10 Questions to Ask in a Sales Rep Interview

A sales rep interview should measure how well a candidate can sell, not how well they can talk. That means your questions need to test past performance, daily discipline, discovery and objection handling, CRM habits, written communication, coachability and motivation. Decide in advance what you are measuring, score the answers, and base the decision on data rather than gut feeling.

Hiring a sales rep is one of the most expensive decisions a sales leader makes. When you hire the wrong person, the loss isn't just salary. It also includes the weeks you spent on onboarding, the prospects nobody reached in that time, badly positioned first meetings, and the motivation of the rest of the team. Because B2B sales cycles are already long, you often only notice the impact of a bad hire 4 to 6 months later. By then, both the time and the opportunity are gone.

In this article I share 10 questions I've seen work over the years while building sales teams and running dozens of interviews. For each one, I'll explain why you ask it, what a good answer sounds like, which answers are red flags, and which follow-up questions you can use to dig deeper. The goal is not to find the candidate who has memorised the "right answer", but the one who can actually sell.

Before the Interview: Be Clear About What You're Measuring

Before getting to the questions, I want to underline one critical point. Most sales interviews fail because the interviewer doesn't know what they want to measure. As a result, the decision rests on feelings like "they had good energy" or "they expressed themselves well". But talking well and selling well are not the same thing.

Before the interview, write down the 4 or 5 most critical competencies for the role. For an outbound-heavy SDR/BDR role, the list typically looks like this:

• Discipline and consistent activity: Being able to prospect at the same rhythm every day.
• Curiosity and discovery skills: Being able to ask the right questions and find the other side's real problem.
• Resilience in the face of rejection: Being able to keep going with the same energy even after dozens of "no"s.
• Coachability: Being able to take feedback and quickly turn it into behaviour.
• Written and verbal communication: Being able to write short, clear, personalised messages.

Once you've defined these competencies, tie every question to at least one of them and score candidates on a scale of 1 to 4. Let 1 mean "weak", 2 "needs development", 3 "meets expectations" and 4 "strong". If more than one person is interviewing, enter scores separately without seeing each other's notes. This simple rule significantly reduces the "the most senior person's opinion wins" effect.

If you're still building the team from scratch, I'd recommend reviewing the steps to build an outbound sales team from scratch before defining your hiring profile. Who you're looking for depends on what stage you're at.

1. "Can you walk me through the deal you're proudest of from the last 12 months, from start to finish?"

This is my favourite opening question. Even if the candidate came prepared, once you get into the details, the difference between real experience and an embellished story shows up immediately.

Why we ask it: To see whether the candidate understands the sales process end to end. Who found the opportunity? How was first contact made? Who were the decision makers? What objections came up and how were they overcome?

What a good answer sounds like:

• There's a concrete timeline: "I sent the first email in early March, the first meeting happened two weeks later, and the contract was signed in June."
• They talk about the different people on the buying committee and their different priorities.
• They can separate their own contribution from the team's: "I ran discovery, and our solutions consultant ran the technical demo."

Red flags:

• The story is all "we" and never "I".
• They can't explain why the customer bought, and just say "the product was good".
• They don't remember the size or length of the deal.

Follow-up questions: "Was there a moment in that process when the deal nearly fell through?", "What would you do differently if you did it again?"

2. "What was your target last year, and what percentage of it did you hit?"

Sales is a measurable profession. A seller who doesn't know their own numbers most likely isn't managing their performance.

Why we ask it: To understand the candidate's awareness of targets, their transparency and how they define success.

What a good answer sounds like: "My quarterly target was 30 qualified meetings. In the first two quarters I hit roughly 110%, and in the third quarter I came in at 85% because my territory changed and it took me time to warm up on the new account list." This answer has numbers, context and honesty.

Red flags:

• Saying "I was always above target" without giving a single number.
• Not knowing how the target was measured (meetings, pipeline or closed revenue).
• Blaming unsuccessful periods entirely on external factors.

Follow-up questions: "Where did you rank in the team?", "How was your target set, and do you think it was realistic?"

A word of caution: always verify the numbers in the reference check. Asking the candidate's previous manager "What percentage of their target did they usually hit?" is the fastest way to check consistency with the interview answer.

3. "Can you walk me through a typical prospecting day, hour by hour?"

