Account Executive Interview Questions
About the role
Sales or Account Executives act as a bridge between a company and its customers.
They not only sell products to interested leads but also remain the key point of communication to inform customers about new products, answer questions and build relationships. Account Executives need to be resilient and empathetic as well as excellent, persuasive communicators.
Account executive responsibilities
- Onboarding new customers
- Reporting on customer retention
- Generating sales opportunities
- Working closely with salespeople to improve the handover process and deepen the relationships already built
- Writing and sharing stories of customers’ success to help others see the values
What skills should you be looking for?
It is the end of a tough quarter and you have under achieved on your sales target. Your sales manager has organised a 1-on-1 with you to review your pipeline.
Although things haven't gone your way this quarter, you're confident that you have laid the groundwork for a good next quarter. What do you say to your manager when they ask you about your performance and how next quarter looks?
You've just gotten off of your third cold call in a row, where the person you have called has been unreasonably rude to you on the phone. You have planned to continue cold calling for the rest of the morning, but you are feeling discouraged now. What do you do?
Your last three deals that you have committed to pipeline have fallen through at the last minute. Describe the impact that this has on the team and the business. Detail three deal indicators that flag whether a deal is likely to come in and describe the proactive steps you can take to understand the state of these indicators and influence them.
The first part of an introductory sales call between an account executive and a lead is typically spent listening to and understanding the lead's pain points relative to the services we offer. This process is called discovery and is key to understanding whether we can match the lead with our solution, and how we can position the solution relative to the things that the lead cares about the most.
You are on an introductory sales call and despite your best efforts, the lead does not want to talk about their problems, they just want to see a demo of the solution. What do you do in this situation and how do you ascertain the information you need from the lead?
How would you structure a 30 minute introductory sales call with a lead? What would you try to learn, what would the objectives of the call be and how would you judge if it was a success?
What are structured interview questions?
Structured questions (or work samples) are highly predictive, job-specific questions designed to simulate parts of a job.
Structured work sample questions are the most predictive form of assessment you can use. Why? Because they directly test for skills by asking candidates to think as if they were already in the job.
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Diversity
Testing for skills instead of just experience makes interviews a more inclusive process. 60%+ of candidates hired through our process would've been missed using CVs/traditional interviews - most of whom are from underrepresented groups.
Accuracy
By simulating tasks that would realistically occur in the role, you can see how candidates would think and work should they get the job.What could be more predictive than having candidates do small parts of the job before actually getting it?
Candidate experience
Candidates genuinely enjoy being given a chance to showcase their ability - this is why we have a 9/10 average candidate experience rating (including unsuccessful candidates).
Decide on the skills you’re looking for
Choose 6-8 core skills required for success in the role. These can be a mix of hard, technical skills as well as soft skills and general working characteristics.You could also include one or two of your organisation's most relevant values.
Think of scenarios that would test these skills
Next, come up with either everyday tasks or rarer, more challenging scenarios that would test some of these skills. They can be day-to-day duties, bigger projects or specific dilemmas that a candidate may realistically face. Should they get the job.
Pose scenarios hypothetically to create your questions
Instead of your typical ‘tell me a time when’ questions, ask candidates what they would do if faced with a given scenario.It's not that experience doesn't have any value… it's just more predictive to test directly for skills, without making assumptions based on background.
Give yourself scoring criteria
Want to make more data-driven hiring decisions? Score candidates against set criteria.We’d recommend starting out with a simple 1-5 star scale and a few bullet points noting what a good, mediocre and bad answer might include.
Use review panels
Having team members join your interviews will result in fairer, more accurate scores.Three is the magic number - you’ll start seeing diminishing return after that