Interviews are nerve-wracking enough on their own, but sales interviews are notorious for having outlandish questions, role-playing exercises and even the dreaded “sell me this pen” scenario. Even the most experienced sales reps can get caught off guard when trying to answer a difficult sales interview question if they’re not expecting it.
Before your next sales interview, take some time to review both common and tricky interview questions. The more you prepare for these difficult questions, the more confident and composed you will be when it comes time to answer these questions during the actual interview. Understanding the motive behind why employers and hiring managers ask these questions can also help you shape an appropriate response.
How do you structure your work week?
Hiring managers and employers will often ask this question to determine if a candidate is self-driven and has the ability to efficiently organize their week. It’s important for sales reps to be able to manage their time since so much of their time is spent outside the office and without direct contact with a sales manager or leader.
An ideal answer should be specific and describe which tasks are performed on certain days and why.
For example:
My heavy prospecting days are Monday and Tuesday and I use Thursdays and Fridays to set up appointments and meetings with prospects and clients. I make sure all cold-calling and prospecting are completed early in the day and in the week so I can have my calendar filled with appointments for the remainder of the week.
Saying that you prospect every day or that you use one whole day for administrative tasks is not going to cut it. There needs to be an exact plan and reasoning that makes sense for your answers. If you’re prospecting every day there doesn’t seem to be much of a plan, and using an entire day for administrative tasks is money lost.
What is your sales strategy?
Asking a candidate about their sales strategy can help reveal a lot about how a candidate thinks and approaches their job. Hiring managers want candidates who have a solid process and can bring that with them into a new job.
When answering this question, make sure to give specifics on the number of cold calls, appointments and demos you’re making on a weekly basis and also provide your conversion rate. You need to know exactly what you need to be doing each day, week and month in order to make your numbers.
If you’re not able to be specific on your numbers, then employers will pick up on this. Sales reps live and die by these numbers and if you don’t know yours, it shows you’re just flying by the seat of your pants and don’t have a real strategy in place.
Why did you leave your last job?
There are many reasons why sales reps have left or are in the process of leaving their current sales jobs. And while an employer wants to know the reason, they’re mainly on the lookout for two main scenarios:
- Whether a candidate was terminated or not
- The candidate left before having a new position secured
If a candidate was terminated, then most likely the candidate was not performing or making their numbers. If the second situation is true, then a hiring manager will question the decision-making ability of the candidate.
Knowing this information, it’s best for a candidate to respond to the question as positively as they can while also being honest.
If you were terminated, talk about any big sales you made while working at the company and what you learned. Don’t deny that you were terminated since many companies will ask for a reference from your past employer, but do try to keep things light and as upbeat as possible. If you left your company before having a new position secured, make sure you’re to talk about the experience positively.
This is always going to be a difficult question to answer, but don’t make things worse by talking negatively about your previous employer or dwelling on the answer for too long.
Practicing your answers to these difficult interview questions will help you be prepared for any questions your interviewer asks. Just remember to be confident, positive, and specific in all of your answers in order to stand out to the hiring manager.