Especially for SDR/BDR roles, this may be the most decisive question in the interview. Success in outbound sales depends largely on a boring but consistent routine.

Why we ask it: To measure discipline, time management and realistic expectations about activity volume.

What a good answer sounds like:

• "From 9 to 10 a.m. I clear the previous day's replies and CRM tasks. From 10 to 12 is my call block, and I don't put the phone down during it. In the afternoon I do account research and write personalised emails. At the end of the day I prepare the next day's list."
• They talk about daily activity targets: how many calls, how many emails, how many LinkedIn touches.
• They can explain the logic of a multichannel sequence.

Red flags:

• Saying "it depends" and being unable to describe any structure.
• Spending no time on research or, the opposite, spending the whole day researching and never making contact.
• Not knowing which tools they used or how they built their list.

Follow-up questions: "After how many touches do you give up on an account?", "Which channel gets you the most replies, and why?"

4. "Tell me about a deal you lost. Why did you lose it?"

You learn a lot from deals you win, but you learn even more from the ones you lose. This question is one of the best ways to measure a candidate's self-awareness.

Why we ask it: To see their capacity to take responsibility, analyse and learn.

What a good answer sounds like: "I worked with a large logistics company for three months but lost it at the final stage. Looking back, I had only built a relationship with the operations manager. I never brought the finance director into the process, and budget approval got stuck with them. Since then I always ask who owns the budget in the first two meetings."

The beauty of this answer is that a mistake is admitted, the root cause is found and a concrete change in behaviour is described.

Red flags:

• Entirely external explanations like "we were too expensive" or "the customer wasn't ready".
• Claiming they've never lost a deal.
• Belittling the customer while describing the loss.

Follow-up questions: "Did you ask the customer for feedback on why you lost?" At this point I'm looking for something that parallels what I've written about the power of customer feedback in B2B: a mindset that tries to learn systematically even from a lost deal.

5. "Let's say I'm a prospect. Let's run a 10-minute discovery call."

The only way to see the difference between talking and doing is to put the candidate on stage. The role-play is the most informative part of the interview.

How to set it up:

1. Send the candidate a short scenario 2 to 3 days before the interview: the target customer type, a short description of your product and the goal of the call.
2. Deliberately leave a hidden problem in the scenario. For example: "The customer's sales team doesn't use the CRM consistently and the manager can't see the pipeline." Don't give this information to the candidate. They need to find it through questions.
3. Limit the call to 10 to 12 minutes.
4. At the end, ask the candidate: "How do you think it went?"

What good performance looks like:

• The candidate leaves at least half of the conversation to you.
• They ask open-ended questions: "How does this process work today?", "What does this cost you?"
• They dig deeper on surface-level answers: "Could you say a bit more about that?"
• They end the call with a clear next step: date, attendees, agenda.

Red flags:

• Starting a product pitch within the first two minutes.
• Presenting a solution without ever exploring the problem.
• Ending the call with a vague close like "I'll send you some information."

The self-assessment in the last question is at least as valuable as the call itself. A candidate who can say "I never asked about budget, I skipped that" is a candidate who will develop quickly in the field.

6. "As the customer, I say 'Your price is too high.' How do you respond?"

Objection handling comes up in every sales interview, but it is often evaluated the wrong way. What you're looking for isn't a memorised counterargument, but the reflex to understand the reality behind the objection.

Why we ask it: To see their ability to stay calm under pressure and turn an objection into a discovery opportunity.

What a good answer sounds like: "I understand, that's important to hear. When you say high, what are you comparing it to? Another solution, or the budget you've set aside?" An answer like this turns the objection into a question rather than an argument. That's because the "too expensive" objection usually hides one of three things: the value hasn't been understood well enough, there genuinely is no budget, or the customer is negotiating with a competitor. Each one has a different solution.

Red flags:

• Offering a discount immediately.
• Getting defensive and explaining at length why the product isn't expensive.
• Ignoring the objection and changing the subject.

Follow-up: Ask the same question once more, but add a second objection: "We're not prioritising this right now." Seeing how the candidate reacts to the second blow tells you a lot about their resilience.

7. "How do you use the CRM in your daily work? What do you do to keep your pipeline clean?"

Many sales managers skip this question because it looks like "an administrative detail". But a seller without CRM discipline damages the team's forecasting quality, causes information loss on handed-over accounts and forces the manager to keep asking "what was the status?"

