30 Sales Interview Questions to Hire the Best Salespeople
- June 30, 2022
Salespeople are skilled at connecting with people, empathizing with frustrations, and overcoming obstacles. They can apply those same sales tactics to crushing their interview and landing an offer.
This isn’t a bad thing – but it does make it difficult for hiring managers to narrow down candidates and understand who’s the best fit for the company and role.
In order to convert top talent and improve employee retention, you need to ask questions that put applicants to the test. Asking the right questions will make the best candidates stand out as you search for your next sales hire.
30 Interview Questions To Ask Potential Sales Candidates
The right interview questions prompt hopeful candidates to sell their skills, knowledge, experience, personality, and drive, and reveal whether or not they’ll be a good fit.
Here are the top 30 interview questions that will help you find candidates who are a good fit for your organization and the sales profession:
1. What is your personal sales process?
It’s important to understand the candidate’s approach to selling – which is why this is one of the most crucial questions to ask in a sales interview. They need to be able to demonstrate how they pitch, their strategy for reaching prospects and nurturing leads, and how to adjust their sales process as needed.
2. How do you decide a prospect isn’t a good match?
To meet sales quotas, sales reps need to be able to identify a worthy lead from a poor match. This question helps you understand what their criteria are, what lead qualification skills and practices they have, and how they decide where to focus their efforts.
3. When you lose a sale, how do you follow up with that prospect?
The number one rule in sales is to follow up – and then follow up again.
Sales reps have to anticipate and embrace rejection. This question is an opportunity to dive into the specifics and judge whether or not they’re an ambitious go-getter.
4. Describe a time when you received constructive feedback. How did you react?
A great sales rep is someone who can digest constructive feedback and use it to improve. They recognize their areas of opportunity and dedicate themselves to growing.
An ideal response is that the candidate reflects on and absorbs feedback well, and uses it to deliver better results moving forward.
5. How did your last product or service benefit customers?
Good sellers don’t just talk about features or flashy elements – they actually understand how their products solve a particular problem and fulfills a requirement. Whether they provide a general overview or use this as an opportunity to show off their pitching skills, it demonstrates how well they understood the impact of what they were selling.
6. How much time did you spend nurturing customers vs. looking for new clients in your last sales role?
Both nurturing and pursuing customers are vital to sales. While some companies and roles prioritize one over the other, it’s best to seek out someone who demonstrates the ability to balance both.
7. Would you rather sign a guaranteed $10,000 deal or have a shot at a $100,000 deal?
This question is common, and the answer says a lot about the candidate– will they always go the safe route, or are they intrigued by bigger, riskier numbers? Does their thought process align with your company’s strategy?
The ideal answer is that they would be able to identify the opportunity for both, spend the proper amount of time on each, and adjust their approach accordingly. A great salesperson can flex their abilities to close nearly any sized deal.
8. What’s more important: meeting quota or keeping customers happy?
This question sheds light on the candidate’s sales philosophy. Ideally, you’re hoping to hear that candidates understand it’s a matter of good balance.
If you hit your quotas but your clients are unhappy and they drop off, you might not be reaching your quota for much longer. But if you aren’t hitting quota, it may be a sign that customers aren’t satisfied or convinced of your product’s worth. This is a great opportunity to open up the conversation about other variables and considerations.
9. What sales-related accomplishment are you most proud of?
This is a great opportunity for candidates to talk themselves up and show off their proudest moments. You can take this question a step further by following up with questions that help you understand the work environment and actions that empowered them to perform well.
10. Why sales?
It’s rare to find someone who has known all their life that they wanted to go into sales. But many discover their skills and eventually realize they’ve got what it takes to succeed.
Dig deeper into why they were drawn to a sales career and understand their motivation. This can help you uncover what drives them and what they want from their career.
11. What’s your favorite part of sales? What’s your least favorite part?
This is another opportunity to understand what motivates them, what they find rewarding, what comes effortlessly to them, and how they power through lull periods. It reveals which aspects of the job will come naturally to them and which area you may need to provide additional training and support.
12. What's something you've learned lately?
You want to hire sales reps who are eager to learn better selling strategies and strengthen their skills? This question helps you find those sellers.
Listen to how they describe what they’ve learned and which resources they used to learn about it. No matter how much sales training you provide, you can’t train someone to have a thirst for knowledge – it’s smart to hire a self-starter who takes their learning and growth seriously.
13. What motivates you?
Self-motivation is critical, especially for salespeople. While other questions looked at why they chose sales and what they love about it, this question is more about their specific motivation tactics.
Ideally, you want a sales team made up of ambitious go-getters who can self-motivate when they need to and advocate for themselves when they need more resources to succeed.
