Sales Manager vs. Account Executive: who sees what
A side-by-side of what each role sees and can do across companies, opportunities, goals, and campaigns.
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The CRM has two working levels inside the sales team: an Account Executive can read the whole CRM but works (and can only edit) their own book, while sales leadership sees and administers everything. Here's the practical difference, side by side: what an account executive can see, and what they can change.
Two ways to be "leadership"
Sales leadership isn't a single role. It's anyone who is a Tenant Admin, anyone with the Sales Manager role, or anyone else with a sales-leadership flag turned on for their profile. That last option means a Tenant Admin can grant leadership-level CRM visibility to someone without changing their underlying role. Whichever path got them there, all three are treated identically by the CRM. Two limits: the Finance role can't hold the flag (moving someone to Finance clears it), and the flag never opens commissions to a role outside Account Executive, Sales Manager and Tenant Admin.
Side-by-side
| Area | Account Executive | Sales Manager / leadership |
|---|---|---|
| Companies | Can open and read every company; owns and works their book (own + co-owned + the unowned prospect pool) | Every company in the CRM, plus assignment rights |
| Opportunities | Sees every opportunity on the board and company records; creates and edits opportunities only on companies in their own book. An opportunity they own on another rep's company is view only, and a teammate's opportunity on their own company is theirs to edit | Every opportunity, any owner, view and edit |
| Reports, the Sales category | Their own numbers; the scorecard opens as My scorecard | Everyone's, plus the whole-team rollup |
| Sales home | "Your Day", own pipeline, follow-ups, goal progress, AI coaching | Team cockpit, leaderboard, team pipeline, whole-team numbers, with a toggle back to their own day |
| Company/owner assignment | Can claim an unowned prospect; cannot reassign an owned company | Can assign, reassign, or add co-owners on any company |
| Sales goals | Views own progress only | Sets and edits goals for any rep or the whole team |
| Campaigns | Can send to up to 25 recipients without approval; larger or marketing-class sends require approval | Approves or rejects any pending campaign, of any size, from any AE |
Full CRM: every account, without running the team
A Tenant Admin can turn on Full CRM for a staff member with CRM access who is an Account Executive, a Service Manager, a Project Manager or an Engineer. The vCIO role comes with Full CRM already on. It is for someone who works every account without leading the sales team, such as the person who runs your Business Reviews, and they keep everything their role already allows. Sales Managers and Tenant Admins already have more than it opens, so Users & roles shows Included for them instead of a switch.
- Opens, on every account in the workspace: companies, including creating one and claiming an unowned prospect; contacts; opportunities; notes, including editing a teammate's; Business Reviews; tags and your workspace's own company fields; campaigns, sequences and lists; prospecting and handwritten cards; the signals on a company page; and the account's contracts, billed items, ticket time and profitability figures as an Account Executive sees them.
- Website leads: they see and work every lead on the Leads board. They are not added to lead routing, so no lead is assigned to them automatically.
- Business Reviews: taking over a teammate's draft in progress, or rebuilding a review a teammate finished, asks first, and nothing is written until they confirm. A rebuild keeps the teammate's wording edits. The account manager gets a notification the first time anyone other than them saves a review on their account.
- On an account they don't own, the owner, customer status, revenue figures and PSA link stay as they are. A teammate's opportunity keeps its owner, its company and its PSA link, and Full CRM does not let them delete it. A website lead keeps whoever it is routed to.
- Never opens: commissions, in any view; running the sales team (goals, pipeline and field setup, coaching, campaign approvals, reassigning owners, managing the tag list, and the deletes kept for leadership); and the team's performance views, such as the team pipeline dashboard, forecasts, stage velocity, the leaderboard and rep scorecards. Reports shows them the reports their role already sees. Raw cost rates and the per-technician cost breakdown stay with Tenant Admins.
- Your PSA: a Project Manager's or Service Manager's changes go over when they save, as any manager's do. An Account Executive's change on an account outside their own book, and any change an Engineer or vCIO makes, is saved in Current and goes over with the next scheduled sync, opportunity changes included when the company is already in your PSA. Depending on your PSA, that sync may not create a new note or a new contact there.
- Only a Tenant Admin can turn it on, and nobody can turn it on for themselves. It stays on when the person moves to another staff role and turns off if they become a Partner.
The companies list filter
On the Companies list, an Account Executive gets three filters: All, Mine, and Unowned. "All" genuinely shows every company in the workspace. Reading any account is allowed by design; it's editing that stays limited to your own book. "Mine" focuses the list on your book, and "Unowned" shows the claimable prospect pool. The Opportunities board works the same way: every opportunity in the workspace is visible, with a Mine chip to focus on just your own.
Campaign approval in practice
Any Account Executive can send a small campaign (25 recipients or fewer) on their own approval. Anything larger, or any campaign flagged as marketing rather than a service notice, goes into a pending-approval queue that only sales leadership can see and act on. An AE who opens the Approvals tab on a campaign they can't approve sees a blocked state, not the queue itself.
For the mechanics of ownership and claiming, see "Company ownership and the account executive book." For how goals and progress work, see "Setting sales goals and tracking progress." For the full tenant-wide role model beyond sales, see "Roles & permissions: who sees what."