family: Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby.
publisher_employer Employer or publishing label displayed by the accepted source.
job_title Vacancy title recorded from the current source.
location Location in the indexed evidence, or an explicit not-stated value.
retrieval_date Point-in-time retrieval date, 2026-08-29.
url Public employer ATS vacancy or accepted employer-board URL.
current_status_signal Evidence that an application route or live board listing was available on retrieval.
minimal_excerpt_or_derived_fact Short paraphrased fact used for screening and coding; not a vacancy body.
coded_skills Functional S01–S13 codes assigned under the accepted coding rule.
dedup_key Lowercase employer-title-location identity key.
rights_classification Public-source and expression-minimisation record.
limitation Row-level point-in-time or missing-evidence caveat.

Appendix B — Compact coding guide

The codes are curriculum-oriented descriptors. S01, S03, S10 and S13 form the common structural backbone in the accepted role-family model. S02 represents the clearly defined pipeline-generation group. S04 separates discovery or needs framing from initial qualification. S05–S09 and S11 represent direct opportunity progression and commercial decision work. S12 covers transfer of qualified context or post-sale commitments. Codes record represented work requirements, not identical language, effort or proficiency.

Appendix C — Public vacancy source list

The entries below contain factual metadata and links only. Vacancy bodies are intentionally not reproduced.

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The capabilities examined in this report are developed in MTF Institute's Professional Certificate in B2B Sales through structured learning and applied practice.