14. How do you stay in the know on your target market?
The best sales reps never stop learning. This question is critical for revealing whether the candidate engages in their given industry and what they do to keep their knowledge sharp and current.
15. Roleplay a sales pitch scenario.
Roleplaying should always be part of your sales interview process. It’s a perfect opportunity for you to see each candidate in action and learn how they perform under pressure.
16. Describe a time when you demonstrated the ability to be a team player on your sales team.
Teamwork is non-negotiable for a successful sales team. Whoever you bring onto your team must be a good team player – both giving and receiving help while working toward a common goal.
17. Describe a time when you collaborated with another department.
Sales often collaborates with various departments, including marketing, customer success, revenue operations, and others. Can they communicate appropriately with others and meet them where they are?
18. It’s halfway through the quarter, and you’re projecting below where you need to be to reach your quota. What steps do you take to ensure you reach your targets?
This question positions candidates to demonstrate their problem-solving skills under pressure. It reveals how they motivate themselves when stakes are high and deadlines are tight.
19. How do you handle customer objections?
Preparing to deal with objections is essential – it’s never ideal to plan on winging it. Listen for how they maneuver pushback and what their process is for moving forward with confidence.
20. Describe a time when you didn’t meet a goal or lost an opportunity, and what you learned from it.
Everyone– brand-new sellers, seniored sales reps, veteran VP of Sales– should have an answer to this question. Learning from failure is a huge part of being a successful seller.
Things won’t always go perfectly — issues come up, mistakes happen, competitors beat you to the punch, and sales quotas are missed. Dig for the lessons they learned, proactive measures they took, and the values they’ve adopted from those experiences.
21. How did you prepare for today’s interview?
Whether you ask this question at the beginning of the interview or use it to wrap things up, it’s another small but telling way to understand their prospecting, researching, and sales process.
22. If you were hired for this position, what would you set out to accomplish in your 30 days? 60 days? 90 days?
The answer to this question doesn’t need to be ground-breaking, but they should have some sort of action plan to get started. A 30-60-90 day sales plan is a great way to structure the first three months in a new role, and sellers who come prepared with a plan are already leagues ahead of other candidates.
23. Teach me something.
This isn’t a question, but it’s a helpful way to assess whether or not the candidate can guide someone through a concept or process. This gauges their ability to think on their feet and understand how to communicate with their audience, just like they do out in the field with prospects.
24. What would your current manager or coworkers say are your greatest strengths? Greatest weaknesses?
Being self-aware of how other people view you is crucial to connecting with prospects and succeeding at selling. Without that self-awareness, candidates can’t understand how they’re coming across to clients, teammates, upper management, or across departments – which means they can’t adjust or improve.
25. Which CRMs have you used in the past? What is your experience working with them?
Technology is the engine that powers sales teams today, so it’s important to learn what kind of technical skills each candidate is bringing to the table. You can always train new sellers on your preferred software or workflow, but this question is more focused on their sales experience and adaptability.
26. What sales metrics do you pay most attention to and why?
There are many different sales metrics that are worth paying attention to, and their answer may depend on where they’ve worked and how they’ve been trained. The hope is that they can clearly explain why they chose certain key performance indicators (KPIs) and aren’t focused on metrics that don’t tell a compelling story.
27. How did you adjust your sales approach in response to COVID-19?
You’ll get different answers based on their previous role – whether they’re an exec, inside sales, outside sales, etc. — as well as their industry. The main idea here is to see how they adjusted when the industry drastically changed.
28. What made our company/product stand out to you?
Every candidate should have done proper research on your business prior to the interview. If they also know who they’d be interviewing with, they should have poked around and found any information they could to connect – just like with a sales prospect. At minimum, they should be familiar with your product or service, your company’s history and mission, and your target market.
29. What questions do you have for me?
The best candidates come prepared with questions for the interviewer. And it makes sense – this is possibly the company where they’ll invest their time and energy, hopefully for years to come. It isn’t just about choosing the right person for the sales position; it’s also about selling your company and building confidence in them that this is a good fit.
30. What questions did you hope I would ask, and why?
After they’ve had the spotlight on them for most of the interview, this question offers them one last opportunity to sell themselves as the perfect fit for the position. This is also a great way to get valuable feedback for future interviews as well.
How Whatfix helps you support your top talent
To build a strong sales team, you need to find people who can hit sales goals, handle objections and pushback, and be consistent, persistent, and patient. You can’t hire just anyone for a sales role – the wrong person can prevent your sales team from hitting quotas that support the overall business.
Whatfix makes onboarding new sales reps fast and easy. With our digital adoption platform, you get access to a pool of vetted, qualified sales talent. Participate in virtual hiring events, use our onboarding and ramping programs, and level up your entire team with trainings and certifications.
Learn more about how Whatfix can support your new sales reps today.
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