Sales Manager Interview Questions
About the role
As well as being skilled salespeople in their own right, Sales Managers or VP of Sales are responsible for overseeing the day-today operations and overall strategy of an organisation's sales team. A successful Sales Manager will be able to motivate, mentor and coach their team, as well as analyse data to spot trends and patterns in their team's performance.
Sales manager responsibilities
- Mentor and train salespeople
- Recruit and onboard new team members
- Ensure team hits sales targets
- Report on success
- Analyse and optimise the sales team's performance
- Monitor and improve the sales process
What skills should you be looking for?
A member of your sales team has underachieved on their sales target this quarter. You have been working closely with them to ensure their future pipeline is a lot more solid, so you are confident that things will pick up for them next quarter. However, their morale is at an all time low and it is starting to affect their work rate and proactivity. What do you say to the sales person to raise their morale?
You and the team have had a hard quarter and have missed sales targets. You know the team has worked hard, but you market forces beyond your control has meant that several large deals have slipped into next quarter. You have to deliver the news to the executive team in your next catch up, what do you say?
You are about to have your 1-on-1 weekly pipeline review with one of the sales people in your team. What data do you need before the meeting and what do you ask the sales person to take you through in the meeting? What is the objective of the meeting?
You have been reviewing the recordings and conversion data for one of your sales people. It looks like their conversion rate for taking a lead from an initial discovery conversation to a demo of the product is significantly lower than the team average and industry benchmarks. What do you do?
A new sales blocker has been coming up more and more in the sales conversations, derailing several large deals recently. The sales blocker is associated with a missing feature in the product, which other competitors have started to offer as part of their software. How do you feed this information back to the product team?
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