Why we ask it: To measure operational discipline and respect for data.

What a good answer sounds like:

• "I enter my notes within 5 minutes of every call, otherwise I forget the details."
• "Every opportunity always has a next step and a date. An opportunity without a next step is a dead opportunity to me."
• "Once a week I review my pipeline and either move forward or close any opportunity that hasn't moved in 30 days."

Red flags:

• "I filled in the CRM because my manager wanted me to."
• Knowing which CRMs they've used but being unable to explain how they used them.
• Keeping their notes in a personal notebook or in Excel.

If the CRM side isn't settled in your own team yet, it's much healthier to set up that infrastructure before you hire. The new person then picks up the right habits from day one. I shared a practical framework for this in my article on choosing a CRM for a small sales team.

8. "You've researched our company. Can you write the first cold email you'd send to one of our ideal customers?"

This is a short take-home assignment you can give during or before the interview. My preference is to send it before the interview and give the candidate 48 hours.

Assignment format:

• Target: a company and a person of the candidate's choosing that fit your real ICP.
• Deliverable: a subject line, a first email of no more than 120 words, and a follow-up message to be sent 3 days later.
• Extra: a 3 to 4 sentence explanation answering "Why did you choose this person and this company?"

What a good assignment looks like:

• The personalisation is real: it references a recent development at the company, their job postings or a post by the person.
• The message starts with the customer's problem, not your product.
• There's a single, clear call to action: "Could we talk for 15 minutes next week?"
• It's short. It fits on one screen on mobile.

Red flags:

• A generic text starting with "Dear Sir/Madam" that could be sent to anyone.
• Listing product features for three paragraphs.
• More than one call to action, or none at all.

This assignment also tests the candidate's motivation. A candidate who doesn't take the assignment seriously most likely won't take prospecting seriously either. When evaluating it, you can use the principles for improving cold email reply rates as a checklist.

9. "Can you give me an example of feedback that genuinely changed your behaviour?"

If there's one trait that matters even more than experience, it's coachability. A very experienced seller who is closed to feedback is one of the hardest profiles to bring into a team. Someone with little experience who learns fast, on the other hand, can become one of the best on the team within 6 months.

Why we ask it: To see their learning speed and how much their ego allows for growth.

What a good answer sounds like: "After listening to my call recordings, my manager told me I interrupted customers far too often. It was hard to accept at first, then I listened to them myself and my manager was right. For two weeks I set a rule on every call to wait two seconds after the customer finished their sentence. My discovery calls got noticeably longer and I started getting more information."

Red flags:

• Being unable to come up with a real example.
• Explaining that the feedback was unfair.
• Saying they accepted the feedback but didn't change anything.

Live test: After the role-play, give the candidate one clear piece of feedback and ask for a short 3-minute redo. For example: "This time, try asking about budget in the first 5 minutes." Whether the candidate applies that feedback on the second attempt is a far more reliable signal than their answers.

10. "Why sales, why now and why us?"

The last question measures motivation. Sales is a profession where the first few months are especially hard. Rejection rates are high, results are delayed and the pressure is constant. To get through this period, the candidate needs an intrinsic reason.

Why we ask it: To understand whether the candidate chose this role deliberately, or came "because I couldn't find anything else".

What a good answer sounds like:

• Why sales: A concrete interest in sales itself. "I enjoy talking to people and understanding their problems", "I like that the outcome depends directly on my own effort."
• Why now: A logical step in their career plan. "I've been an SDR for three years, and now I want to close my own deals."
• Why us: Having genuinely researched your company, your market and your customers.

Here I'd especially recommend being open to candidates from different backgrounds. People who come from engineering, teaching or the service industry and make a deliberate move into sales often turn out to be the most motivated and most structured sellers. As I described in my own story of moving from civil engineering to sales, the right motivation is often more decisive than industry experience.

Red flags:

• Motivation focused only on commission and earnings. Money is an important motivator, but on its own it isn't enough to get through the hard periods.
• Being unable to explain exactly what your company does.
• Speaking negatively about their previous employer.

Bonus: Don't forget to ask "What would you like to ask us?" at the end of the interview. Good candidates ask about things like the career path, what the successful sellers on the team have in common, the onboarding process and how targets are set. A candidate who asks no questions will most likely ask few questions in customer meetings too.

