With over 150,000 sales jobs available on salesheads.com, you can be sure that plenty of sales professionals are trolling the listings and planning their interview tactics as they prepare to compete for the best assignments. And if the firms behind those 150,000 jobs each select three or four people to interview, that means roughly half a million meetings will be conducted in the interest of filling those jobs.
Let’s take the number crunching a step or two further. How many questions will be asked in those half a million interviews? Ten? Fifteen, 20 or 25? If it’s the latter, then over 12 million questions will be asked in our hypothetical employment scenario.
But if the better question is this:
How many of those 12 million questions will be asked by the candidate instead of the interviewer?
The answer? Not enough.
Therein lies the problem, and by extension, the solution. Because of all the interview tactics available to sales professionals looking for a new job, there is one that stands above all the others.
Asking questions.
In the sales profession, there’s an old saying that suggests, “to be interesting, you have to be interested.” In the context of the interview process, this excellent advice means that you can make employers pay more attention to you if they sense you are interested in their company. How best to do that? By demonstrating your interest through asking questions.
Well-qualified candidates using salesheads.com understand that asking intelligent questions goes far beyond the simple use of interview tactics. That’s because they know that interviewers hoping to fill sales positions are on the lookout for candidates that understand the value of asking questions in business meetings. And since a job interview is indeed a business meeting in its own right, what better way to measure an individual’s aptitude for the selling process?
Obviously, the interviewer has to be able to picture the job candidate sitting across from a potential customer and drawing out effective communication, preferably the kind that leads to new business for the company. So rather than waiting for that point in an interview where the employer asks the candidate if he has any questions, true sales professionals weave their thoughtful questions right into the interview itself.
This is an important concept, because it helps the interviewer to see the candidate’s skill at wrestling the conversation around to topics that demonstrate strong communication and result in impactful outcomes. And even if the employer sees that the candidate is using interview tactics with his question-asking strategy, there will be a certain level of respect afforded the prospective sales employee.
That respect can often lead another important upshot: a greater investment in time on behalf of the interviewer. Every sales professional worth his salt knows that getting a prospect to invest more time with him (and therefore less with the competition) can only be a good thing.
And in the case of interview tactics that really separate good candidates from great ones, there is no better way to get a leg up than gaining respect in another old-fashioned way.
By asking for it.
By: David DiCola, Elance
But if the better question is this:
How many of those 12 million questions will be asked by the candidate instead of the interviewer?
The answer? Not enough.
Therein lies the problem, and by extension, the solution. Because of all the interview tactics available to sales professionals looking for a new job, there is one that stands above all the others.
Asking questions.
In the sales profession, there’s an old saying that suggests, “to be interesting, you have to be interested.” In the context of the interview process, this excellent advice means that you can make employers pay more attention to you if they sense you are interested in their company. How best to do that? By demonstrating your interest through asking questions.
Well-qualified candidates using salesheads.com understand that asking intelligent questions goes far beyond the simple use of interview tactics. That’s because they know that interviewers hoping to fill sales positions are on the lookout for candidates that understand the value of asking questions in business meetings. And since a job interview is indeed a business meeting in its own right, what better way to measure an individual’s aptitude for the selling process?
Obviously, the interviewer has to be able to picture the job candidate sitting across from a potential customer and drawing out effective communication, preferably the kind that leads to new business for the company. So rather than waiting for that point in an interview where the employer asks the candidate if he has any questions, true sales professionals weave their thoughtful questions right into the interview itself.
This is an important concept, because it helps the interviewer to see the candidate’s skill at wrestling the conversation around to topics that demonstrate strong communication and result in impactful outcomes. And even if the employer sees that the candidate is using interview tactics with his question-asking strategy, there will be a certain level of respect afforded the prospective sales employee.
That respect can often lead another important upshot: a greater investment in time on behalf of the interviewer. Every sales professional worth his salt knows that getting a prospect to invest more time with him (and therefore less with the competition) can only be a good thing.
And in the case of interview tactics that really separate good candidates from great ones, there is no better way to get a leg up than gaining respect in another old-fashioned way.
By asking for it.
By: David DiCola, Elance
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