20 Tough Interview Questions for Sales Superstars

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: August 28, 2007
• Category: Recruiting, Screening and Assessment, Business Matters
• Tags: No Tags
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Recruiting by Numbers: Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

1. What are your financial goals? How much money do you want to make this year?
2. How do you get past gatekeepers?
3. How many prospects do you need to cold call to get an appointment? How many calls do you make each day?
4. What’s your philosophy of selling? If you were going to teach me how to sell, what are the top three things I would need to know?
5. Lots of sales people say they will cold call during the interview process. Once they get the job, they make calls diligently for the first two months or so, and then stop or get lazy. How do I know that you will keep hitting the phones to land new clients and meet your goals — without my having to nag you?
6. How do you keep from burning out?
7. What are the steps in the sales process as you define it? How would you estimate the probability of a closed sale at each point in the process?
8. What kind of pipeline reporting do you do?
9. How will you manage the handing off of projects to technical staff?
10. What activities do you carry out, and in what quantities, to generate new clients?
11. Would people say that you’re a “closer”? Why?
12. How long will you need to land our first new client?
13. How do you speed up the sales cycle with a prospect who’s delaying?
14. How do you know if a prospect is qualified?
15. What part of the sales process is least enjoyable to you?
16. Tell me about a time when your boss didn’t think you were performing, and explain how you reacted. Was your boss right? How do you handle conflict and tough feedback?
17. I don’t know much about selling, and really don’t like selling at all. But at the same time, I expect results. Help me understand how — or if — we can work together given this state of affairs.
18. How should we communicate about the pipeline? What is your experience with creating pipeline reports and sales forecasts, then meeting them?
19. Where and how did you learn how to sell?
20. Tell me about a time when you were unsuccessful selling, and what happened next?

Andrew Neitlich, SitePoint