How Should You Structure the Interview Process?

Squeezing these 10 questions into a single conversation is unfair to both the candidate and you. Here's the structure I recommend:

1. Screening call (20 to 30 minutes, phone or video): Questions 2 and 10. A check on basic fit, salary expectations and motivation. The goal here is to filter.
2. Competency interview (45 to 60 minutes): Questions 1, 3, 4, 7 and 9. In-depth questions based on past behaviour.
3. Practical stage (45 minutes): Questions 5, 6 and 8. The role-play, objection handling and the take-home assignment, evaluated together.
4. Reference check: A 15-minute conversation with at least one previous manager. This is where you verify the numbers and coachability.

Ideally the whole process should be completed within 2 to 3 weeks. Good sellers usually have more than one offer. If you stretch the process to 6 weeks, you'll lose the best candidates to your competitors.

Scoring and Decision

At the end of each stage, score the candidate from 1 to 4 on the competencies you defined. A simple decision rule might be:

• No critical competency should score 1.
• Coachability and discipline should be at least 3. These two are the hardest traits to teach later.
• Aim for an average of 3 or above on the other competencies.

The rule may look simple, but it largely eliminates the debates that start with "they were really likeable, but…".

After the Hire: The First 90 Days

Finding the right person is half the job. The other half is making sure that person becomes productive quickly. Don't throw away the notes you collected in the interview. The areas where they were weak in the role-play should feed directly into the first 90-day development plan. For example, if the candidate is strong at discovery but weak at objection handling, focus the first month's coaching sessions on that.

The new seller also has a responsibility of their own. They need to learn the product, the customer and the internal processes quickly. At this stage I recommend to my candidates and new teammates the guide I wrote on adapting to a new B2B sales landscape.

Finally, I'd add this: not every company has to build an in-house team at every stage. If you're still validating product-market fit, or you want to see whether the outbound channel works for you, working with an external team at first, such as SAAS Corner, which provides outbound sales and lead generation services to B2B SaaS companies, can be a sensible way to test the channel before taking on hiring risk. Once the channel is proven, building the in-house team is both faster and less risky.

Conclusion

A sales rep interview should measure how well a candidate can sell, not how well they can talk. The 10 questions in this article give you a framework for systematically evaluating past performance, daily discipline, discovery and objection handling skills, CRM habits, written communication, coachability and motivation. What matters is not only asking the questions. Defining in advance what you're measuring, scoring the answers and basing the decision on data rather than gut feeling are just as important.

Remember: the best sellers aren't the ones who give a perfect answer to every question, but the ones who openly admit their mistakes, apply feedback quickly and show up in the field with the same discipline every day. If you build your interview process to bring these traits to the surface, you'll seriously reduce the risk of a bad hire.

If you'd like to structure your hiring process as you build your sales team, or review your interview framework together, you can get in touch with me through the [Berkay Yalçın](/) page.

Frequently asked questions

Which competencies should be assessed in a sales rep interview?

Before the interview, you should define 4 or 5 core competencies such as discipline, curiosity and discovery skills, resilience, coachability and communication. Each interviewer should score these competencies on a scale of 1 to 4, independently of the others. A candidate who scores 1 on a critical competency is eliminated; coachability and discipline are expected to be at least 3, and the average of the other competencies 3 or above.

How long should the sales rep interview process take?

The whole process should be completed within 2 to 3 weeks in total; when the process stretches to 6 weeks, candidates are lost. A structure made up of a 20 to 30 minute screening call, a 45 to 60 minute competency interview, a 45-minute practical stage and a 15-minute reference check is enough for this.

How can you tell in an interview whether a candidate is coachable?

The best way to find out is to give the candidate one clear piece of feedback after the role-play and ask for a short redo. How well the candidate applies that feedback on the second attempt shows more about their coachability than what they tell you about the past. If the candidate is hired, the areas where they were weak in the role-play can also be carried over into the first 90-day development plan.

Can you hire a candidate with no sales experience?

Yes, being open to candidates from different backgrounds is recommended. People who make a deliberate move into sales from engineering, teaching or the service industry often become the most motivated and most structured sellers. The right motivation is often more decisive than industry experience, and the "why sales, why now, why us" question helps you understand that motivation.

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