Sales manager interview questions help hiring managers find the right fit for their business. Their purpose is to evaluate future employees’ leadership, operational, interpersonal, and other skills that are essential for such a role.
If you have relevant experience and believe you are a great match for a sales manager position, you should thoroughly prepare for the hiring process and stand out from other candidates. In this article, we’ll present the most common sales manager interview questions and answers, helping you get past one of the crucial hiring stages.
Besides that, we’ll also share some additional tips on interview prep for sales managers to ensure everything goes smoothly. Let’s start!
Key Takeaways
Sales manager interview questions are an excellent tool for examining candidates’ abilities, talents, and skills.
There are technical, behavioral, general, and operational interview questions covering various aspects of this role.
Potential employees should confidently answer questions and highlight their skills while mentioning real-life examples and experiences that prove their competencies.
Checking out the role and the company offering one, and creating a proper resume can help you land a sales manager job quicker and more easily.
11 Sales Manager Interview Questions with Sample Answers
With the right answers to particular interview questions, you can be one step ahead of your interviewer and stand out as a candidate during the hiring process.
Let’s examine the 11 most frequent sales manager interview questions, see why they are important, and learn how to answer them:
#1. Describe your experience with managing a sales team.
Hiring managers use this question to learn more about your previous professional experience and how you put your theoretical knowledge into practice.
Assuming you have prior experience, you should go through your most valuable achievements and share them with the interviewer. You can also state how long you have been working in similar roles and how your entire experience has impacted and shaped you as a professional.
Here’s an example answer:
Good Answer
"I have more than 4 years of experience as a sales manager focusing on team and business development. In my most recent role, I organized over 10 onboardings and staff trainings and increased sales by 15% with a new and more efficient delivery coordination network plan, which was a fantastic experience for my career growth."
#2. How do you motivate underperforming sales reps?
This interview question for sales leadership roles helps recruiters check your ability to boost the morale of your subordinates. By answering this question properly, you can showcase your management skills and style in the best possible light.
Therefore, you should describe your approach to new, unmotivated, or underperforming coworkers and explain how you deal with them based on the company’s standards. The point here is to show that you’re always eager to motivate and encourage your colleagues, which is an irreplaceable trait in managerial positions.
Let’s check an example answer for this type of question on a sales leadership interview:
Good Answer
"I motivate underperforming sales reps by concentrating on open communication. I approach an underperforming colleague in a friendly way and start a dialogue to find out what the problem is. Next, I provide improvement suggestions and strategies, which also include reasonable performance goals and rewards for outstanding work."
#3. Why do you want to be a sales manager?
This is one of the typical sales manager interview questions for freshers, but that doesn’t mean that seniors can’t stumble upon it, too. With it, the interviewer wants to discover whether this role is your true calling, how motivated and passionate you are about it, and what future plans related to the job you have.
Your answer should target the elements of this profession you find attractive and the moment you realized that it is the career you want to pursue. Plus, you can discuss a series of events that led to your decision.
Here’s how to answer this question:
Good Answer
"I’ve always been interested in how products are positioned and sold. During my early career in retail, I realized how much I enjoy leading teams and driving results. Later, I earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and wanted to combine my knowledge with my enthusiasm for sales management."
#4. How do you set and track sales targets?
Goal-setting inquiries are part of sales strategy interview questions that serve to discover your ability for short- and long-term business development planning. Additionally, by asking this, recruiters want to evaluate your strategic and critical thinking skills.
Your answer should include mentions of specific (and effective) methods you used for creating sales plans and an explanation of how you did so, as well as which tools or strategies you used to track progress.
Let’s see a good answer example:
Good Answer
"My way of setting and tracking sales targets includes creating a sales plan where each goal aligns with the business objectives and using sales platforms to track the metrics. Once I develop general strategies and targets, I come up with minor goals, paving the way for bigger endeavors. Then, I use Zendesk to analyze reports, track leads, and learn about team performance."
#5. What CRM tools are you experienced with?
CRM tools help sales managers learn about the sales pipeline, leads, individual and team sales performance metrics, and deal status. Being familiar with software such as ClickUp, Salesforce, and HubSpot is a staple of successful sales management, so you should definitely mention your knowledge of such tools to catch recruiters’ attention.
Here’s how to structure your answer:
Good Answer
"I am experienced with Salesforce, Freshworks, and Pipedrive. In my most recent role, I used Freshworks, which helped me increase lead generation by 17%. I also used this tool to streamline my new pipeline management program, which made the work for me and my colleagues much easier."
#6. How do you handle conflict within your team?
This common sales team management question refers to potential conflicts and how you could handle them. Regardless of how peaceful the work environment is, misunderstandings can still arise from time to time, and it’s crucial for a manager to tackle them efficiently.
When responding, you should describe a prior situation where you solved a conflict, demonstrating your abilities (e.g., communication skills). Let’s have a look at a good example answer:
Good Answer
"I had a situation where two coworkers had a dispute over customer ownership. I approached and listened to both sides gently and attentively, and then tried to communicate transparently about the roles each of the employees had, explaining who was eligible for the ownership with strong reasoning."
#7. Can you walk us through a time you turned around a struggling team?
One of the frequent sales manager behavioral questions aims to assess your ability to make changes for the better and improve the way your team functions. This is where your problem-solving and decision-making skills come into the spotlight.
To answer the question successfully, you can use the STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. This means you should provide a real-life example of a situation in which there were specific struggles in the team that you managed to reverse and explain how you solved it.
