Behavioral Questions Flashcards
Communication skills are essential for the category manager position. What sort of experience do you have that has developed your communication abilities?
- As a brand manager, I had to communicate with multiple parties (internal and external sales teams/suppliers/importers/brokers) across multiple media (email/ presentation/Excel/Powerpoint) and coordinate sales and marketing strategy across all parties.
- I’ve learned to be both comprehensive with the information provide but also responsive
Describe a situation in which you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince someone to see things your way.
- Negotiated with previous boss to bring on an orange wine from Australia
- Initially highly skeptical, but wine hit a specific BTG price point and filled a hole in overall Company portfolio
- Initial showing to select Brooklyn boutique retailers and Manhattan wine bars: sold most customers on deepest deal and wine bar took 50cs as exclusive BTG pour
Share an experience in which you successfully taught a difficult principle or concept. How were you able to be successful?
- I used to teach a Wine 101 class.
- Teaching people to describe wine is difficult.
- When talking about a wine’s body, I would have them imagine drinking skim, 2%, and whole milk. That would be the equivalent texture of a light, medium, and full body wine respectively.
You will be facing many unique problems that you must be prepared to overcome. Have you employed problem solving in previous jobs?
- Brand management involved putting out all types of fires: sales, operations, marketing visits
- Be responsive and frame the problem accurately; view the problem as an opportunity to improve go-to market strategy
- If you can’t solve the problem with existing resources, find someone who has encountered a similar problem or has expertise in the relevant fields, and ask for help!
Give me an example of when you thought outside of the box. How did it help your employer?
- I made the case to a previous employer to have employees get paid for part of the time they attended a distributor tasting.
- I convinced him that having the employee taste samples at the distributor tasting would be cheaper than tasting them in-house and as a side benefit would allow them to write tasting notes for the website they built.
- This allowed me to get multiple viewpoints on what wines to bring in, and not to overlook a key product category or region.
Name a time when your creativity or alternative thinking solved a problem in your workplace.
- At one of my first retail jobs, the owner asked me to build a website for the store.
- I had no previous web design experience, but figure out you could easily build an online store using Shopify.
- I set up the store layout, product fields, and item descriptions, as well as the payment platform using the Shopify tools/
- I found out that one of my employees had graphic design experience and had him take photos of the bottles while he was working at the store.
Give me an example of a time when something you tried to accomplish and failed.
Re-launching high-end, biodynamic ciders by a Brittany producer
- Price point ended up being slightly too high for BTG and releasing it in spring vs. fall
- Mitigated risk by only having 1/4 pallet of each cider and focusing on off-and on-premise
Describe a time when you anticipated potential problems and developed preventive measures.
We had a supplier that had complained they were spending too much money DA support for their primary Prosecco
- We ended up cycling a deep deal every other month so that customers could purchase at the best price but reduce the DA spend.
You must have adequate cooperation skills to succeed in this position. Describe previous experiences where you worked as a team.
- Coordinate a NYC Metro visit for 8 different French winemakers for a Loire Valley importer and the NY Metro sales teams
- This involved coordinating samples from the importer, setting up new items, writing tech sheets, coordinating market visits with managers and reps over two days
What have you found the best way to monitor the performance of your work and the work of others? Share a time that you had to take corrective action.
- Check-in with counterpart at regular intervals on performance tracking and relevant feedback that might goals and objectives
- Example: Setting up market visits. Each rep send an prospect list for accounts to target two weeks beforehand. This gets updated every couple days. I had a rep who had difficulty setting appointments for the afternoon (through no fault of her own). I agreed to work the rest of the market with my account relationships and had the winemaker be extremely happy.
Share an experience in which personal connections to coworkers or others helped you to be successful in your work.
- As a brand manager, I was always in conversation with sales reps about what products might well for them, and would pull bottles under my sample account that they could take at monthly sales meetings and not count toward their weekly allotment.
- This helped greatly with growing sales and distribution for smaller suppliers and the rep knew best how to backfill his/her sales territory with that item
- Also the rep knew that I was trying to help him/her make commission dollars; this generate more trust/reciprocity and made it easier to work with in the future
What methods make you a successful manager?
- Be willing to undertake any task. No job is beneath you.
- Be responsive and comprehensive to employees’ questions and needs. (People will follow if they know they are being heard.)
- Finding responsibilities to delegate and give employees relevant skills for future jobs
How would you create a culture for success? (leading, mentoring, etc.)
- Hire the right people and have the appropriate back office support to do their job
- Don’t delegate something that you wouldn’t do yourself
- Learn about what others do outside your immediate department; understanding how other people do their job help you to know your job better
- Have fun – people work better when they enjoy working with each other.
Have you ever had to sacrifice customer needs to achieve a business objective?
This usually backfires as the customer has more leverage
- Having a product that doesn’t sell on the shelf reminds the buyer that you sold them something that didn’t fit their needs
- You’re only good as your last sale
Share an example of when you established and accomplished a goal that was personally challenging.
Changing careers from finance to wine was a very difficult and turbulent point in my professional career: developing new skills, making new contacts, navigating an industry outside my previous industry experience
- My first job in the food and wine industry was working as an intern at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats – which involved vacuum sealing cuts of meat and working in a cramped cold storage locker for several hours at time
- It was very hard work (I didn’t know any better) but it was reason that I got my first restaurant job which got me exposed to wine, and laid the groundwork for the rest of my career.
