In this video, we discuss how to interview sales candidates with the goal of improving your ability to select the right person out of all of the different people that you interview for a sales position.

 

Decrease Time Spent Interviewing

The tips we discuss in this video will definitely help make you more efficient with the interviews that you conduct, but the real goal is to decrease the total amount of time that you spend interviewing for a position. And the key to achieving that is to decrease the frequency that you have to interview and fill the same position.

In other words, the real goal in trying to figure out how to interview sales candidates is to decrease sales staff turnover by selecting the right applicants and that would include picking the person that is most likely to stay the longest. As a result, all of the tips that we provide in this video will help to decrease sales staff turnover.

 

View Yourself as a Detective

The first step in figuring out how to interview sales candidates is to shift from thinking of yourself as an interviewer and view yourself more as a detective. When you view yourself as an interviewer, you will see the task as meeting with a bunch of different people, asking each of them a lot of questions, and picking the one that you like the most.

A detective who is trying to solve a crime will try to gather as much data and clues from as many different places as possible. And their goal is not to find a suspect that could potentially fit with the crime, they are trying to look at as many clues as possible in order to find the perfect match with the crime and person that fits the best.

The way this differs from an interviewer is that the detective will be more thorough in the amount of data they look at and scrutiny that they use against the information collected before picking the person the select as the main suspect. If you try to be more like this when you are interviewing sales candidates, you will improve your ability to select the best person for the positions that you are trying to fill.

 

Sources of Information

You have a few key sources of information that you can access when working on how to interview sales candidates.

  • Resume
  • Social media
  • Interview questions
  • References

You should try to use all of those sources of information and try to gather as much information as possible when trying to find the best sales candidate out of all of the applicants that you are interviewing. But out of those resources, the one that you can use to gather the most and best clues is asking good interview questions.

 

Building Interview Questions

In this video, we discuss how to build good interview questions, which is a step-by-step process that involves outlining the requirements for the position and then creating a question for each requirement.

Most people do this already in terms of asking questions that pertain to what is required to perform the job. What we do is try to get more organized in terms of brainstorming six categories of requirements to make sure nothing is missed and then aligning a question or two with each requirement.

By going through our thorough interview question-building process and asking the same questions to each applicant, you will improve your skills in how to interview sales candidates.