Free sample: the Role Primer

This is a real module from the kit, exactly as it appears in Notion, minus the trackers. It's Module 1 of 5: the Role Primer. Read it, use it, and if it helps, the rest of the kit works the same way.

💨 The job in one breath

You find organisations with a problem the cloud can solve, build the case with them, bring in the right specialists, and stay with it until the contract is signed and the customer is actually using what they bought.

An AWS Account Executive looks after a territory, a segment or a named list of customers. A Greenfield role focuses on organisations that spend little or nothing with AWS today, so most of the work is winning new logos.

👂 What interviewers are listening for

☁️ Explain cloud value like a human

Pick each theme and practise explaining it to a non-technical buyer in under a minute. Tick it once you can.

• ☐ Pay for what you use. Swap big upfront hardware costs for a running cost that follows demand. They care about cash flow.
• ☐ Speed. New environments in minutes, not months of procurement. They care about getting to market first.
• ☐ Scale. Handle a spike without paying for peak capacity all year. They care about staying up when it's busy.
• ☐ Global reach. Run close to customers in lots of regions. They care about performance and where data lives.
• ☐ Focus. Hand routine work like servers and patching to the provider. They care about their team building the product.
• ☐ Innovation. Ready-made building blocks for data, AI and analytics. They care about new revenue.

🧱 The basics you should be comfortable with

Nobody will quiz you like an engineer, but you should be able to talk about:

• The main building blocks: compute, storage, databases, networking, security, analytics and AI
• The difference between migrating, modernising and building something new
• The usual objections (security, cost predictability, skills gaps and lock-in) and how they tend to get answered
• Who's in the buying group: the CIO or CTO, the CFO, security, procurement and whoever owns the problem

Bonus points: open a free-tier account and do one short hands-on tutorial. "I set up a small environment myself to see what the customer goes through" is a strong line, and it'll be true.

🕵️ Your customer research routine

Run these five questions on any company before a case study or role play.

1. What do they sell, and who buys it?
2. What's changing in their market right now?
3. Where is technology slowing them down or costing them money?
4. Who inside the company owns that problem?
5. What would a small first win look like?

⏱️ Write your 60-second intro

Your answer to "Tell me about yourself", in three beats.

• ☐ Said it out loud in under 60 seconds

What the full product adds 🎁

• 📖 Module 2: Story Bank. All 16 Leadership Principles through a seller's eyes, guided STAR templates and a story database with a strength bar that fills up as you write.
• 🧩 Module 3: Question Patterns. 29 behavioural and sales patterns, what a strong answer shows, and a daily practice view.
• 🗓️ Module 4: Loop Game Plan. How the recruiter call, phone screen and loop run, a planner for every round and a checklist for the day.
• 🔄 Module 5: The End-to-End Gap. How to show you can carry a deal on your own, from prospecting to renewal.
• 🃏 Day-of Cheat Sheet. A printable one-pager for your intro, top five stories and the numbers you need to know cold.
• 📊 The trackers. A story pipeline board, an interview calendar and a readiness scoreboard that updates itself: stories by stage, patterns practised and stories per principle.
• ✅ Everything editable. The tick boxes on this page become real Notion to-dos, and the intro boxes are yours to write in.

Principled Pitch is independent and has no connection with Amazon or AWS. Amazon publishes the official Leadership Principles on its careers site.