If you’re a hiring manager in tech currently, conducting an interview for an open sales, marketing, customer success or other go-to-market (GTM) role can be a challenge. While our previous guide covered the 10 fundamentals of effective interviewing, we want to expand upon these tips and align them more closely with the unique needs of SaaS startups.
How to Conduct an Interview for Tech Sales & GTM Jobs
- Prepare the Right Questions
Preparation is key for any interview as we outlined before, but it is especially – and increasingly – important when screening candidates for sales, marketing and customer success roles in the technology startup space. You will need more than general questions to narrow down the right fit for the job, and most of your inquiries should steer the interview to specific needs and objectives of the position you are interviewing for. While there may be overlap in some areas, Account Executives and Customer Success Managers have different ways of reaching their goals, as will Demand Generation Managers and Marketing VPs.
What is especially critical, however, is looking for answers that reveal whether the candidate is the right fit for this particular role. It is about more than finding out if they meet the basic requirements from surface-level questions – you need to uncover if they have the exact type and level of experience your organization is seeking when hiring for this position.
- Define Your Unicorn Candidate Profile
Most SaaS companies have shifted GTM talent acquisition targets to focus on candidates with specific expertise and sales motion experience, typically a unicorn seller. This ranges across go-to-market roles, however, from growth marketers to technical sales professionals. The trick is that there is always something unique about each company’s unicorn that makes them the right fit for the job.
The best way to prepare for interviewing a potential unicorn seller or other GTM candidate is to define your ideal candidate profile and quantify the requirements. Look at successful examples in your sales, marketing or customer success teams to help develop who this unicorn looks like. Create a clear profile that outlines must-have experience, desirable skills and cultural attributes that will lead to success in your organization’s unique context.
- Gauge Sales Motion Alignment
Every SaaS startup has its approach to sales, and how each go-to-market team and job fits into this is what should drive the direction of your interview by informing what you are looking for in a specific candidate profile. Your unicorn seller or marketer will already be experienced in your sales motion and will be able to integrate seamlessly, leaving it to you to gauge if an applicant shows they meet this criteria through interviewing.
The interview must help you evaluate how well a candidate’s previous experience, approach to selling and skill set matches with your org’s current sales culture and motion. You will need to look for candidates who demonstrate familiarity with the typical sales cycles, deal sizes and decision-making processes that come up as part of your sales motion. Their track record should show success in environments that mirror your methodologies and indicate being able to excel in your type of culture.
- Uncover Key Success Metrics
For go-to-market roles in tech, success is defined in numbers and KPI (key performance indicators) provide a valuable look into a candidate’s performance record. Strong candidates in the space will also be the ones that not only hit their quotas, but that understand and can tell the story behind their key metrics to articulate how they reached their goals.
To identify these unicorns, you need to be able to dive deeper beyond what these numbers communicate at first glance. When a candidate mentions a milestone such as hitting 150% of quota, dig into the context around that achievement. Also make sure you have a list of KPI categories ready to discuss that let you dive straight into the most relevant metrics for the role, and that allow the candidate to provide concrete examples of success and explain how they got there.
- Have Role-specific Scenarios Ready
Creating role-specific scenarios based on real situations the position will help to solve lets you evaluate how candidates think on their feet and their approach to problem-solving in context. These should reflect the actual challenges they will face and the goals your organization wants to meet with this title, allowing them to show you how they would apply their experience and demonstrate whether they have the kind you are looking for.
This also means that the scenarios should be tailored to each position, and input from managers or team leads will help you to construct the right kind of situation to explore the candidate’s thought process, approach and expertise. For Account Executives, this might involve handling technical questions about your product, while Customer Success Manager candidates could demonstrate how they would address an account they believe is at risk of churning.
- Ask About Market Awareness
In SaaS, where the market is still constantly evolving, a candidate’s ability to understand and anticipate industry changes can be a game-changer. One thing that will help set a unicorn seller apart is how they leverage this awareness. Look for candidates who can articulate how these forces will affect buying decisions in the immediate future, what drives prospect engagement in your space and where the industry is heading.
Before conducting the interview, document the key market dynamics, trends and competitive challenges that are impacting your organization the most. This preparation will help you recognize when candidates demonstrate genuine industry insight versus surface-level research they did the night before.
- Paint a Clear Picture of Your Product
Interviewing can be a two-way street, and should be in many cases, such as when communicating what your company does and where your product fits into your market. You will want to make sure the candidate is not only on the same page, but that they fully understand where your SaaS offer fits and how your sales motion outlines this positioning, and how the role they are being interviewed for contributes to selling to your prospects and customer base. This will also help you weed out applicants that did not do their homework, as well as those who simply do not have the right kind of experience with your product category and sales motion you need.
Prepare a clear, concise overview of your SaaS product that highlights both its technical description and business impact. Your unicorn GTM professional will naturally ask questions that show they are already thinking about how to position your solution in the market, handle potential objections, or drive user adoption – even before you have finished the interview.
- Engage Key Stakeholders
Once you find a candidate serious enough to make it past the first round of screening, you should begin involving other relevant team members in follow-up stages of the interviewing process to get a 360-degree perspective on their viability for the job. This will help you avoid the gap that can form between internal or outsourced recruiters and GTM teams, and narrow down exactly what you should be looking for.
Time is always a factor in any tech startup, but you can find a way to make the later rounds of interviews scalable while ensuring they filter out wrong-fit applicants. Work with stakeholders to build out key questions, test scenarios, “take-home” projects, etc. that allow the candidate to demonstrate their level of aptitude and knowledge in topics that relate directly to the role itself.
- Explore Soft Skills
The 2020 global pandemic and the mass shift to remote work it sparked among SaaS companies left a noticeable impact on the interpersonal skills of many sales, customer success and account management professionals. Being able to empathize and be personable with customers and prospects is a major requirement for GTM jobs in tech, which means it needs to be assessed as best as can be for candidates being interviewed by hiring managers.
You can test your candidate’s emotional intelligence with behavioral questions that explore how they navigate interpersonal communication with different parties, handle objections and negative feedback in the field, or build relationships with points of contact. Seek evidence of adaptability, resilience, empathy, a willingness to collaborate and other “soft” skills the position calls for.
- Look for Consistency
The most revealing insights will often come from comparing how candidates present themselves across different interactions throughout your interview process, as well as in their CV. Watch for consistency in a candidate’s responses across each round of screening, and how well they align with what is on their resume. If their answers seem to change, note by how much and whether it happened gradually or was a sudden shift, and address the difference directly to see how they respond.
You will also want to develop a simple framework for stakeholders to document their own observations about candidates’ responses, especially concerning those that show whether they meet the requirements of the job they are interviewing for. This insight will help your team determine if the candidate displays genuine experience in the position or if they are repeating rehearsed answers from quick research.
Fast-Track Your Tech Talent Search with Betts Connect
Finding and screening unicorn candidates for tech sales, marketing and customer success roles can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Our Betts Connect platform helps you face this challenge by providing direct access to pre-vetted professionals who are actively seeking opportunities in the technology sector, ensuring every interview counts.
Contact Betts here to discover how Connect can transform your hiring process and connect you with the top-performing talent you need.