Best Practices for Interviewing for an Account Manager Role
Every sales manager eventually engages in the hiring process when he or she needs to grow the team or backfill departing team members. Evaluating the motivation, skillset, and culture fit is both an art and a science. Only with experience would the hiring managers be able to distinguish great candidates from those who would probably not be the best fit for the role. When I was managing and growing a customer success team here at Wrike, I developed a clear and straightforward interview process that enabled me to get the best candidates in various locations and build a successful team. And when our team transitioned to the sales department I had to revise the process by adapting it to meet the specifics of sales which included changing some of the parts of the interview, adding new questions, and modifying existing ones. The approach proved quite effective so I decided to share some of the best practices for hiring account managers.
Mock calls
One of the key elements that transitioned to the AM interviews from our previous experience of interviewing CSMs is the mock call. Even though the format of the call has been modified, I strongly believe that doing such a call is one of the most effective ways to evaluate the candidate’s skills. Here are some of the things that can be reviewed during the mock call:
It is critical for any person working in a customer-facing role to understand the importance of listening to the clients before jumping into solutionizing and/or offering anything. I believe that the ratio should be disproportional in favor of listening. So if candidates basically engage in a monologue during the “customer” conversion, this would definitely be a red flag for me
Being relatable is an important part of the account manager’s job. The lack of ability to effectively build rapport in the beginning of a conversation creates risks of clients not opening up and sharing the details that could potentially play a critical role in further negotiations.
There’s no better way to understand the challenges the clients are dealing with rather than to ask them directly. Mock calls help to understand how good are the candidates in asking questions. I also pay a lot of attention to their ability to ask multi-level questions that help to uncover additional details
Obviously, asking questions is only the first step. Then the information that was uncovered should be leveraged when any solutions are offered to the client. It is usually pretty clear whether the candidates are offering generic solutions vs when they try to tailor their offering to the client’s needs based on the details discovered.
As a part of the mock call, I always prepare a bunch of objections to the solutions the candidates are offering which helps to evaluate their ability to defuse those objections. Using objections the candidates are not prepared for also helps to evaluate a creative approach to problem-solving (or the lack of it)
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Since we’re interviewing for the sales role here, getting the client’s commitment to certain next steps is an important part here. It could be a next meeting scheduled, an agreement to review pricing and discuss it next week, etc.
I have several mock call scenarios that I prepared and we’re sending them to the candidates in advance to prepare. Also, before the mock call, I always tell the candidates the time frame within which I’m asking them to stay when doing the call. It helps the candidates better plan the call and have the time to cover all aspects they believe are important.
Evaluating analytical skills
The ability to prioritize and plan work effectively is a critical skill for account managers. During the interview, it would be a good idea to dive into how the candidate has been prioritizing the clients in the book of business in the previous role, which factors were taken into account, which metrics have been used in the process, etc. The hiring manager could also present a particular scenario — for example, an account manager receives a new book of business of X accounts and sees a bunch of metrics associated with each account. Which metrics would the person use to prioritize the book of business and why? It’s critical here not only to review the answer but also how the candidate justifies it.
Deal Overview
Many CVs of candidates applying for the sales roles contain information on the accounts they work with (not the company names but the client size — e.g. Enterprise or SMB), and could also include some details on the quota attainment. While this is important, I strongly believe that hiring managers should encourage the candidates to choose and describe in detail one particular deal that they discovered and closed recently. The details that would interest me include the deal size and its correlation with the average deal size in the team, how it was discovered, what actions the rep took to progress the deal, how much time it took to close it, how complex was the deal, how many people on the client’s side and the company’s side were involved, and more. Such an overview enables hiring managers to get a pretty good picture of the ability of the candidate to take control of deals in the pipeline.
Proactiveness and tenacity
I recommend including questions that would enable the hiring manager to evaluate how proactive the candidate is with outbound activities. For example, one could present a scenario where an account manager has a particularly large customer in the book of business that has been unresponsive for a while and ask how the candidate would engage such a client. Which channels are going to be used, which messaging, and how would the common objections be defused? When it comes to tenacity, the hiring manager could ask how the candidate made sure in the previous company that the deals would be closed within a certain timeframe. As an example, an interviewer may ask to elaborate on a certain time-based incentive (TBI) that the candidate has set for the client to close the deal by the end of the month. General questions about daily outbound activities may paint a clear picture of whether the candidate fits a hunter or a farmer profile.
Ability to explain complex things with simple words
There are hundreds of SaaS solutions available on the market and even the most simple of them may be quite challenging for non-tech-savvy customers. That said, the ability to present complex concepts with simple words is essential for account managers to be successful in the role. The hiring manager could pick a pretty advanced and well-known solution or service and ask the candidate to explain what it is in a couple of sentences to a person who has no clue what the solution is about. The answer doesn’t need to be perfect, but if when providing it the candidate uses some complex terminology, that would be a red flag for me.
Since measuring the effectiveness of an account manager is very straightforward compared to many other customer-facing roles — the person either hit the target or didn’t, either created the pipeline — or didn’t, etc., one last recommendation I would like to give is to pay attention to how the candidate talks about the previous experience. Some would dive into an explanation of what activities they were engaged in, while others would focus more on the results — what was the regular attainment percentage, did they hit their annual goal or not, and whether they qualified for the Presidents’ Club or not, etc. In many ways, this helps to understand whether the candidate is concentrated on activities or outcomes, and when the latter is the focus, there’s a high probability that the person would more likely help your sales team to achieve amazing results.