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from my perspective based on working at a startup in a sales meeting setting role:

- there are two classes of tech salesmen - the lower level meeting setting monkey (business development representative/sales development representative, they are the same thing), and the higher level deal closer (account executive), keep in mind the account executive will still most likely be responsible for generating some of his own pipeline, he's just also getting pipeline from the meetings set by the lower level monkeys

- based on my experience I personally think that this model of the selling being split up is kind of retarded but that's just me

- no idea what recruiting looks like, I worked for a startup, I would assume most startups will recruit on an as needed basis, but with something like Oracle I'm sure that they have more of a structured recruiting process, I can't be of help here

- I did a lot of cold emailing to set up meetings and not that much cold calling, most companies my understanding is that you are doing a lot of cold calling. I wouldn't say you are building actual relationships

- depends but you're normally talking to someone decently high up, just depends on what you are selling though, you're probably either talking to someone who is high up in the department that your product is going to be used by, or someone just high up in the company if it is a small company, that was my experience but it could be different at other companies, might depend on how expensive the product is too, think about it if you're selling something then you need to get that sale approved by someone at the company that you are selling to, in order to approve a purchase that person has to have some power on some level to decide to buy new products, especially if it is a really expensive new product, I think at the bigger companies sometimes the types of accounts that you are prospecting into are split up though, like you may see a small biz account executive/mid market account executive/enterprise account executive where you start with working with smaller accounts and then as you progress in sales you get the opportunity to work with bigger accounts, not exactly sure though, I worked for a small startup not a big company

- prospective client usually just wants to talk about business, the product, how the product can help them, the current state of their own company, etc. you don't usually just chat about whatever based on the meetings that I've sat in on, I was a meeting setting monkey, I didn't handle any meetings, but I sat in on a lot of initial meetings

- inputting vs talking to people depends on the company but unless you're working for a really small company you're not going to spend a ton of time just inputting information into a database, you're going to spend a little bit of time doing that kind of stuff but you will spend more time trying to get meetings scheduled or conducting meetings if you are higher level

- hours depends on the company but mine was 9-5 monday-friday

- my comp was $40k + bonus, you're probably not going to find a legit job much lower than that, that was a couple of years ago, big company comp is probably higher, it's also COL dependent of course. no idea what account executive comp was at my company since I wasn't one, you've got to be careful with total comp when you're an AE though because a lot of your comp is performance based I believe based on my limited understanding, so you might get told for example that your OTE (on target earnings - total earnings if you hit quota basically) will be a certain number, but you only actually make that much if you hit your quota, and maybe 40% of the account executives aren't hitting their quota, so those 40% aren't actually making the OTE number

happy to answer any other questions