SDR Interview Questions

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About the role

A Sales Development Rep (SDR) concentrates on prospecting outbound potential leads. They are closely linked to the Sales team and help to add to and develop their pipelines through nurturing prospects in the companies target market. It requires an individual who is proactive and resilient constantly researching and learning. They also sit closely with marketing, running email sequences and automations.

SDR responsibilities

  • Qualifying leads at the initial stages in the sales funnel
  • Research potential leads
  • Engaging current users to expand awareness
  • Scheduling appointments/demos
  • Acting as the subject matter expert

What skills should you be looking for?

Proactivity
Tenacity
Resilience
Communication
Analytics
Growth mindset
Accountability
Question 1

What motivates you to work in sales? Which aspects of the role energise you?

Growth mindset
Question 2

The following cold email has a 15% open rate and a 10% click through rate. Critique the subject and contents of the email and suggest how you would improve both the open and click through rates.

Subject: Free training

Hello <name>,

Hope you are well. I'm sure you are very busy, so I will keep this short. Our organisation provides world leading software for the <x> industry and we are offering a limited time, free training course on <y>. You have been lucky enough to be selected for one of the limited tickets and can sign up here <link>.

Do you think you would be open for a call?

Kindest regards and sorry to have bothered you.

Communication
Question 3

You have a busy day planned today with the following tasks to perform:

  1. Cold call a list of prospects
  2. Reviewing your ongoing sequences to make sure everything is running smoothly
  3. Analyse your ongoing sequences to understand email subjects and contents that are working best
  4. Research some new prospects to reach out to later in the week.

Relative to when you work best on different tasks, when do you perform these tasks throughout the day?

Proactivity
Resilience
Question 4

You've just gotten off of your third cold call in a row, where the person you have called has been unreasonably rude to you on the phone. You have planned to continue cold calling for the rest of the morning, but you are feeling discouraged now. What do you do?

Resilience
Tenacity
Question 5

Your organisation is putting on a free event and you have been asked to invite a list of 1,000 in-target people to the event. Other than using your the existing contacts in your CRM, what methods would you use to find, reach out to and invite this number of invitees?

Research
Analytics
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