General Interview About Me Questions Flashcards
Tell me about a deal you have won?
- VShred- 210k - chosen to speak about it at quarterly sales all hands
- 4 main things that we did well on this deal and that were the reason eladership chose me to speak about it in our all hands
1) creative prospecting
2) earning C suites respect early
3) tasteful indirect competitive trapping
4) leaning back on already strong relationship to combat last hour price drop from competitors
Started with instagram add - realized they had money to spend on ads but were not doing any personalization - account not in SF
- Did some digging and found out they used a partner, met with partner to understand who we needed to speak to and what would resonate
- Made a loom video and sent it just to their exec team politly suggesting some areas we could improve their user journey
- Won exec side over first on business and gained their trust as thought leaders as we were the first people in and bringing new ideas to them on how to save money/generate revenue
- Then from there was able to win the end user and technical side with personalized demos and use case workshops. IAs they were so green, instead of just asking for with use cases we suggested them actively and did a session getting feedback on it, then demod it.
- Doing this proactively allowed us to lay competitve traps - where every use case we suggested made us look good and subtely encouraged them to ask questions about ares our competitors dont do as well
- Then we fully earned their trust and when it got to the last hour - and naturally, our competitor Iterable dropped their price to half of what we offered just before VShred signed
- We were able to lean back on the trust we had built from the begining and called that out in the email, that from the start we wanred them they would do this, theirs a reason, etc.
- Didnt have to drop our price at all and won the deal
“Tell me about a deal you have lost?”
Here, you’re looking for accountability. If they won’t talk about a deal they lost, call them a cab. Interview is over. Everyone has lost a deal at some point. A good salesperson is always looking for ways to improve and isn’t afraid to admit their mistakes.
How do you normally handle rejection?
Humble Bundle - $400k
A deal that I lost early on in my career, really shaped my strategy moving forward and caused a healthy level of anxiety in all deals
After any loss, I will have my boss reach out to the prospect and schedule time with them to get feedback, then we will sit down together and do an in depth loss review. Focusing on learnings, things we can do better, and what we will change in our processes moving forward to ensure this does not happen again.
For this specific deal, we lost to no decision. Which is common in the space. People struggle to motivate their team to make a big change. So the take aways were:
- Never trusting your champion when they say we’re in the clear/they’re going to sign
- Get in at the highest level - no matter what
- Win together - involve everyone at braze and use your exec connects to get in higher
- if there’s no compelling event for timelines, create one and get them to agree on it from the start and continuously remind them of this timeline agreed upon timeline after every call.
Average Deal Size? What size businesses?
The smallest deal I have closed is $40K and the largest is a deal with bumble I have been working on thats for $800K. With my recent promotion to the scale team, deal sizes can go anywhere up to a million.
Anything west coast with an employee count 300-1,000. We price based on MAU’s, emails, sms sends.
5-7 Billion dollar companies like Carta/bumble down to small start ups
Companies like: CA State Lottery, Wynn, Philz Coffee, Goop, Alo Yoga, Carbon Health (one medical competitor), Insurance, Banks….
How do you divide up your time? Whats your strategy for prospecting?
In sales, time is money. Managing a sales pipeline, closing deals and servicing relationships with existing accounts takes a lot of time. Good salespeople squeeze hours out of minutes and weeks out of days, and are always looking for ways to close deals faster.
I have 3 massive google spreadsheets that I live out of that keep me organized in my day to day. The first, is my active deals:
Active Deals
- At the start of each week I go through my active deals - ensure medpicc is filled out and think through what needs to get done for that week for those deals. Then I build out my calendar for the week ensureing I have enough time to get all my active deal work done first and foremost, whether thats scheduling time to prep pitches, presentations, get more multithreaded, etc.
NB Prospecting (schedule for that day): -**
I have an extremely organized system my BDR and I use together (about 60/40 bdr support and prospecting myself). I rank my accounts based on 7 different criterias (partners, volumes, business fit, etc) then I have a weekly scheduled where I plan out all my touches for that week and keep track of results on those touches so I can A/B test strategies. For example last week, we tried focusing on doing short and sweet emails with visuals. The week before that we did mostly loom videos, the week before that we focused on adding some linked in voice memos, then we track the results and continue to iterate and find the best strategy.
Whitespacing & Customer Accounts (schedule for that day):
Then I have a third spreadsheet/system for my customer accounts where I map out the whitespace and try and hold myself accountable to keeping conversations going with those customers on the areas we see whitespace. As well as just keeping up with ongoing communications to keep the customers happy.
How do you research prospects before a call or meeting? What information do you work for?
Neglecting to use LinkedIn to research clients is not a viable option in today’s sales environment. Ensure that candidates are searching for personal commonalities in addition to professional information so they can tailor their communication as much as possible. Looking into company trigger events would be the cherry on top.
- What partners they use can be super telling - cross-beam - built with
- who they are using today and who we may be competing with (then set traps/staging)
- figure out who their competitors are and come with a few specific customers stories in their industry
- relevant news/company events
- Obviously linked in of each person your talking to - linked in org map of who you need to talk to
- ## we have a system we use to think through the business itself and how we should sell based on their revenue model. Most businesses can be boiled down to three sectors: selling goods/Services, subscription, or ad revenue. So I will map that out and prepare my discovery questions and language for that call to match up with what is top of mind for them in their role and their business. So for example if I am speaking to a at a low level marketer at good and services company, I’d ask how long they spend a day building campaigns, where they see fall off in cart abandonment, what their AOV and time to purchase is, but for subscription we’d really want to drill into retention and engagement metrics, referrals, daily versus monthly vs yearly active users, etc.
Who are you most comfortable selling to and why?”
