C
C

caffeinatedsales

Account Exec

Fire Starter
Contributor

Behavioral-based interview for AE Role

Hello! I'm preparing for a behavioral-based interview for an AE role. Does anyone have thoughts on how you'd structure answers for the following:

  • How do you plan for your year to ensure you hit your quota?
  • How do you use research + data to demonstrate to your clients that you understand them and their industry?
  • How do you build and demonstrate value/ROI with clients?

Really just looking for ideas here as I'm preparing...curious to hear your thoughts!

👥 Hiring
🤝 Interviewing/Offer
🗣 Interviewing
12

20 comments

Sort by:
ThatNewAE
Big Shot
5
Account Executive - Mid enterprise
An interview i gave recently asked me these questions. Not trying to paint your vision, but this is what I said -
1. How do I plan? (Bullshit question, but okay) - Sourcing my own leads, referrals, not rely completely on marketing bound leads but using them as a hook to get into the accounts. Blah blah, sell the picture that you won't give up even if you are running behind schedule.

2. How do I research? - I read their LinkedIn profiles, website, customer testimonials (to know what the industry painpoints usually are) and of course third party analyst articles like Gartner etc. Now how do I use this research? - By making the entire sales cycle from start to end, relevant to their industry and painpoints. If retail industry has certain issues, they won't resonate with how I am helping Oil and Gas. So making sure the entire conversation is supremely relevant to them: Pain points, customer references, demo, value propositions. EVerything.

And the best way is to really listen to them. Actively listen to what they are saying troubles them. That in itself would be a good intel.

3. First position yourself as someone that's really potentially solving a problem that they foresee + problems they haven't foreseen yet. Futuristic. And this is not on one call, this has to be from the first email itself.
ROI - Short term and long term. Show them in numbers, manpower and resources of how much you are saving up for them. Be realistic. Be transparent.
poweredbycaffeine
WR Lieutenant
4
☕️
What’s your first take? Hit us with your answers.
jefe
Arsonist
3
🍁
Seriously.. We're happy to give advice but he's gotta put some effort in.
Maybe more caffeine is needed?
caffeinatedsales
Fire Starter
0
Account Exec
Appreciate the tough love! Notifications were sent to a different email and forgot to check back. See below for some ideas so far--not exhaustive for all three of these, but most concerned about #1 right now. Any feedback would be appreciated!
As far as research--looking at industry research to understand trends/challenges, general account research (financial reports to understand growth trends and higher-level strategies, Linkedin posts, leadership changes, general headlines), as well as internal sales tools to understand existing install base, service requests, relationships with my company.
re: strategizing and planning for the year --> divide this into existing pipeline vs generating pipeline. For generating new, sourcing new leads with both cold outreach and leveraging existing relationships within the account to make new connections. To understand how to allocate time amongst accounts, researching and qualifying my accounts to forecast potential needs and deal sizes, when during their fiscal does this account make big purchases, what are historical discounts and purchase sizes; maintaining cadences with existing contacts to understand business problems and identifying new opportunities within the account.

For existing, continuously qualifying/forecasting to leadership; maintaining deadlines for action items to close; having a clear understanding of customer's requirements + attention to detail to get ahead of any Ts and Cs showstoppers that may prevent close....not sure how deep into the weeds to go into for how I close a deal, or if this question is focused more on just higher-level planning/strategy.
poweredbycaffeine
WR Lieutenant
2
☕️
Hey @caffeinatedsales what’s good? You want us to do the work for you? If so, you’ve failed my behavioral test.
Sunbunny31
Politicker
3
Sr Sales Executive 🐰
Is this something you have experience doing?
CuriousFox
WR Officer
2
🦊
👀🍿 help us help you
oldcloser
Arsonist
2
💀
Where you at so far? Gotta give a little around here.
caffeinatedsales
Fire Starter
0
Account Exec
Oops, replied above! Curious if you have any thoughts. Are you able to see?
DataCorrupter
Politicker
0
Account Executive
Yeah, can't you see OldMan?!?!
Pachacuti
Politicker
1
They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy
In all seriousness, I would take these questions to SalesGPT and ChatGPT. Especially ChatGPT - it can do wonders with those questions. If you’re doing the interview remotely, you can read the answers verbatim. Really slick.
GDO
Politicker
1
BDM
yeah these sound perfect for GPT
FinanceEngineer
Politicker
1
Sr Director, sales and partnerships
This is basic stuff. Generally, a healthy pipeline is 4X your quota, and you prospect/work with your team to get there. The ROI is based on cost savings and revenue generation (even protecting existing customer base if that is a risk). Everything else is just cadences and personality.
SDR2AE
Fire Starter
0
Account Executive
This one 👏🏽 usually hiring managers would ask how you ensure you keep a healthy pipeline. You nailed it
braintank
Politicker
1
Enterprise Account Executive
We've gone in another direction...
jefe
Arsonist
1
🍁
.
SDR2AE
Fire Starter
0
Account Executive
3. How do you build/demonstrate value/ROI.

This question greatly depends on the product you’re selling. Can value be quantified? If so speak to SC, CSM, sales engineers to help with metrics. I previously sold in the conversational ai space (sms, chatbot, ivr deflection)

Clear value/ROI in this industry:

Customers that keep calling for simple and repetitive tasks that can be automated by bots. Results of this is, lower CSAT for example customers waiting for 20 minutes on hold just to be connected to an agent and nature of their request gets resolved in less than 30 seconds when connected to an agent.

Also companies would usually pay X amounts per customer interactions. Let’s say it cost a company $2 for every customer interaction through their phone support line. Imagine receiving 10,000 calls on a daily with similar request.

That would mean $2x10,000 calls.

Now if you were to automate this sort of requests via a bot, it would probably cost 5p or 5 cents per interaction.

Now do the maths and work out the ROI on both the client side and customer


Follow a similar framework to think of possible ROI based on the solution you’re selling.
ApocalyBoom
Politicker
0
Account Executive
Where are you now? I have something to give here.
pcaliii
Personal Narrative
0
Account Executive
Research the size, revenues, industry, what is the normal standard deviation for the particular industry, news -- projection for industry, funding - who do they do business with? who funds their operations?
You can demonstrate ROI by stating the numbers you were expected to hit/what you hit. I always like to have clients/customers leave reviews so that their are real life testimonies on the work you have done from real people.
SonnyVaccaro
Good Citizen
0
Growth Lead
Are you pooling answers for yourself? Use whatever you get here as a baseline, but make it your own. If you sound like a robot repeating what you get here, it will show in the interview.

Related posts

6

I have an interview for an AE position

Advice
🎈
👥
🤝
13
10

SDR Interview Assignment

Advice
🎈
☁️
🎙
16
8

Interview Prep - AE Role

Question
🧠
🚀
💡
6
Bravado is a community of trusted sales professionals endorsed by their customers.
Apple Store logo
Products
The War Room Jobs Salary Guide Tech Sales U
Company
About Us How It Works Blog Bug Bounty
Contact
Press Careers
© 2024 Bravado Inc. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy Legal and Privacy Center Sales Jobs
If you are hired as a contract sales rep by a Bravado customer, we may ask you to prove access to the employee email account provided to you by that customer. This data will be shared with customers to track your sales productivity; customers can use this data to confirm you meet the minimum activity requirements to pay out your ramp stipend and commission.