hunterbidenlaptop

Sr. BDR

AE SMB Interview (Questions)

hey everyone,

I have an upcoming interview for an AE-smb role. I'd love to know the best way about this such as common behavioral questions, technical questions, mock calls, etc.

background - currently in bdr role with no room for growth at my current company, and I'm pretty sure I'll be done by EoY or early Jan.

I'm not worried about the mock call/discovery, but I think this will be the most challenging aspect - I'd love to know how to prepare for a disco call. (Intro, Body, Close).

If anyone can point me in the right direction to a youtube video/LinkedIn influencer/etc., that would help.

☁️ Software Tech

☑️ Qualification Calls

🗣 Interviewing

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totesmcgrotes

Opinionated

Sr Account Manager

Hey I've just been through this process myself, here's what I did. Hopefully it's of some help to you!

Interview prep for roles and doing a role play discovery call, here's how I structured my prep and the call itself:

1. Researched the product to understand what problem(s) the product solves. For this I used the company website and YouTube channel. I read their customer stories and watched their most recent webinars.

2. I went through the specifics of the task and matched them to the product offering, there was one obvious feature that they were not using.

3. I laid out what information I wanted to know so that I could understand the business that I was pitching too. I kept it very high level, how many customers, what industry the customers were in, customers geography, how many customer managers etc.

4. I researched GAP selling using Kennans podcast.

5. Practiced interview questions on the HubSpot website (best resource IMO out there for all those behavioural Q's etc)

6.Gong.io website for help with themock discovery.

Here's how I structured the discovery call itself:

Intro:

Thank you for joining me today, by way of introduction I am X and I am going to be your Account Manager here at Y. I’m excited to meet you and work with you moving forward.I know that we have 15mins scheduled for today, does that still work for you? Can I ask for you to introduce yourselves and the roles you have here at X?

Agenda:

For today's call I was hoping to firstly learn more about your business and understand how you’re currently using Y, my role as your account manager is to be the expert in helping you to maximise the value you’re getting from Y and to make sure that we’re aligned with your business moving forward, I’m happy to share any best practices from what I’ve seen with my other customers and of course answer any questions that you have! Is there anything else that you would like to cover today?

Q1:

What I’d like to understand is more about your business, the kinds of things I’m interested in are who and where your customers are, what industry they operate in and who looks after them?

Q2:

How is it going with the Z no. of customers that you’re onboarding with us, how do you find that process?

Q3:

I can see that with us you’re monitoring Z customers per month, is that the total number of customers that you have?How are you monitoring the other X?Can you tell me about the challenges that your facing with two separate processes?What are the barriers to streamlining this?

Q4:

With (input revenant knowledge) and (input revenant knowledge) happening I’d be interested to understand your X process?Are you aware that we help with X here at Y?

Similar to you people are/n’t aware, or it wasn't high priority tool at the time, now seeing huge rise in use and we’re seeing great results. X% increase in Z! What would something like that mean to your business?

Q5:

Thanks for sharing all of that. It's really helped me to get a better understanding of your business and how we might be able to solve some of those challenges that you’re facing. Before we wrap up, is there anything else about your business that is relevant to our product that I haven't picked up?

Exit:

Based off of X,Y & Z that you mentioned, I think that there is a huge opportunity for us to can add significant value.I would like to show you how we can do that with a demonstration, does early next week suit for the follow-up? I’m conscious that we’ll need to move quickly with summer holidays coming up!

Great, it was lovely to meet you both and I’m excited to work with you moving forward.

***After each question I rounded up the key points of what they mentioned EG Thanks for sharing that Graham, if I understand you correctly you said that the biggest challenges that your facing with X are Y & Z? Is that correct or have I missed anything?

***I also regularly said 'look that's something I hear a lot when speaking with my clients and what we found was.....'

If you have any questions, just shout!

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

you need to edit question one. if you come to a discovery call and dont know anything about the prospects business then thats a huge problem.

my suggestion would be to phrase it:
"so i would love to tell you a bit about what I know about your company and see if you could fill in the gaps for me. It looks like you have customers in XYZ industries and from what i can tell it looks like you focus on ABD tyoes of companies. I was a little unsure if you main goal is to help companies do A or B? am i on the right path? "

If you show you did some work that goes a loooooong way. dont expect your customer to give you basic info. its annoying

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

Sales Rep

I was trying to think of something to add but literally could not. Great post can’t think of anything to add

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Damn 🔥

hunterbidenlaptop

Good Citizen

Sr. BDR

This is amazing! Thank you for your insight. You are the goat ! Going to practice with this and use the resources you mentioned.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I second Kosta. Really thorough. Great post!

antiASKHOLE

Tycoon

Bravado's Resident Asshole

@GastyThis would be a great add to the academy.

GingerBarbarian

Opinionated

Lead Sales

My favorite structure for a sales call is not really Intro/Short Story/ Presentation..... AEs are more like great podcast interviewers. They are there to listen to and understand client problems, draw out stories, and find the emotional high notes.

In the end, they tie the stories together and paint two pictures, one is what it would be like if they move forward, the other is if they do not. It is that HONEST foresight that most AEs need to be good at.

LambyCorn

Arsonist

A mfkn E

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hunterbidenlaptop

AE SMB Interview (Questions)

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