Listen for whether they answer with a description or an ideal buyer, or a particular demographic with no tie-in to the buying process. Depending on your product or service, the second type of response might pose a problem.
Braze’s product is really fun and interesting to sell because it touches a ton of different parts of the org so I’ve gotten good at making sure my pitch is catered to who I’m speaking with: LIfecycle marketing, product marketing, loyalty, Engineerings & product for website and app expData Analytics.
My favorite kind of pitch to give and people to sell to, however, is The C suite ROI pitches. As an example, I recently gave a big pitch to the CMO and all the marketing and lifecycle directors at Alo yoga. Alo yoga is a very innovative forward thinking brand who cares a ton about brand continuity and being on the cutting edge. So I creating a fully customized deck and pitch on how braze aligns to the 3 pillars their CMO laid out in a recent podcast she was on, and how well drive value in value in those areas. It landed extremely well and we now are working toward final contract negotiations with them. Our champ gave me the feedback afterwards that her team felt like we really understood their business where the other competition it was much more generic.
“How do you find your leads?”
Beware of the sales rep who is handed a steady flow of leads, has the best accounts or can hide under the air cover offered by a big brand name firm. Nothing wrong with big companies but often their sales reps haven’t had to make a cold sales call to a stranger for decades.
Still doing a ton of cold prospecting, I’ve found partnerships to be really fruitful for know who to focus on and having warmer intros, loom has been really successful for me, etc.
“What are three adjectives a former client would use to describe you?”
**
Prepared: Came prepared with the answer to everything we may need on each call to make the best use of our time. She clearly understood our business and came prepped with extremely personalized materials - not broad fluffy/salesy pitches
Mar tech Thought leader: Jennie clearly knows the space and pushed us to think bigger. We learned a lot about campaign ideas and how others in our space are doing things
Prompt:
10. “What book is on your nightstand?”
Top sales reps are self-improvement junkies! Doesn’t matter if they have been in the business for 4 weeks or 4 decades, the top 10% are always looking for ways to improve and gain a competitive edge.
The daily stoic. Its a chapter each day about being your best self. I am big into meditating, so I will usually start my day by reading that then meditating before I dive into work. i’ve found it drastically increases my productivity when I can come at it from a calm, centered mind. Really has helped me convert my “sales anxiety” into a healthy motivator.
. “What are your short-term goals?”
Long term goals are fine but they all usually sound the same. You want someone that can get off to a fast start with minimal hand holding. A great candidate will have already thought about, planned and prepared for how they will build a pipeline and get to their first commission check as fast as possible.
Realistically it takes time to get into accounts. In my next role my goal would be to come in, within the first week rank all my accounts and put together in depth prospecting plans for how I’ll crack into them, then in the first quarter just really crank on prospecting so I can build enough pipeline for a really strong second H1. In tandem with that, I’d want to ensure I am demo certified within the first month. Another thing I will definitly want to do is a “ride along” with a more tenured rep where I
How do new sales reps learn at X company- obviously its fully remote - do you managers hop on calls with you as your learning - do you use gong? what does that look like?
When I started at Braze I did “ride alongs” with team members and then management helped out on my first few cycles so I could learn by doing
Do you think it’s more important to produce a high-quality product or invest in superior customer service?
Both are incredibly important. it’s almost like the chicken and the egg where you can’t have one without the other. When I first started at Braze they definitely were more product focused, we had features 6-12 months before anyone else on the market but often our customer service lacked. So in my later years here we really invested in customer service and in hand were much stickier and more successful overall. Referrals are everything. One unhappy customer can cause a lot of damage.
What’s your process for improving your skills?
Prospecting: Ab testing, outreach creeping
Deal Strategy Bringing my boss on calls for feedback, Pairing up with a teammate to strategize/bounce off one another for key deals, team deal reviews, gong creeping successful reps pitches, subsribe to various mar tech emails to stay in the know with whats going on there. I keep an internal doc of customer stories that I am always adding to,
What are some key values you have? Whats important to you in a working relationship?
Transparency & trust are probably the two most important things to me. I have an extremely close relationship with my boss where we have built a lot of trust and work very well closely together in deal cycles. Coming from athletics, I love feedback and am extremely coachable. I bug my boss after every single call we are on together for feedback on how I can improve and want full transparency from him on how I am doing overall. Its also really important to me to feel like I have a leader who is transparent with me about expectations, whats going on with leadership, etc.
I also try and facilitate that kind of transparent relationships with customers/prospects. Where they feel like they can come to me directly with any questions they have versus listening to FUD from competitors. I set that president at the start of the relationship and work hard to gain their trust throughout the cycle.
What advice would you give to a new sales rep?
- Be an industry expert. Read the news, learn the lingo, memorize those customer stories!
- Be curious: practice 2nd/3rd level questioning, put yourself in their shoes
- Healthy anxiety: Medpicc, spend time thinking of every angle and possible thing that could go wrong
- AB testing is critical: for prospecting, losses, keep track of your strategies
Why do you want to leave Braze?
Turn on your excuse radar and listen closely to this answer. The bottom line is the good candidates ALWAYS FIGURE IT OUT, regardless of market conditions
been with Braze 3.5 years now, watches us grow from from a baby start up to a massive post IPO organization. Its been an amazing ride but I think its starting to feel like a natural closing point to make a change as I reach 4 years.. I want to continue to push myself to keep learning new markets/products and to sharpen my skills by selling new things and learning from new leadership. Additionally, I think it would be a lot of fun to be back at an earlier stage company. I loved my early days at Braze when I felt like I could really make an impact.
I was originally planning on waiting until the end of the year but then I realized timing I also think could be really good where I could start up end of october, have a few months to ramp then hit the ground running in my first full year here (and I am hoping to close out my largest deal for the year in october too so timing for payouts works well) deals for
