How to Dominate Executive Leadership Interviews

Hey, all. Today I want to talk about a framework that you can use to dominate leadership interviews and become more assertive and take control of the dynamic. Now, the framework that I'm talking about is called closer, and it's something that I've adapted from Alex Hermozi, which he uses in a sales context. Closer stands for clarify, label, overview, sell, explain, and reinforce. And I want to share how you can run an executive interview with that concept. So first things first. The C stands for clarify. What does that mean? In the context that we use here, we want to clarify why we're in the room. This gives you an advantage by learning first what the other party cares about most. So you want to use something like, hey, before we get started today, can you give me an idea on what excites you about my background? I suspect it could be my experience at X, Y, or Z. But correct me if I'm wrong, why am I here today? Something along those lines. As we hear what they're interested in. For example, they might say, hey, Jacob, we heard that you do great work with executive leaders. You help them be more assertive, you make them stronger negotiators. And we're really interested in how you do that. Then we move on to the L, which is labeling why they might be interested in that in the first place. It sounds like you might be interested in having some coaching for your executives. You might be interested in the behavioral psychology of my work and how to make your executives stronger negotiators. As an example. Now we're using this to reaffirm, like, is that what you're most interested in? Is that the exciting part of the conversation for you, etc. Now, as we move through the label phase, we're looking for head nods and yeses or corrections or. Actually, what I meant was this. What I'd like to know more about you is X and Y and Z. As we move to the O part of the process, we want to talk about an overview of why that's important to them, what they've done about it, and so on. So as an example, I might say, what are some of the things that you're looking for with your executives when they're negotiating? What are the outcomes that you want? What have you done about it? What's worked? What's not worked? Oh, it looks like you've had a handful of other coaches that must be frustrated or frustrating. What is it that you've done about that? If you're, let's say, a chief revenue officer negotiating and interviewing for a new CRO position, you might say, it looks like you've had a handful of sales leaders in here. What have you liked about them and what has not worked out? So we want to overview next. We want to hear about their stories. They'll often say, yeah, we had someone for a short period, but they were too tactical or they didn't take autonomy and lead the team as we anticipated, or their go to market motion fell flat. Now we want to sell the vacation to them that we're the right solution or we can find the right solution for them that might look something like this. It sounds like, you know, this is important to you. Growth is important to you. Now, fast forward six months. You and I have worked together, established the go to market motion, we're back on track with our revenue targets, and you're walking into a board meeting. How do I make sure that your head is held high as we do that? Now, the key to this is selling some future state vacation where they can visualize what it would be like to work with you in a more optimal or utopian type scenario where the challenges are already solved. You'll notice I didn't do a lot of detail on how to get there. We can earn that later. We're focused first on navigating the conversation, understanding what's important to them. This is also helping us understand what cards they have without necessarily revealing ours. We might also go through the process and ask them questions. And let's go back to the overview piece here. We might ask them questions like, have you thought about hiring somebody less experienced? Have you thought about making a cheaper hire? Have you thought about bringing in an agency? What's stopping you from hiring someone in your network? What we want to overview here is all of their different alternatives. That's going to help us sell a stronger vacation too, because they're giving us all of the clues necessary to sell a stronger vacation that's more pertinent to them. Now, the e explain away any concerns that they have. This is where we want to have strong stories because they're undoubtedly going to ask, well, how are you going to do that? Now in this situation, I like my clients to pull out. I call them arrows in a quiver. It's stories that they've prepared so they can say, in the past, I've seen this be accomplished in XYZ ways. Now, the beautiful thing about this is that it doesn't always need to be your story. Sometimes it could be a story that you've adapted from your network or from others. You might say that you know, I was talking to another CRO the other day and how they overcame this was with X, Y and Z and it sounds like that approach might work for us. What do you think? Now we're explaining away concerns that they have and starting to talk through our actual approach to do that now. The R stands for reinforce. We want to reinforce the positive messaging that we've heard throughout the conversation. We also want to reinforce that. Reinforce that we are the right solution for them or that we know how to get to the right answer. So we might say something like, wow, it makes sense why so and so connected us because it sounds like we're a good fit here. Or that challenge you're talking about with go to market. It makes sense why we're talking today because as I look back on my career, that's where I've made the most impact with others and I suspect that you and I are going to talk plenty about that over the next couple of weeks. So the reinforce message is really important because you're vocalizing that we are aligned and that we are a good fit. Right. So reinforce frequently, but don't be obnoxious about it. You want to hear more tips like this? Maybe study a little bit more about Closer. I would recommend giving Alex Hormozi a follow and taking a look at his sales approach. With that, he goes into a lot of the, let's say, apples to apples and oranges and simplifies the messaging quite a bit for selling any kind of products. And I'm applying it in an interview and a complex negotiation process. Want more tips like this? Like and subscribe? Follow me on LinkedIn or also subscribe to execsandthecity. Com, the newsletter we publish every week. Thanks so much. Take care.