This guide gives {{Company name}} a structured loop for sales roles — account executives, SDRs stepping up, and sales leaders. Salespeople interview for a living, so unstructured conversations select for charm rather than selling. This loop counters that with two evidence-heavy stages: a pipeline walkthrough where numbers must reconcile, and a mock discovery call where the candidate sells live.

Stage plan

Competency map

• Pipeline discipline — builds and maintains coverage systematically; numbers reconcile under questioning.
• Discovery skill — asks questions that surface pain, budget, and process instead of pitching features.
• Deal control and closing — advances deals with mutual plans and handles negotiation without panic discounts.
• Forecast accuracy — calls their number honestly and knows why each deal sits where it sits.
• Coachability — absorbs feedback fast and shows evidence of changing their own game.

Question banks by stage

Recruiter screen

• Walk me through your quota and attainment for the last two years, year by year.
• What was your average deal size and sales cycle length?
• How much of your pipeline did you source yourself versus receive from marketing or SDRs?
• What are you looking for in your next team?
• What are your compensation expectations — base, variable, and OTE?

Hiring manager interview — pipeline walkthrough

• Reconstruct your pipeline from your best quarter: how many deals at each stage, and what was the coverage ratio?
• Pick the biggest deal you won last year. Walk me through it from first touch to signature.
• Who were the buyers in that deal, and who almost killed it?
• Tell me about a quarter you missed. What did the gap analysis show?
• How did you decide which deals to walk away from? Give me a real example.
• What was your prospecting rhythm when pipeline was thin — literally, what did Monday look like?

Mock discovery call

Brief the candidate on your product with a one-pager the day before. An interviewer plays a realistic prospect with a hidden pain, a budget constraint, and a competing priority. Do not make the prospect easy.

• How do they open — agenda and permission, or straight into pitch?
• Do their questions go one level deeper on the pain, or skim and move on?
• Do they uncover the hidden constraint without being handed it?
• When asked directly for price, how do they handle it?
• Do they close with a concrete, time-bound next step both sides agree to?
• In the debrief: what did they learn about the prospect, and what would they do next?

Deal review deep dive

• Bring one won and one lost deal. For the loss: when was it actually lost, in hindsight?
• What did the champion in your won deal say about you to their boss? How do you know?
• Show me how you ran the negotiation: what did you concede, and what did you get in return?
• Where did legal or procurement almost stall the deal, and what did you do?
• If you re-ran the lost deal, what is the one change that flips the outcome?

Scoring anchors

Score each competency 1 to 4 with written evidence immediately after each stage. The mock call and the pipeline walkthrough carry the most weight; charm without reconciling numbers is a 2, not a 3.

• 1 — Below bar: attainment stories collapse under arithmetic, discovery is a feature pitch, discounts are the only closing tool.
• 2 — Near bar: hits quota in favorable conditions; discovery adequate but stays shallow; forecast driven by hope.
• 3 — At bar: numbers reconcile, discovery uncovers real pain, deals advance through mutual plans, honest about losses.
• 4 — Above bar: controls the mock call naturally, diagnoses their own losses better than the interviewer could, and shows a repeatable system others could learn from.