Job description template
A complete sales executive JD for Indian employers — with the four disclosures (field or inside, leads provided or self-sourced, pay structure, territory) that determine whether your new hire is still there in month four.
Sales hiring in India fails on retention far more often than on sourcing. Applications arrive; the problem is that a meaningful share of new hires discover in week two that the job is not what they understood it to be — that the leads they assumed would be provided are not, that the role is field rather than inside, or that the earnings they anchored on were the variable-inclusive number. Every one of those is a disclosure the job description could have made. This template makes them.
Replace everything in [square brackets] before you post it.
Job title
Sales Executive
[Company name] sells [what you sell] to [who buys it]. This role covers [territory / segment] and is part of a sales team of [n].
We are hiring a Sales Executive to own [new business / renewals / a named territory] for [product or segment]. You will [prospect / work leads generated by marketing — say which], qualify opportunities, run the pitch or demo, negotiate and close, and keep your pipeline current in [CRM]. This is a [field / inside / hybrid] role carrying a [monthly / quarterly] target.
Experience: [x–y] years. Freshers are [eligible / not eligible] — state which, because sales JDs attract fresher applications at very high volume when this line is missing.
Location and work model: based in [city]; territory covers [areas]. [Field: expect n days a week in the market. Inside: office-based, n days a week.] Travel: [frequency and whether it is reimbursed, and how].
Reports to: [Area Sales Manager / Sales Head]. Team: [size and structure of the territory team].
Compensation: fixed plus variable. State the split, the payout frequency, what triggers variable payment (booked, invoiced, or collected), and whether travel and phone costs are reimbursed or built into the fixed component. Do not describe earnings as unlimited or uncapped unless the plan genuinely has no cap.
To apply: send your resume to [email / apply link] with your current target and last four quarters' attainment. Process: [n] rounds, including a role-play of a first call with a real objection from our market.
The template is the easy half. These are the decisions that decide whether the posting works.
This is the single highest-value edit you can make to a sales JD in this market. Field sales and inside sales are different working lives — travel, hours, physical demands, autonomy, family logistics — and candidates choose deliberately between them. A JD that stays vague, or that says "field/inside" as though the distinction were minor, will fill your funnel with people who are optimising for the other one.
Put it in the summary line, put it again in the location line with the number of days in the market, and say who pays for travel. Attrition in month one and two is very often just this.
"Generate leads" is doing a great deal of hidden work in most sales JDs. A role where marketing delivers qualified inbound and a role where the executive cold-calls from a purchased list are the same job title and completely different work. Experienced closers will ask on the first call; if the JD has already answered honestly, you keep the ones who want that job and lose the ones who would have quit.
Write the actual mix as a rough proportion — "roughly 70% self-sourced outbound, 30% inbound from marketing campaigns" — and update it when it changes.
You may not want to publish numbers, and you do not have to. You should publish the mechanics: whether there is a fixed and variable split, how often variable pays, and — most importantly — whether variable is earned on order booked, invoice raised or payment collected. In markets where collections are slow, that last distinction is the difference between a plan candidates trust and one they resent.
Avoid "unlimited earning potential". Experienced salespeople read it as a signal that the fixed component is low and read past the rest of the JD accordingly.
Signals specific to sales executive applications — not generic screening advice.
Strong closers have options and they read job descriptions commercially. These four things end the read.
Sales resumes are achievement-dense and keyword-poor: they are written in numbers and narrative, not in skill tokens, so keyword matching underperforms on this role more than almost any other. Two adjustments help.
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Stack depth over stack breadth. The JD that attracts engineers who ship and filters out keyword collectors.
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Lifecycle ownership, not talent acquisition with a bigger title. Scope it by headcount supported.
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