Here’s how to answer this behavioral interview question:
Good Answer
"One of my past experiences includes a sudden drop in sales performance. I tackled it by performing a thorough analysis and identifying the problem. Specifically, I analyzed each of the team members' performance and compared the expected results to their current engagement to define the weak points. Once I detected these, I organized various training sessions, which resulted in a 16% sales growth and penetrating two new markets."
#8. How do you build a sales strategy from scratch?
Rarely can any recruiter miss out on sales manager interview questions regarding sales strategies, as developing such action plans is crucial for business expansion.
Whether it is single, multimarket, or international sales, the interviewer's goal is to see your way of thinking and ability to prepare sales schemes, blueprints, or programs. To stand out, you need to pick your most successful strategy and describe your approach to building it, paying special attention to analysis and collaboration with other teams.
Here’s the way to do it:
Good Answer
"My way of building a sales strategy from scratch is to perform an in-depth market analysis to learn about our competitors and the overall market situation. Next, I use data statistics to employ the product, marketing, and sales teams to find development opportunities and take proper sales action. With such an approach, I improved the market share by 14% in my previous role."
#9. How do you evaluate sales performance?
The way you evaluate sales performance provides a clear insight into the sales progress and hints at areas that need improvement or change. As a good sales manager, you should consider all important metrics such as KPIs, conversion rates, sales outreach, sales productivity, and more.
Specifically, you need to explain which tools and methodologies you use to measure all the critical sales performance indicators.
Here’s what you can say:
Good Answer
"Sales performance evaluation is a complex process. In my opinion, it needs to be detailed and include gathering important information (e.g., KPIs) and analyzing sales data (e.g., win rates and sales lengths). Also, we should perform detailed and frequent sales reviews and check both employees' performance and general sales numbers after changes, training sessions, or new adaptations to see if there is improvement."
#10. What’s your approach to sales forecasting?
If you get this question, it means that hiring managers want to know about your ability to estimate the company’s sales in advance. This is because you need to operate with a business’s budget effectively while considering the company's goals and potential restraints, such as budget cuts.
Your answer needs to have three elements: the forecasting methods you use, budget plans, and adaptation strategies for volatile markets.
Here’s an example answer:
Good Answer
"While working as a sales manager at my previous company, I used numerous analytic tools to track market changes and the business’s progress and performance. Accordingly, I successfully predicted our sales rate for the next two quarters, distributing the budget effectively. During the two quarters, we also switched between two market-oriented budgeting plans, helping us hit sales goals in this period."
#11. What qualities do you look for in a sales rep?
The role of a sales manager includes working closely with sales representatives, observing their work, and providing directions. This is why hiring managers want to know how you build your team and what your coworkers must excel in.
To answer this sales manager interview question, you need to pay attention to the entire scope of a sales rep's role and concentrate on all the featured sales representative skills.
Let’s take a look at a good example answer:
Good Answer
"A sales rep must be proficient in using CRM tools, be data-driven, and have good decision-making skills. Such an individual should know how to handle rejection well and be a team player, but also be capable of working as a solo member in more independent teams."
11+ More Sales Manager Interview Questions
Sales manager interview questions cover different aspects of this role, including general, technical, and operational ones.
Let’s discover more questions to which you may want to prepare answers in advance:
Additional Interview Questions
How will you collaborate with different personalities on your team?
How would you describe your job to someone who does not know what sales management is?
How will your strengths and weaknesses affect your work in this role?
How do you allocate your tasks during a week?
Can you describe a situation where you had to say goodbye to a sales rep?
How do you stay current with the newest trends in the sales industry?
How do you deal with customer complaints during the sales process?
What is the best training session for new salespeople?
How do you estimate customer satisfaction?
What role does technology play in your sales improvement process?
How do you stay compliant with the market rules and regulations?
3 Key Tips for Having a Successful Sales Manager Interview
In addition to knowing what the most common sales manager interview questions are and how to answer them, you should also follow these interview tips for even better results:
3 Key Interview Tips
Relax. Even though interviews can cause nervousness and overthinking about what could go wrong, our advice for you is to try to calm down and take it easy. You can do breathing exercises, imagine yourself in a peaceful environment, or implement any other technique that works for you.
Mind your body language. The specific way in which you walk, use hand gestures, and assume a particular stance or posture leaves an impression on interviewers. Because of this, you should learn about confident body language and practice it daily so it becomes an integral part of your persona.
Never lie. Recruiters may not realize that you twisted the truth right away, but as soon as you start working, your skills (or a lack of these) will become evident. Therefore, avoid lying both on your sales resume and in your interview at all costs; this could ruin your reputation and lead to job loss.
If you haven’t reached the interview stage or even applied for this role yet, the first step is to make your resume shine.
To achieve this and increase your chances of landing an interview, you can check our resume examples and learn how to create different versions of this document using our resume builder. Our software is easy to use and provides various templates, allowing you to present your experience, skills, and qualifications in the most efficient way.
Stand out to employers with your resume
Build your resume now!Final Thoughts
As you could see, hiring managers use sales manager interview questions to estimate the potential employee’s skills and abilities. Therefore, preparing smart and satisfying answers to these is one of the most important steps you can take to get hired.
When answering, you should focus on emphasizing your skills, talking about relevant past experiences, and providing concrete examples of handling role-related tasks successfully.
This increases your chances of standing out and helps you land the desired job, which will fit you both financially and, more importantly, be your true calling.
