Hiring 101 — What makes a good Sales Person?

For many reasons, hiring a sales person is different to hiring a developer.

Since sales is an external-facing role, you have to think about whether or not you’d want this candidate to represent your company. Does she make eye contact with you? How are her interpersonal and communication skills? Where’s her confidence level? All of these things speak to a level of gravitas. Are they authentic? Do they build rapport easily?

Example questions:

“Give me your current elevator pitch.”

Have them “sell” their current product to you. Are you left wanting to buy it?

“What does our company do, and why is that exciting?”

How does our product fit within the market?

“What do you look for when hiring other sales people?”

A nice meta question, that will give you insight into how the candidate rates themselves and may give you another line of questioning.

“Tell me about your performances at previous companies.”

What is your deal size, on average and range? (A great sales person will be specific about metrics and goals, the best will be able to give you the exact numbers)

“Tell me about your biggest deal in the last year.”

Talk me through how it happened. How could you repeat this success?

“When was the last time you were competitive?”

You’re looking for their eyes to light up when they answer.

Customer service interviews

Example questions:

• Tell me about a time you received great service. What made it stand-out to you?
• What service-level targets should we be setting?
• What kinds of tools should we be using?
• What kind of documentation should we create?
• How do you prioritise a demanding queue of customer requests?
• How would you effectively collaborate with the product team?
• Tell me about times you: had to handle an irate customer, went above and beyond for customer, circumvented policy to serve a client
• You might want to try a role-play and have a teammate call the candidate with a difficult customer issue, and see how she handles it. How quickly does she find a solution? Does she use any pre-existing materials or figure it out herself? How does she leave the customer?

Originally published at thekingsshilling.io.