SDR Interview Questions To Elevate your Recruiting
Statistics reveal that in the past few years, an average of 30-45% of all business revenues has been generated by the Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), which projects an annual median value of $3 million. Thus, it expresses the importance of SDRs for the growth of a company! In most cases, they are probably the business makers for top organizations across different industries.
SDRs in a company serve the role of empowering the sales process and the entire team for identifying, outreaching, and converting prospects into business-earning opportunities. However, as important as it is to have SDRs in your firm, hiring the right people becomes tricky at times.
More than 1/3rd of all sales leaders have come together to agree that hiring for the SDR roles is one of their biggest challenges. It is mostly because candidates applying for the role of a sales development representative come from diverse experiences and backgrounds, making it difficult for the recruitment team to filter out the best picks.
You need someone who is well-versed in sales management and inside/outside sales and has adequate aptitude for the role. Therefore, you must stress asking the right SDR interview questions in order to not just evaluate the candidates but also to ensure their skills align with your business goals.
7 of the Most Impactful SDR Interview Questions You Must Ask Your Candidates
Once you are done with the general introduction of candidates in an interview, it is time to dive in and ask them the questions specific to the role and niche. So, here are 10 impactful SDR interview questions that will help you evaluate the skills, knowledge, and expertise of candidates for the role, beyond what their resume has to tell:
1. Can you tell me about a big sales setback you experienced in the past, and what measures you took to handle it?
Purpose of the Question:
As a new or experienced SDR, it is obvious that a professional experiences multiple setbacks or rejections. The purpose of this question is to evaluate the candidates on their most challenging sales setback and what measures they took to recover from it.
Ideal Candidate Response:
Candidates must respond to this question by expressing an honest count of rejections or setbacks they have faced in the past. They then need to pick the most challenging one among them all and express the reason behind it. Following that, an ideal candidate must also highlight the measures they took to overcome it, such as
- Acknowledging the setback.
- Analyzing the root cause of it.
- Take action on the controllable tasks in the sales process.
- Seek the help of managers to know what could have been done better.
2. Can you showcase your sales skills in a demo phone-based roleplay right at the moment?
Purpose of the Question or Task:
It is more of an interview task than a question, but it is a very crucial part of recruiting the best SDRs. The purpose of this demo sales call is to evaluate the practical skills they have in handling a prospect and making a successful conversion.
Ideal Candidate Response:
Your candidates, if experienced, must deliver exceptional performance in the phone-based roleplay. On the other hand, if you are interviewing freshers, you can set the level of performance leniency at your own will.
However, the key assessing factor with this question or task is to see if the candidate is ready to accept coaching on areas of improvement. An ideal candidate shouldn’t be defensive towards the feedback from interviewers and must accept it with a sense of confidence and project determination towards being the best.
3. How many SDRs were in your last company, and where did you stand among them?
Purpose of the Question:
Every SDR must strive to record individual contributions to the company’s sales growth, and competing with the team is part of the job. The purpose of this question is to test the level of competitiveness in candidates and to know where they ranked among their team members in the last job.
Ideal Candidate Response:
A recruitment-worthy response of candidates must showcase humbleness and acceptance of the true rank they held among the team members in their last jobs. They must highlight their contribution in numbers and also accept the setbacks that, at times, troubled their ranking in the team.
At the same time, your ideal candidate must also express competitiveness by highlighting out-of-the-ordinary efforts they made to come to the top of their company’s ranking table. As an interviewer, you must not just seek to hire candidates who their the MVPs in their team but also consider the ones who are motivated to not stay at the bottom.
4. What makes you passionate about handling sales in this company?
Purpose of the Question:
The purpose of this interview question for SDR candidates is to evaluate if their passion for the role varies from their first answer to the second. It is expected of a good candidate to showcase positive consistency across every point they make as a response to this question.
Ideal Candidate Response:
A candidate is expected to deliver a creatively crafted response to this question, expressing immense passion about joining your company as an SDR. Following that, they must also convey their interest and dedication for the role through their tone, energy, and body language.
5. What’s the very first action that comes to your mind when the company’s sales are down?
Purpose of the Question:
Here, the candidates are meant to be tested for their understanding of business goals and the activities meant to be executed for achieving them. Beyond that, the purpose of this question is also to know if a candidate for the SDR role is aware of healthy phone or email activities they can engage in while pitching the product to a customer.
Ideal Candidate Response:
As an ideal response, candidates must tell the interviewing panel about what effective efforts they usually take to improve their sales pitch and the quality of their conversations. They must also convey reaching the customers within positive activity boundaries to avoid spamming them with emails or phone calls.
This question will also test a candidate’s ability to retain the sales figures when an unexpected flow of setbacks comes in.
6. What is a unique sales quality that differentiates you from others?
Purpose of the Question:
The purpose of this SDR interview question is to test the personality of candidates and how they show their skills to be better than others. For instance, a candidate talking negatively about others isn’t the person with the right personality to be an SDR in your company.
Ideal Candidate Response:
Ideal candidates for the SDR interview must express optimal planning, strategic execution, and high goal-setting characteristics in their answers. Beyond that, the unique qualities they highlight must also be practically implementable in the real-world sales scenarios, which will strongly prove their experience in the niche.
Nevertheless, the right SDRs must show respect to the sales approach of every teammate they interact with and extend help whenever needed to meet the business goals.
7. What, according to you, is the biggest reason salespeople fail?
Purpose of the Question:
The purpose of asking this question is to discover the perception of candidates towards the failure of salespeople. This question in the SDR interview will tell you if they blame the external or intrinsic factors for the poor sales performance in any company.
As an interviewer, your intent in asking this question should be to filter out candidates who take all the credit for a sales success and blame circumstances or leads for the failure. Such people might not be the right fit to learn and grow in a competitive sales environment.
Ideal Candidate Response:
Candidates with the right sense of the sales role will respond to this question by expressing their early-day downsides, which resulted in poor results or failures. Following that, they should also shed light on the common flaws among salespeople that lead to poor collective performance and justify the ways taken for them to avoid making those mistakes.
In simple words, you must look for a candidate who has the courage to own up/their own actions, irrespective of whether it resulted in success or failure. It expresses that a candidate can be trusted and groomed to overcome the common flaws made by most salespeople.
Hiring Top SDR Talent Made Easier with Out-of-the-Ordinary Interview Questions!
Elevate your company’s sales potential with a strong, skilled, and knowledgeable team of Sales Development Representatives. However, hiring the right people for the SDR role is not a piece of cake, especially when every industry is becoming extremely competitive every year. Therefore, you must ask the right & relevant SDR interview questions that can give you a clear insight into the capabilities of your candidates.
At Ducknowl, we offer you a comprehensive suite of recruitment tools to help you streamline your SDR interview process. We have our one-way interview tool that enables you to list out your interview questions and assign candidates to provide video responses to them. This way, your recruitment panel can review the recorded responses at their convenience and finalize the right candidates for the final rounds.
We also recommend that you conduct an SDR skill test prior to the final interview to analyze subject knowledge, personality, cognitive ability, and other such traits of your potential candidates. This way, you can filter the large pool of shortlisted candidates and schedule one-way interviews only for the most qualified of them all, saving you overall time and effort.
To know more about how Ducknowl’s smart recruitment tools can help you hire the best team of Sales Development Representatives, request a demo today!
