What did LinkedIn rank as the most in-demand job of 2023?
Head of RevOps.
Revenue operations (RevOps) is a rapidly growing field responsible for aligning sales, marketing, and customer success teams across the customer lifecycle. You’ll often hear many RevOps leaders classify their work into these three buckets: people, processes, and data.
As part of the people focus, one of the trends we’ve noticed is RevOps leaders joining sales candidate interviews, which makes a lot of sense. RevOps presence in sales interviews creates a great opportunity to gauge the candidate’s understanding of the sales process and the metrics that matter most in driving revenue.
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Including RevOps in the sales interview process is also a good idea to ensure the candidate is a good fit for the company’s culture. RevOps can ask questions about the candidate’s experience with cross-functional collaboration and ability to work effectively with people from different departments, particularly Marketing, Customer Success, and Product.
Additionally, RevOps can help identify any potential gaps in the candidate’s skills or knowledge and offer suggestions for how the candidate can improve their skills or knowledge in these areas.
We say all this while fully recognizing that RevOps remains a relatively new field. With that in mind, many folks in their first RevOps title are conducting sales interviews for the first time.
So, to help those of you who will represent RevOps in a sales interview, we curated 15 relevant questions to ask.
Rise of RevOps
41% of surveyed companies in Revenue.io’s study reported having an in-house RevOps function, a stat that’s up 15% since 2021. Another 11% of companies said they plan to introduce RevOps in 2023.
15 questions
- What are the key metrics you track to measure sales success? Asking a sales candidate this question can give you valuable insight into their understanding of sales metrics and their ability to measure success. Can they communicate what their current org.’s metrics are? Can they explain how their compensation plan or sales process aligns to these? The more they can, the higher the caliber of the candidate.
- What do you think about cross-functional collaboration? The candidate’s answer to the question can showcase their:
- Experience with cross-functional collaboration: Have they worked on projects that involved multiple teams? What were their roles in these projects?
- Approach to cross-functional collaboration: Do they believe in a “siloed” approach, where each department works independently? Or do they believe in a more collaborative approach, where teams work together to achieve common goals?
- Communication style: How do they communicate with people from other departments? Are they clear and concise? Do they listen effectively?
- How have you leaned on data in the past to inform your decisions or strategy? Their response will give you a peek into how much (or little) they value the importance of data-driven decision-making. Maybe they A/B tested email copy for outreach or looked into what times of day they’ve had the most success getting replies. By asking them for examples, you can gauge their experience diving into their data.
- How would you find 10 new leads today? This is one of my favorite questions and gives you insights into their lead-generation skills, creativity, proactivity, problem-solving skills, knowledge of the industry, and confidence. You’ll learn a lot about the person in how they react to answering this with little to no context.
- How would you enter the 10 leads into your pipeline for consistent follow-up? If you ask question No. 4, this should be the next question. Ask this one to get a pulse on the candidate’s sales process. Their answer offers insight into how they typically organize and track their leads, their attention to detail, their willingness to follow up with leads, and how they leverage their CRM and other tools to make follow-ups more efficient and consistent.
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Start Trial- What do you think about a lead versus a contact versus an account? A great way to test your candidate’s sales terminology is by asking them to discuss how they treat and define a lead, contact, and account. If you’re hiring for a less senior role, I’d ask this question to measure just how green they are in their sales career.
- What are some key admin tasks you complete daily to be successful? For a glimpse into the candidate’s time management skills and attention to detail, ask them questions on sales admin tasks, like updating accounts and opportunities, scheduling follow-ups, creating new contacts, etc.
- Have you worked with RevOps in the past? If so, how did they support you? What would you like to see more of from RevOps at your next organization? Learn more about the candidate’s experience in working with RevOps and how they understand the value RevOps brings. This is also a great opportunity to sell your organization and what your RevOps team delivers if they had a poor experience or never worked with RevOps.
- What’s an ideal customer profile, and what do you think ours is? This question again tests their knowledge of industry terms and how much research they’ve done on your organization. It also allows them to let their curiosity and honesty shine through if unfamiliar with the term.
- How does your approach to a sale change when it’s a short cycle compared to a long one? The candidate’s answer to this question will reflect their adaptability and showcase their experience.
- Have you asked a closed/loss prospect why they didn’t move forward? What did you take from it? The response to this question, assuming the first answer is “yes”, will show you good qualities, such as accountability, selflessness, humility, and pro-activeness. Reps who put their egos aside to learn the why behind the “no” are interested in better positioning the company and themselves in the future. All green flags.
- What’s your least favorite part of the sales process and why? You’re looking for honesty and a candid answer that isn’t riddled with excuses and complaints. This response sheds light on areas where RevOps can assist, and for you to highlight how you can help them overcome their least favorite part.
- What sales technology have you used in the past? What did you like about it? What would you have changed about the tech stack? Not only will this question reveal what platforms they have experience with (in case that’s not evident on their resume and/or you forgot to look ahead of the interview), but it will also show you their level of tech competence. The more specifics they can provide about their likes and what they would change, the more likely they will be heavy users (and ambassadors) of their previous tech stack.
- How do you learn and get better at your role? A question focused on self-motivation for improvement will demonstrate how coachable they are and how independent they are to own their training and development versus requiring a ton of support and guidance from leadership.
- How do you approach forecasting? This question will show you if they care about their forecast or have been held to it in the past. For greener reps, this will also test their sales knowledge.
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