Guidelines for conducting effective interviews

When you are developing interviewing questions for a specific position, be sure to keep the questions specific, yet open ended enough to allow the applicant to explain and expound on their experience.

Sample sales interviewing questions

In order to determine if a candidate would be a successful sales representative, here are some suggested questions. These questions should be tailored for the required sales presentation for your sales process:

• How do you organize your sales day in your current job? This will uncover if the candidate works in an orderly fashion or just handles whatever comes first or whatever may be the crisis of the day.
• How do you set up your week? Can the candidate structure their efforts beyond the current day? Does the week include cold calling, telephone first appointments, follow-up calls? What do they do in their down time? Is their morning calling customers and the afternoon for paperwork? What is the ratio of administrative to real selling?
• How many prospects can you cover daily or weekly? This will uncover how long or complicated their present sales call is as well as how many calls they plan to do in one day.
• If you were given a sales assignment with 100 accounts, what would you do first? Determine what logic the person would take to organize the assignment – geographic, numeric, by industry, by outcome potential?

• How do you plan for a sales call? Try to uncover specific details about this process in the current assignment. Is there a logical sequence of events? Do they need to do research, send collateral via fax or email, prepare written plans?
• Tell me what you know about your company? This will give insight into how important planning is to the candidate and how detailed they can be.