What are the responsibilities and job description for the Associate Account Executive position at Willamette Week?
ASSOCIATE ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE
Willamette Week (wweek.com), Portland’s most vital source for news and coverage of arts and entertainment, seeks a new Associate Account Executive for our Sales Team. In this role, you will work with local businesses on advertising solutions across our platforms (weekly paper, magazines, wweek.com, newsletters, events and social channels) in service of driving revenue for WW.
We're looking for a driven, detail-oriented go-getter to join our fun, fast-paced team. As an Associate Account Executive, you’ll be building your book of business —researching leads, making cold calls, and handling the nitty-gritty tasks that turn prospects into long-term clients. You should thrive on checking things off your to-do list, staying organized, and tackling tasks with enthusiasm. But just as importantly, you should love connecting with people, building relationships, and bringing energy to every conversation.
To be successful in this role, you should be resourceful, analytical, adaptable, and organized with the ability to build rapport with clients.
A successful candidate understands and values the importance of local journalism, is excited about advertising, and is hungry to sell. WW offers an exciting and challenging environment that is best-suited to passionate self-starters who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves.
Responsibilities :
- Manage and sell to a small but ever-growing portfolio of accounts — embodying a keen sense of sales priorities.
- Deeply understand the WW media calendar, platforms, and audience — and be able to clearly target sales opportunities based on those inputs.
- Develop strong relationships with key clients. Build genuine trust and rapport with them.
- Identify growth opportunities with existing accounts and initiate long-term planning (quarterly business reviews, regular in person working sessions, and numerous client engagements / calls each week) to bring these opportunities to fruition.
- Develop creative marketing solutions that help solve key clients’ business goals. Build and present clear, thoughtful proposals.
- Demonstrate an ability to grow a book of business, focused on quarter over quarter net new revenue growth.
- Identify and contact new prospects with creative approaches.
- Actively contribute to the ad design / sponsored content process by having a strong point of view on strategic direction, vision, and business objectives that reflect the client’s voice.
- Keep up to date on digital tools and platforms — and how to best leverage them with social and digital advertising opportunities.
- Work daily within our CRM on booking ads, logging notes, managing accounts.
- Proof and audit all your clients’ ads to assure they are designed and placed correctly and on time.
- Provide ideas and feedback about how to improve Willamette Week’s advertising products and services for our partners, enabling our advertisers to maximize their participation
- Collaborate cross-functionally with the Account Management, Marketing, Analytics & Strategy teams to monitor client & portfolio activity and track performance against goals.
Experience
While the experience below is nice to have - we value kind, humble, hardworking people who are eager to learn and excited to be a part of the local journalism landscape. If that describes you, we encourage you to apply, regardless of your experience.
To Apply : Send Cover Letter and Resume to jobs@wweek.com, with “Associate Account Executive” in the subject line.