Nailing your FinTech Sales hiring process or your interview – what do you need to know?

I’ve interviewed 1000s of FinTech Salespeople who have subsequently done 100s of interviews with my clients.

Of all the skillsets, I’ve found that sales hiring is still done on gut feel and is the least objective process. I’ve been guilty of it too when hiring recruiters – overvaluing feedback like “they’re energetic” or “they’re charismatic.” As opposed to valuing great answers on process, approach, problem solving ability and target attainment.

I actually don’t think this is all wrong – and communication style and your ability to get on with someone will always play a part in hiring until we fully outsource everything to AI. But I hope that some of the questions below allow you to be more systematic about your hiring decisions if you're a hiring manager and I hope the below inspire you to be able to knock all of these out of the park if you're a candidate looking for a new role in FinTech Sales.  

In this first section, they are all quite matter of fact questions to understand what the candidate sells, their role in the organisation, their sales process and the structure of the company they work for.

·      What does the product you sell do? What’s the value proposition?

·      What is your role?

·      How much of your role in %age is new logo sales vs account management?

·      What are your sales targets? How have you achieved against them in the last 3 years?

·      How many deals did you close to reach your number last year?

·      If you were over/under target – why do you think that was?

·      Who do you compete with? What are the pros and cons of your product and your competitors’?

·      Who are the client types you sell to? E.g. hedge fund, investment bank, retail trading firm. Can you quantify the amount of time spent selling to each.

·      What countries do you sell to? Can you quantify the amount of time spent selling to each.

·      Who are the users of the product? Do different users use the product for different reasons? E.g. equity derivative traders, equity derivative risk managers.

·      Who are your economic buyers? E.g. Head of Engineering, CTO, CMO.

·      How do you change your communication style based on the level or function of the person you’re selling to?

·        What’s the range in 1st year ARR of the deals you sign? What’s the average? E.g. $40-200k, average of $75k.

·      How is it priced? E.g. per user, usage etc.

·      What are some of the negotiation techniques you have used when pricing? E.g. c. $10k per user per year, with data add-ons that are usually $1-5k per year.

·      How long are the average sales cycles? E.g. 4 months.

·      What are the sorts of steps you take in your sales cycle? E.g. lead gen, discovery call, demo, PoC, negotiation, contracts.

·      What’s your approach to lead generation – what do you utilise the most? E.g. cold calling, email, content & campaigns, events & networking,

·      Where are your strengths and weaknesses in the sales cycle?

·      Who else is involved in your sales processes – when do you bring them in? E.g. build campaigns with Marketing, SDR does outbound, Presales brought in at demo, Professional Services brought to help with contract and scoping, Head of Sales brought in at close. 

·      Do you follow a sales methodology? E.g. SPIN, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, Challenger etc.

·      How big is your sales team? Where have you ranked the last two years?

·      What are your other KPIs / metrics?

·      How does your manager know if you’ve had a good or bad week?

·      What tools do you utilise and value? E.g. CRM, Contact finders, note takers,

The below are much more about getting to know the candidate on a deeper, more personal level and what makes them tick.

·      Why did you get into sales?

·      Is the reason you got into sales still what drives you today? If no – what drives you today?

·      What do you really enjoy about your job?

·      When do you get into a flow state?

·      What don’t you enjoy?

·      How do you like to be managed?

·      When do you usually go to your manager for advice?

·      Talk me through the deal your most proud of in detail?

·      Talk me through a deal you lost recently?

·      What would you have changed about your sales process? What did you learn?

·      Talk to me about your best 3 relationships and how you built them?

·      What is your approach to building relationships?

·      What’s your general approach to closing / negotiation / pricing?

·      Have you ever had to change this to suit a client?

·      What personal development have you undertaken in the last 12 months?

·      What would your customers say about you?