June 11, 2014 in Blog by Dawn Williams

What to expect from a sales interview

How to prepare for a sales interview.
If you’re a sales person, you need to go to that interview prepared.

1. Performances: Elaborate on your performances and get very specific. Your percentage of objectives; did win President’s Club? Did you grow your territory by a number of customers? By a percentage? Get very specific. Saying you did well is not good enough.
2. What did You Sell and to Whom?: Describe your territory, describe your industry. Are you selling to end-users? Are you selling to distributers, resellers? That’s important.
3. How You Built Your Territory?: Was it is by cold-calling? What is by lead generation? Were you at trade shows? You need to talk about your process. How did that funnel get filled?
4. New Business vs. Existing Business: We always want to know about that, because people want to know if you’re a hunter or a farmer.
5. How You Qualified Your Customers: Was it anybody in your territory? Or were you focusing on customers above a certain size, between certain sizes? Get specific about that.
6. Why You Quit: Everyone wants to know that. This is not just a sales interview question, be prepared to talk about it.
7. Why Did You Make the Choices You Made: Some of it could be why you chose the education you chose. You need to be able to justify what you’ve done. They’re going to challenge you, but you have to tough enough to rise to the challenge.
8. Soft Skills: Such as listening skills, emotional intelligence, those things are important. These are specific things to a sales interview.

What did you do? How did you do it? And with whom did you do it? Hope you’re prepared! I’m Dawn Williams from Sirius Personnel. I can be reached on LinkedIn and Twitter. Happy Selling!