Account Executive 2 - SMB Merchants

About the role :

Groupon is an experiences marketplace that connects people to the best their city has to offer. Through our platform, we help local businesses grow, strengthen customer relationships, and unlock new revenue opportunities. Our Merchant Development team plays a critical role in ensuring these partnerships thrive long-term.

As an Account Executive on Groupon’s Local team, you’ll own and grow a diverse portfolio of local merchants across categories such as food & drinks, wellness, beauty, spa, fitness, and home services.

You’ll be responsible for managing multi-location accounts, ensuring their deals perform, identifying optimization opportunities, and structuring new campaigns that drive sustainable growth and profitability.

This role requires a strong account manager with commercial acumen — someone who can combine relationship management, data analysis, negotiation, and operational execution to deliver long-term value for both Groupon and our merchant partners.

You’ll drive sustainable portfolio growth through retention, optimization, and expansion.

North Star :

Maximize merchant lifetime value by optimizing deal performance, strengthening long-term partnerships, and structuring profitable, repeatable growth for both merchants and Groupon.

What You’ll Do :

• Manage and grow a portfolio of merchants, including higher-value and multi-location accounts.
• Own the full merchant lifecycle, including performance strategy, renewal negotiation, expansion, and reactivation.
• Use data-driven insights to improve live deal performance (pricing, structure, inventory, timing, margin).
• Proactively identify opportunities to launch new campaigns aligned with merchant objectives and marketplace demand.
• Act as the primary point of contact for your merchant portfolio, ensuring high satisfaction and retention.
• Analyze merchant performance metrics (GP, conversion rate, repeat rate, margin contribution) to recommend strategic improvements.
• Partner cross-functionally to ensure seamless execution and performance.
• Maintain accurate portfolio tracking and forecasting in Salesforce, consistently achieving and exceeding monthly revenue targets.
• Apply AI-generated insights to identify optimization opportunities, prioritize high-impact accounts, improve campaign structuring, and enhance CRM accuracy.

What You Bring : 

• 3+ years of experience in account management, sales, or business development, ideally in digital, marketplace, or local services environments.
• Proven ability to manage a larger and more complex portfolio of accounts with revenue ownership.
• Strong commercial acumen — able to assess deal profitability, margin impact, and merchant ROI.
• Experience negotiating renewals, upsells, or repeat campaigns.
• Ability to interpret performance data and translate insights into actionable recommendations.
• Strong relationship-building and communication skills with business owners and multi-site operators.
• Familiarity with Salesforce or similar CRM tools preferred.
• Comfort using AI-enabled tools to drive smarter prioritization, insights, and account planning.

Who You Are : 

• A commercially driven relationship owner who thrives on growing existing partnerships.
• Strategic and analytical — you balance data insights with merchant empathy.
• Results-oriented and accountable for portfolio performance.
• Organized and disciplined in managing a high-volume, high-value book of business.
• Collaborative and proactive, working cross-functionally to unlock growth opportunities.
• Passionate about helping local businesses succeed while driving sustainable profitability.

How We Operate

At Groupon, we're building a culture of extreme ownership, speed, impact, simplicity, and discipline. These aren't aspirational values - they're how we expect everyone to show up every day:

Extreme Ownership – One owner per outcome, no passengers, no excuses. We avoid accountability theater; we don't blame teams or create shared ownership that diffuses responsibility. When something goes wrong, we look in the mirror first. We escalate early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure everyone knows who owns what.

Speed Over Comfort – We ship fast and learn faster. Perfect is too slow. We make fast, reversible decisions, normalize iteration, encourage early demos and prototypes, and admit mistakes openly. Bureaucracy and endless debate are the enemy. We clear bottlenecks and accelerate decisions across functions.

Impact Obsessed – We focus only on what moves the metrics that matter. We set metric-first goals, direct effort to high-value work, avoid feel-good activity, and use data and customer/merchant stories to guide decisions. We don't confuse effort with impact or tolerate low-ROI work that erodes trust. We drive team ROI and raise the quality bar by prioritizing ruthlessly.

Simplify to Scale – Complexity kills; simplicity scales. We build lean, scalable processes, remove noise, champion clarity and efficient ways of working. We drive cross-org simplification, push automation and tooling, question every layer, and ensure systems work for diverse voices - especially those closest to customers and merchants.

Disciplined – We do more with less; constraints breed creativity. We make ROI-based decisions, enforce resource discipline, set clear priorities, make durable decisions, and uphold integrity in data and commitments. We use constraints to drive innovation, build efficient operating rhythms, lift team productivity, and protect trust in trade-offs. We prioritize long-term value and create organizational leverage that scales efficiently.

In This Role, These Principles Mean :

• Owning your portfolio performance end-to-end, with clear accountability for GP, retention, and deal quality.
• Moving fast to launch, test, and optimize campaigns based on data and AI insights.
• Prioritizing high-impact merchants and actions that drive measurable ROI.
• Simplifying processes and leveraging tools to scale efficiently.
• Operating with discipline in forecasting, CRM accuracy, and commercial decision-making.

How We Measure Your Success : 

• Consistent achievement of monthly and quarterly GP and revenue targets from your managed portfolio.
• Merchant retention and repeat deal rate.
• Portfolio growth (upsell, cross-sell, expansion of campaigns).
• Improvement in deal margins and performance metrics.
• Accurate forecasting and disciplined CRM hygiene.
• Effective and consistent use of AI-enabled tools to enhance account strategy, prioritization, and performance optimization.

Base Salary: The base salary range for this Account Executive II role in Chicago is $43,400 – $60,000, with on-target earnings (OTE) of approximately $60,760 – $84,000 through Groupon’s Sales Incentive Plan. Commission is uncapped and tied to individual performance against quota. Final base salary is determined by experience, skills, and market factors.

• Full benefits package including Medical, Dental, Vision, EAP, 401(k) Match, ESPP, Life & Disability Insurance, FSAs, and more.
• Real impact on a high-visibility category.