Podcast episode
Interview Smarter: Using Roleplays to Identify Top Sales Talent (Brooke Freedman, Chameleon)
30 Minutes to President's Club18 Jul 202435 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE LEADERSHIP TAKEAWAYS Sales leaders need to stop observing from the sidelines and actively participate in deals as player-coaches, even if they are CROs. Giving candidates extensive preparation materials for role plays allows for a more accurate evaluation of their abilities. Replaying specific parts of a role play multiple times can effectively demonstrate a candidate's coachability. Hiring decisions should be unequivocally positive or negative, avoiding the temptation to settle for average candidates. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB VP of Sales @ Chameleon Senior Director of Sales @ Drift Senior Director of Sales @ Litmus Sales Manager @ Litmus RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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for you. All righty, Brooke, welcome to the show. We start every leadership show with your top three actionable takeaways. Let's get your three. So the first takeaway is always have a role play step in your interviewing process. I haven't found a better way in all these years of management to size up a rep for a few different things. “I think the most important are one, how well do they prep and research before they get” on a call? It shows in the role play how they do that. I can find out how they structure a conversation, if they're comfortable, if they're quick to pick up on cues, if they can open a call and then guide it, and can they close it out with the next step. And then third, I kind of get a feeling for how curious they are and what kinds of questions they ask, and then how they tie everything back together. Awesome.
Let's get your three. So the first takeaway is always have a role play step in your interviewing process. I haven't found a better way in all these years of management to size up a rep for a few different things. I think the most important are one, how well do they prep and research before they get on a call? It shows in the role play how they do that. “I can find out how they structure a conversation, if they're comfortable, if they're quick to” pick up on cues, if they can open a call and then guide it, and can they close it out with the next step. And then third, I kind of get a feeling for how curious they are and what kinds of questions they ask, and then how they tie everything back together. Awesome. Number two. My second favorite is onboarding all reps as support reps first.
I haven't found a better way in all these years of management to size up a rep for a few different things. I think the most important are one, how well do they prep and research before they get on a call? It shows in the role play how they do that. I can find out how they structure a conversation, if they're comfortable, if they're quick to “pick up on cues, if they can open a call and then guide it, and can they close it out with” the next step. And then third, I kind of get a feeling for how curious they are and what kinds of questions they ask, and then how they tie everything back together. Awesome. Number two. My second favorite is onboarding all reps as support reps first. It's something I do at Chameleon now, but hadn't done at my previous companies.
few different things. I think the most important are one, how well do they prep and research before they get on a call? It shows in the role play how they do that. I can find out how they structure a conversation, if they're comfortable, if they're quick to pick up on cues, if they can open a call and then guide it, and can they close it out with the next step. “And then third, I kind of get a feeling for how curious they are and what kinds of questions” they ask, and then how they tie everything back together. Awesome. Number two. My second favorite is onboarding all reps as support reps first. It's something I do at Chameleon now, but hadn't done at my previous companies. If you can have your new AEs spend their first few weeks holding off from jumping onto calls
standard. Like I'll give an example of an objection that we might give in the role play, which is, okay, this all sounds great. We're going to continue to do our research. I think this is something that we're just starting to think about. So we don't want to keep going right now. Like if you can send some follow up, we're going to tee up some of your competitors. “I'm looking to see what the rep does to pull back from what they learned in the” beginning of that conversation to challenge the buyer on that based on what they heard and what sort of urgency they think that there could be if we just No matter where you are, whatever product you're selling, you should kind of know how to handle that and not just let it slide. I've definitely had candidates that let it go. They're like, sure, I'll send a follow up.
others. We've gone through hiring rounds at different companies where we missed it. There are questions that we should add to our interview process that we just missed on. We got it wrong and then we change it. I think that's the key to having a rubric, a scoring method and the same questions asked. “We've got a lot of questions that are really well asked every time that are organized in such a way that, you know, Mark, you're asking these three questions, Armand's asking these three, and I'm asking these three, and we're scoring our results based on agreed upon criteria before we ever got into that.” People take different pieces of the interview, like there might be a benefit to have one or two people from your organization take the first intro call and do just culture fit, work ethic, a few other pieces that you're looking for.
Okay. So I've learned over time that if it's not a yes, if it's not a like, absolutely, we need to hire this person. You got to keep looking, even if that means that you have to find a way to hit the number for another month until you get that rep in the door. I know there's always a lot of pressure on hiring. “And I think it's important for managers to have that head hired before the number goes up.” But like it costs too much to do it wrong. So we really need everyone to be an enthusiastic, yes. And if it's not, then we keep moving. I would argue like and I would do this is, as soon we set this is the worst answer in interview, I'm a soft, yes.
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