A guide to structuring sales interviews: warm up candidates for 5-10 minutes, ask three targeted resume questions, then behavioral questions about drive and core sales skills. Use prompts like "what sacrifices have you made to be successful?" and ask for repeated examples to predict future performance.
That's all about balancing, of course, especially in the current environment, balancing the time that you ask questions of the candidate with attracting the candidate, showing them what's unique about your position and how you really offer something that they can't currently get. But in terms of structuring the interview, first of all, first off, it kind of depends on how much time you have. If you have, say, one hour, two hours, I like to start it with a few minutes, five to 10 minutes at the very beginning, kind of warming the candidate up. Any candidate, naturally, is going to be a little bit nervous for that first one on one interview. Sometimes that's in person, sometimes it might be over zoom, if there's a bit more of a distance, but letting them kind of warm up and kind of get their baseline of behavior to kind of get them to calm down. Then at that point, you know, once the candidates warmed up, if you have not yet done so, I recommend getting into their resume with them and have them walk you through their resume. And for each position that they've held, ask them to answer three questions. Number one, give me the basic job description. Of course, what did you do in that role? Number two, if you were on a sales team, where did you rank on the team? Of course, the competitive person, as you can probably imagine, will know exactly where they ranked. And number three, what got you to move on to the next position? And when you ask that third question, what got you to move on to the next position? I'm sure you've heard over the years, Lars, that sometimes people will have what we might consider to be very guarded answers. Things like, oh, what got me to move on to the next position? Oh, there were some misunderstandings with my supervisor. There were some differences of opinion concerning my salary. You know, things like that. If you find that you're getting what you might consider to be guarded answers, I recommend using what we call the magic wand question. Okay, if we had a magic wand and we could change three things about that job so you would have never wanted to leave, what would those three things be? And you can imagine at that point, you start to get a kernel of the truth. Oh, let's see, my assistant wouldn't have quit, might have gotten paid more. I wouldn't be able to my sales manager to give you something you can start to dig in on. And then, of course, at that point, the key is to find whether or not you can see other examples of that behavior occurring in the past as well. Because the more consistent examples of a behavior we can see previously, the more Reliably, we can predict it will emerge for us going forward, too. So then at that point, once you're through with the resume, then I recommend getting into the behavioral interview questions. Again, the best predictor of future behavior is previous behavior. So during the interview, we want to ask the candidate about behaviors they've engaged in at work that reflect the characteristics that we would like for them to show for us going forward. Looking at the three elements of drive, of course, need for achievement, competitiveness, and optimism. And then also those other core skills that, as I mentioned, we found to be important in just about every sales position that we looked at. Confidence. Does a person have a thick skin? Can they handle rejection? Persuasion? Does the person enjoy selling and negotiating? Will they move that sale from the first call to the second call to the close relationship skills? Is this person comfortable reaching out to other people socially? And then organization? Is this the sort of person who enjoys dotting their I's and crossing their t's, if you will, asking them specific behavioral interview questions about each of those characteristics. Awesome.
Give us some. Some examples. Like maybe, like, what are the top three most revealing or best interview questions? Like, I'm just thinking of, like, what are some? Just like, you've got to ask these three or four questions to every salesperson. They're just amazing. What are the few that come to mind?
Of course, so relative to, say, the three elements of drive, Starting out with need for achievement, again, we want to look for that person with need for achievement who wants to do well for the sake of doing well. So we want to ask the person about that sort of characteristic. One of my favorite questions is, what kinds of sacrifices have you had to make to be successful? What does that person consider to be a sacrifice? Was it maybe they had to work a couple of weekends last year, or was it something more substantial? Now, compare that to the kinds of sacrifices you've seen your top performers have to make over time. Or tell me about the greatest goal you've ever accomplished professionally. Really, have the person describe that to you in detail, and then you can say back to them, you know, you've got to be proud of that. How do you intend to top it? Again, the person high in need for achievement has a plan to top it, and they are excited about the opportunity to tell you about it. For competitiveness. When was the last time you were competitive at work? What did that look like? Again, we want to find the person who just relishes a competition at work, where, even if there's not a competition in place, they will look to create one because they just need to know where they stand up compared to their peers, if you will, for optimism. Tell me about a time when you remain persistent even though everyone else around you gave up. Now, tell me about another time, you know, just getting those consistent examples of people. Those are some of my favorites for the three elements of drive.
