The Master List of GTM Interview Questions
The GTM Newsletter
With so many people shuffling into new roles these days due to lay-offs or re-evaluating priorities, there’s a lot of candidates on the market.
How can you weed through the good to find the great?
Getting the right people on the ship is 90% of the battle.
Today we’re going to focus on how to evaluate talent and what questions to ask candidates so you can find the diamonds in the rough.
That new hire who comes in, has an immediate impact and up-levels the whole team.
Let’s get into it.
The Master List of GTM Interview Questions
“I look for candidates who desire to achieve things others have not accomplished before.”
Lucas Price, Founder and CEO of Yardstick, former SVP of Sales at Zipwhip had a great stream of consciousness in our GTMfund Slack channel on this topic:
“Many leaders look for competitiveness, which overlaps with a desire to achieve, but the desire to achieve is a broader, more predictive pool of candidates.
For desire to achieve, I’ll ask questions like, “Tell me about a specific time you set a goal you didn’t know if you’d be able to accomplish.” or “Tell me about a specific time when you wanted to hit a higher bar than what others had done before, or what your boss asked for.”
A screening question that works well for AEs and SDRs is. “What is something complex that you understand well and can explain to me in 30 seconds.” I’m looking for the ability to make the complex simple and communicate clearly.
Instead of asking about average deal sizes the candidate worked on in the past, I like to ask, “Tell me about the deal you worked on that had the most complex buying organization. How did you navigate dealing with multiple buyers and influencers?” I find that I get richer answers from that question rather than asking about ACV.
When asking about previous roles, one of the last questions I’ll ask after getting detailed information about the role and their performance, I’ll ask, “Who internally at this job was the most important to your success.” I’m looking for their humility and ability to recognize that they need support to maximize their potential.
I also like to ask, “Tell me about a specific time when a customer or potential customer seemed to not trust you when they met you.” I look for their ability to read the room and make changes when necessary to turn around suspicious or negative prospects.”
*caveat from Lucas: Good question are not enough!
“There are a lot of potential failure points in hiring.
It helps on the margin to come up with a great new interview question, but to be truly great at hiring you need to have a comprehensive process.
Some of the things the hiring process should have include a well thought out candidate profile, clarity on what the job entails, identification of the behaviors and competencies needed to succeed in the role, a scorecard that maps to the role and the competencies, the right series of interviews and exercises, good interview questions, guidance for each question so the interviewer knows what good looks like.
These items are table stakes for having a rigorous process. There is much more that can be done to improve the process from there. Like so many other things in sales, when it comes to hiring, the best process wins.”
📈 How to take action/learnings:
To screen for ‘desire to achieve’ ask: “Tell me about a specific time you set a goal you didn’t know if you’d be able to accomplish.”
To screen AEs and SDRs ask: “What is something complex that you understand well and can explain to me in 30 seconds.”
When diving into past ACV ask: “Tell me about the deal you worked on that had the most complex buying organization. How did you navigate dealing with multiple buyers and influencers?”
To test for humility and collaboration ask: “Who internally at this job was the most important to your success?”
To test the ability to read the room ask: “Tell me about a specific time when a customer or potential customer seemed to not trust you when they met you?”
Make sure you pair your questions with: candidate profiles, clarity on what the job entails, identification of the behaviors and competencies needed to succeed in the role, a scorecard that maps to the role and the competencies, the right series of exercises, guidance for each question so the interviewer knows what good looks like.
Olivier Labbe, GTM at Testbox handed over his full list of interview questions that are loosely inspired by reverse engineering this tweet thread from Sahil Bloom:
Tell me about yourself: looking for candidate to be concise and for us to focus on key decisions and insights this generates
Why are we speaking?
Why (insert your company here)?
What do you excel at?
Tell me about a time you failed?
What are you passionate about?
What was your first job?
What's your learning style?
What would you do in the first 100 days on the job
2-5 years from now where do you see yourself?
How do you handle stress?
What questions do you have for me?
More incredible leaders share their go-to questions/learnings that have allowed them to find/hire the best of the best onto their teams.
Neil Weitzman, Founder/CEO of RevOpsX Advisory and Porch:
“My number 1 question for all roles is more of a comment “tell me your story” - what they focus on and how succinct or verbose they are etc.. tells me so much more than anything else in my opinion (doesn’t mean I don’t ask other questions but I feel I learn about them from these three words than anything else)”
Rachel Lyubovitzky, CEO and Chairman of Setuply:
"Describe 3 skills or natural talents that give you the edge over other people in your field &, conversely, what are 3 skills you would like to learn or 3 talents you wish you were born with." The answers, esp. if you dig in, provide pretty telling insights into the candidate's mindset and self-awareness.”
Scott Brown, CMO at Hum Capital:
1. “Tell me about a project/sale/campaign that went absolutely sidewise, and what you learned from that experience.” 2. "what's your [insert role] superpower?" and 3."There are always things about our jobs that we don't enjoy doing as much. What's the one thing you wish you would never be asked to do in this role?"
Bob Elliot, 3x CRO/VP Sales, former Manager Director at SAP:
“One of my favourite questions regardless of role is what did you do to prepare for this interview. Both for me personally and my company. If you’re not putting serious homework into the person who can determine your next career role, how much are you putting into your customers. It’s amazing how many people just don’t research. I had someone at a previous company come in for a final full day of interviews meaning he had passed the first several gates. When I asked him what questions do you have for me, his first question was ‘How long has xxx been in business for?’. You don’t know that after three interviews and being flown in?! Interview over. Prep is beyond critical”
📈 How to take action/learnings:
Aggregate all of these questions, break them down by role and put them in this INTERVIEW QUESTION BUILDER that the legendary Chuck Brotman, VP of Sales and Co-Founder at Blueprint Expansion built out.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
This was a simple but solid take from Sam Blond, Partner at Founder’s Fund.
You can always count on Scott Leese for a healthy dose of perspective.
👂More for your eardrums:
I got to catch up with my friend, Rick Smolen, SVP of Sales at Loopio on the GTM pod this week. We covered:
How to transition from a great salesperson to an effective people leader
Three sales methodologies, when to use them, and how to teach them.
How to sell in a different global market
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
Historically, agents have had to piece together 10-14 different pieces of software to complete sales and marketing workflows, making sales cycles long and costly with poor experiences for both agents and consumers. With iLife, they are able to complete all their critical workflows in one place, eliminating redundant sign-in's and data entries, leading to a dramatically better productivity and cost savings for agents, agencies, and carriers.
They are about to take flight 🛫
🔥Hottest GTM job of the week:
Customer Success Manager at Magic, more details here.
See more top GTM jobs here.
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Happy hiring to you all.
There’s so much good talent out there waiting to be scooped up. I hope these Qs, frameworks and insights help you zero in on your next A+ player.
And if you’re in the other side of the aisle and looking for a role, use these to prep for your next interview and make sure you check out the job board above.
Appreciate you.
Barker,
✌️
I love this. I don’t know why I didn’t make an “interview question builder” years ago. Definitely adding some of these questions and tips to my hiring tool kit 💯