Sales Interview

In today’s evolving landscape, finding the right talent for your sales organization is critical. A successful interview is the first step in this process.

Here are 5 interviewer mistakes to avoid:

Don’t prepare enough

Talk too much

Don’t pause

Let the candidate off the hook

Don’t dig into past experience

If you’re looking for key questions to ask during an interview, here are 10 you’ll want to consider:

Tell me how you organize, plan, and prioritize your work
Share an experience in which you successfully shared a difficult piece of information
Would you consider analyzing data or information a strength? How so?
Provide an example when you were able to prevent a problem because you foresaw the reaction of another person
Describe an experience in which your ability to work well with others and reconcile differences helped your company or employer

Provide an example of when you were persistent in the face of obstacles

Name a time when you identified strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions to problems. What was the impact?
Provide an example of when you were persistent in the face of obstacles
Share an experience when you applied new technology or information in your job. How did it help your company?
Provide an example of a time when you were able to demonstrate excellent listening skills. What was the situation and outcome?
Share an example of a time you had to gather information from multiple sources. How did you determine which information was relevant?

How to succeed in enterprise sales

While there are many factors to successful enterprise selling, there are 4 top principles to consider. In simple terms, those 4 principles are: know your customers, know your products, know your solutions and build long-term relationships. During an interview, ask a candidate about these directly (or indirectly) to get a sense of their familiarity with the principes.

Know your customers, you need to research the marketplace and your customer, of course. Even more importantly, you need to experience your customers’ products and services. All the reading and research in the world won’t match actually experiencing your customers’ products and services.
It’s imperative that you understand the features and functionality of the products you’re selling. This can be especially challenging as the product you’re selling may evolve over the course of the sales cycle. Don’t rely on others in your organization to explain the value of your product to your customer. You must have this knowledge and the ability to expertly explain the features, benefits, and unique advantages of your product.
You must know how your products can become solutions to your customers’ needs. It’s not up to your customer to connect the dots for you. You need to be able to articulate how your product delivers solutions to real business problems. Often this means being able to provide relevant case studies and success stories at the right time and in the right words.
Successful selling almost always requires the building and nurturing of strong, long-term relationships.

What are the challenges of enterprise selling?

There’s no denying, enterprise selling entails many formidable challenges. During the interview, discuss these challenges openly with the candidate. Understanding their level of comfort with the challenges is an important part of the interview process. Here are just a few.

First, enterprise sales cycles are nearly always lengthy, from many months to oftentimes more than a year.
Second, the discovery process is far more complicated and involved than that required for a smaller, transactional sale.
Third, the requirement for social proof and projected ROI is far more important in enterprise selling than in transactional selling.
Fourth, things change! Over the course of a lengthy enterprise sales cycle, the customer’s business, its decision-makers, the external business environment, your products, your pricing, your sales team and the positioning of your competitors may change, all with the potential to impact the outcome of your enterprise sales efforts.
Fifth, enterprise selling almost always means multiple decision-makers and often the very real and active presence of office politics. It can be challenging to identify key influencers from the outside and then win their support. Sixth, once you do identify the right players, you may have just one shot to secure their interest, their support, and their business.

How can Showpad Make Your Sales Hires Stronger?

Showpad is a global leader in revenue enablement technology, providing teams with a modern selling solution for maximizing hybrid sales. In more than 50 countries, customers rely on the Showpad platform to empower their teams to be at their best. Showpad has been named a Strong Performer by Forrester’s Wave for Sales Content Solutions, recognized as a top 10 software company by G2, and listed in Deloitte’s Fast 50 and Inc Magazine’s 2019 Best Workplaces.

Showpad will support your current needs and future growth because we help prepare sellers by making it easy to find the latest on-brand content in a central location for every opportunity. Showpad also supports sales onboarding, training, and coaching to maximize teams’ productivity, increase active selling time, and accelerate sales rep onboarding time.

Sellers can more effectively engage buyers by leveraging Showpad to more efficiently prepare for and personalize sales presentations. Sellers can easily share the most relevant content with buyers from any device and collaborate with all stakeholders in one branded location
By tracking their buyer’s level of interest through Showpad insights, sellers can optimize their performance, shorten their sales cycles, and have increased visibility into buyer intentions
Sales leaders can identify and replicate their top sellers’ behavior to scale success, decreasing the overall long-term cost of sales
Marketing can leverage our bottom of funnel insights and buyer insights helping marketing identify the content and experiences that engage buyers and drive revenue
Administrators can support content management and distribution of content as well as sales training efforts at scale from one unified platform, decreasing the administrative burden of launching and maintaining a Sales Enablement program

Want to learn more about Showpad?