5 Questions to Ask During an Interview for Sales Candidates
5 Questions to Ask During an Interview for Sales Candidates - Your sales staff is one of the most important hires you have to make in your company. If you can’t move your products and services successfully, you will not have much of a business to speak of.
Unfortunately, there is no fool-proof formula for hiring the right salespeople, and most businesses deal with their fair share of duds. They may have seemed promising in the interview, but failed to live up to the image they presented.
But, this does not mean you are completely at the mercy of chance each time you extend a job offer. Learning more effective interview techniques will help you more accurately evaluate candidates, and here are some questions that you should be asking to really see if this person is the right fit for your company.
1. What is the Sales Process at Your Current/Previous Job?
While at the core, all salespeople are doing the same thing and have the same goal, the nature of the sales process varies greatly depending on the industry, and the product or service in question. Don’t make any assumptions that because the person has worked in sales already, their job has adequately prepared her to perform this same function at your company.
This is an open-ended question that will reveal a treasure trove of information necessary for you to determine whether this person could succeed with selling what you sell. You will learn about the complexity of the products he has sold in the past, the type of sales cycle he was working with and much more.
2. Have You Found Greater Success in Developing New Territories or Servicing Existing Clients?
Being a good salesperson is not just about getting that initial order, it is about properly servicing existing clients and making sure they remain clients. Making claims about how much money in sales she has been responsible for does not really tell the whole story.
Perhaps someone else made the sale and she now just manages the customers; or maybe she just makes the sale and someone else handles the servicing. This is a good question because it requires the candidate to pick which one is her stronger suit.
You then ask follow-up questions to flesh out the answer. When choosing a sales candidate, this is important information to know.
3. Can You Provide Examples of Short-and-Long Sales Cycles?
A number of factors influence the cycle of a sale. Sometimes, you can close them quickly, and sometimes, it can take a few months. Unless your business solely involves just one almost all the time, you want candidates experienced doing both.
Being able to close a sale sooner than later is always a good thing. With longer cycles, you want people who are persistent, good at strategizing and can successfully influence multiple decision-makers.
With the exception of being in a line of work that only consisted of short-cycle sales, someone who fails to give any examples may be someone who lacks the skill or personality for longer cycle sales.
5. Can You Identify the Problems in Our Current Sales Process?
One of the primary reasons interviews fail to uncover the best candidates is the tendency to focus on the past—important for sure as previous experience will provide good insight. But, you must also formulate questions that will reveal whether this person can succeed at your company in the present moment.
Make up a sheet outlining a system or process that you know to be flawed—give this to the candidate during the interview and ask her to identify three areas in which problems are likely to occur.
On a related note, make up a sheet outlining the details of a problem this person will actually face should she get hired and ask how she would handle it.
6. Can You See Yourself Here 10 Years from Now?
No matter how great a candidate may seem, there are no guarantees that anyone will be at the same job a decade from now. But, this question can be very helpful in determining whether you think the person would be able to make a career here, or would be likely to leave.
Listen carefully to their answers and if you hear anything that gives the impression they would leave sooner than this, do not hire that person.
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