SaaS Sales Interview Tips

At Salient, we’ve had the privilege of placing over 3000 GTM professionals across the APJ region. It’s fair to say that we’ve collated some juicy IP around what drives success in a sales interview. If you’re preparing for your next tech sales role, here are some SaaS sales interview tips to keep in mind.

We have collated some of our top SaaS sales interview tips to help you sell yourself to the hiring manager, both through your resume and during the interviews.

Tips for Your Next Sales Role Interview

Sales interview tip 1: Research the Company

Yep, the standard ‘research the company’ is often overlooked or underbaked. Be sure to spend time really thinking about the company’s market opportunity and how your profile and skills align to maximise it.

Remember, the moment the interview starts, you’re showcasing your sales skills. Knowing a company and solution background shows how well you can internalise product features and benefits and prepare smart insight questions based on this. So, aim to show you express your enthusiasm about their company and the products that they sell.

Sales interview tip 2: Showcase your Storytelling Skills

Sales interviews are about effective communication.  Interviewers will be assessing your communication skills through the lens of ‘how you will communicate with our customers’. And the role of good storytelling in sales can’t be underestimated. Your customer will have glazed eyes if you’re talking features and product jargon, but will engage if listening to a story about how a similar customer solved a problem they are facing.

Have a raft of stories ready, but be sure to keep them sharp and succinct whilst balancing talking and listening. Have strong narratives that you’ve rehearsed when answering questions like, “Tell me about your career so far,” or “What are your career goals?”, or “Tell me about a deal that you lost and what you learnt”.

Answer career questions by telling them about your skills, experiences, priorities of your past sales roles, and how you met these expectations. Future goals responses are about expressing how you balance ambition with realistic time frames.

Whilst the narratives should be cogent and engaging, also let the interviewer know you can elaborate further on any key points if needed.

Sales interview tip 3: Articulate your Sales Methodology

One of the key sales interview tips is to ensure you’re prepared to articulate how you sell and how you leverage different sales methodologies applicable to the customer context. Don’t assume because your interviewer knows sales that they aren’t looking for strong detail on this – they want to see how well trained you are and your instinct for the deal. 41% of SaaS start-ups are eyeing vertical markets rather than horizontal market opportunities, so it’s likely you’ll encounter hiring managers who want to know how you differentiate your approach.

Sales interview tip 4: Communicate your Sales Discipline Effectively

The less glamorous aspect of selling is how you ‘chop wood and carry water’. Good hiring managers will probe to understand how disciplined and hard-working you are – especially when riding the ups and downs of a sales role. Why? They know that work ethic and discipline usually trump talent when it comes to dictating who will be an elite performer within a sales team.

For this next SaaS sales interview tip: be clear in articulating your sales discipline strategy to ensure you hit quota – how you keep yourself doing the hard things consistently when times are tough, and what you do differently from others.

They may look to see if you rely solely on company metrics or are proactive enough to think of a different approach to help yourself succeed. They’ll want to understand how you keep going when facing a lot of rejection or how you do repetitive activities like prospecting that might get tedious over time. Present your personal mental roadmap to drive success – day in, day out.

Sales Interview Tip 5: Be clear on your numbers

You must be across your numbers and be clear on how you achieved them.

Interviewers aren’t expecting perfect results from you. Rather, they want to know what worked well for you, what didn’t, and how you used data to change your approach or draw insights for the future. Most will want to see that you understand your conversion ratios and that you reverse engineer your target into daily, monthly, and quarterly activity to reach your sales quota.

Sales Interview Tip 6: Showcase your sales superpowers

In every interview, one of the main goals is to bring yourself to life as a value proposition for the company.

What sales strengths do you want the interview to remember you for? Pick a couple that are authentic and relevant for the role and context of the company. Prepare some strong stories that highlight how you leveraged those strengths to win.

Example Sales Interview Questions

1. Walk me through a deal that you lost to a competitor and what you learnt in that process.
2. Tell me about your typical ICP and what’s important to them?
3. What sets you apart from others in your team who didn’t perform as well as you?
4. Can you tell me about a time you were able to get a prospect to create a budget when there wasn’t one?
5. Can you tell me how you shape your value proposition to different stakeholders across the account?

Example Questions to Ask Your Interviewer

1. What do your most successful reps do that others don’t?
2. How do you see the competitive landscape playing out for X segment across the next couple of years?
3. How does your team leverage AI in the sales process?
4. I saw X (demonstrating your research on news articles, financial reports etc) about this company. What are
5. your thoughts on this/how do you see that impacting? etc

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