Tom FerrariVP - GTM & Technology Search, UltraTalent · Placing elite sellers & builders at startups

Unlock Top Sales Talent: The Innovator Interview Question

28 Jun 2025 · 2 min

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In this segment, the speaker explains how to evaluate the "innovator" characteristic when hiring sales professionals such as SDRs, AEs, and solutions engineers. He defines the trait as the ability to influence process change, be creative, and achieve better results beyond one's formal responsibilities. The core interview question he recommends is: "What’s something you did that impacted the team that wasn’t part of your job description?" He discusses why this question works across any background, highlighting examples like retail managers who manage P&L and staff yet still introduce creative, cross‑regional improvements. The speaker also shares a personal anecdote from his early career—streamlining an ERP workflow while in a sales‑operations role—to illustrate the kind of initiative he looks for. The overall message is that top‑1% sales talent consistently goes above and beyond their defined remit, and identifying these nuggets can help pinpoint future leaders.

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All right, let's move on to I and C. Yeah, so I is, you know, you can call this innovator, innovation, and actually Salesforce, when I was there for 4 years, it was one of their core values. And the way I'd look at this is the ability to influence process change, be creative, and do something different in order to get a better result. And I think the easiest way to probably ask this is, again, it's agnostic. You don't need to have been in a particular profession, but you could simply ask a candidate, What's something you did that impacted the team that wasn't part of your job description? So, when you think about what I love about, you know, trying to find, let's say, the leaders of tomorrow, the AEs or the solutions engineers of tomorrow, if they're gonna be a successful SDR, they not only do really well in their role, but they're doing additional, they're going above and beyond. And I think if you can identify those people who potentially were a retail manager, you know, and they were running stores, and they've got a P&L, they've got to manage staff, but then they're doing something creative, or they're doing something that impacted the whole business across regions that wasn't part of their remit. Well, does that mean they'd then go and do the same thing? And there's a lot of people who would just live by the job description, but I think if you're looking for that top 1% talent, they're great sort of nuggets of information you can sort of pull out from someone. And it's something I did in my early days within a career. Whilst you might have, I remember, a sales operations role, this was just before I got into sales, and it was about, delivering equipment on-site to deliver for financial services. So, you imagine it was dealing with suppliers, arranging logistics, but then we had an ERP platform, and I started to work on the workflow and the process to refine this down, so we can actually make it more efficient. Not part of the remit, but just something I did at an early point to really, you know, sharpen the sword. So, I think innovator is really important. That's good.