"i coached myself out of the job." Terri told me this in her car, engine on, heater going, staring at the dash. she had bombed a role-play interview. the interviewer was playing a hostile prospect dodging budget questions and Terri started explaining what she would do instead of just doing it. "normally what i would do here is reframe the value..." and the interviewer cut her off. gone. Terri is my cousin and she sells enterprise SaaS at a company you have probably heard of and honestly she is the only reason i know what a BDR is or what keeping track of your deals even means. until she started yelling at me over takeout i was clueless about all of this. embarrassingly clueless lol
different night, different disaster. pad thai. 11pm. my kitchen table, styrofoam leaking onto the counter. Terri lost a 180k deal that afternoon because she showed up with business slides to a CTO who wanted technical diagrams. forty minutes of wrong. "i brought a knife to a gunfight, except the knife was also wrong." her fix was stupid simple -- started asking "who will be evaluating the technical requirements" before every demo. has not gotten it wrong since. she uses this as her go-to whenever an interviewer asks "tell me about a deal you lost" which apparently comes up every single time. three beats she said. what happened. what was YOUR fault. what did you change. the STAR method is fine she said but you gotta sound like you are telling your friend about something dumb you did not reading from a slide deck
the role-play advice came from that car conversation too. "never break character. never say in a real scenario i would and then describe the play. just RUN the play." she watched a dude do the same thing a year later when she was sitting on a panel. "normally i would build rapport first and then..." bro. nobody needs your director commentary. just build the rapport. and the close, she jabbed a chopstick at my face about this one, you have to close every role-play. "based on what we discussed, would it make sense to schedule a technical deep-dive with your team next Tuesday." let it fizzle and that is a ding. "you would not end a real call without a next step. do not end the fake one without one either." she said it twice. i wrote it down both times.
saturday. bad latte, seven bucks. she dragged me to a coffee shop to prep me for a BDR interview i was thinking about. drew the whole interview structure on a napkin. phone screen, hiring manager, panel or role-play, final with a VP. "Oracle or Salesforce drag it to six rounds and by the end you have talked to more strangers than your first month on a dating app." she circled the role-play round and wrote THIS IS WHERE EVERYONE DIES and yeah after the car story i believed her
she quizzed me on how i would go after new leads at that same coffee shop and i had nothing. "what is your sequence." i just stared. she laughed so hard the people at the next table looked over. hers is 12 touches over 21 days, 3 emails, 2 LinkedIn messages, 4 calls, 2 video messages, 1 direct mail piece. 23% response rate. tracks everything in Salesforce. "if someone asks your metrics and you shrug you are telling them you do not measure your own work." i had never thought about a job where you memorize your own stats like a baseball player knows their batting average
i was sitting on her floor, no couch because Terri hates furniture apparently, eating trail mix, when she got a call from the other person on her interview panel about some account exec candidate. heard her side of it. "no. he said he did well. those were his actual words. PASS." not pass meaning the guy passed. pass meaning she was done with him. "if you do not have numbers you are not a salesperson." she hung up and looked at me and did the question in her interview voice. "walk me through what you closed the last 12 months." then answered it herself. "Q1 was 112% on a 240k annual target, Q2 dropped to 87% after we lost a big integration partner, Q3 i rebuilt pipeline and hit 104%, Q4 was 131% because two enterprise deals i had been nursing for six months closed in December." like reading back a license plate. i asked her once if she rounds up. fork down. stare. three seconds. "rounding is lying." fork up. conversation over.
she asked at the coffee shop what kind of sales job i wanted and i did not have an answer and she grabbed a chip and pointed it at me. "SaaS and enterprise are not even the same sport." SaaS wants speed she said, deals per month, cycle length, your stack -- Salesforce, Outreach, Gong, ZoomInfo -- how full your funnel is compared to your number. enterprise wants patience. six to eighteen month cycles, 500k to multi-million dollar deals, rooms full of people who all have to say yes, procurement nightmares, lawyers poking holes in everything, some VP who vanishes for three weeks mid-deal. "tell me about a deal that took more than 9 months to close" is enterprise-only, a startup would never ask that because the whole company might be nine months old lol. the behavioral questions overlap with any interview loop but sales panels want money answers. failure better involve a lost deal. influence better involve a prospect, not some argument about what color the button should be.
we drove back to my place and she took her shoes off and put her feet on my coffee table and got annoyed because i kept asking what to study. "your NUMBERS" she yelled, my roommate looked over from the kitchen. quota, how much you actually closed, average deal size, how long deals take, win rate, how much you have cooking versus your number. she grabbed a marker off my desk and wrote on a napkin in all caps IMAGINE A CFO ASKS YOUR REVENUE AND YOU GO UH LET ME CHECK MY NOTES then drew a little skull. i still have that napkin in a drawer somewhere. then she made me sit on the floor next to the coffee table and would not let me get up until i had five stories ready. i got to three and blanked. she just sat there eating trail mix staring at me. did not help. did not give a hint. i sat there for probably ten minutes before i pulled two more out of nowhere and she goes "now say them out loud, not in your head, out loud." i tried recording myself for a presentation once after she told me she does that driving to work. first take was so bad i almost threw my phone into traffic lol. second was worse somehow. third was ok.
anyway. a week later. dinner. the objection stuff. chips and queso. she got queso on her phone screen while explaining the "your price is too high" response and did not even notice lol. "i hear that a lot and it is a fair concern. can you help me understand what you are comparing us to? because when we look at ROI our customers see..." i was scribbling on a receipt trying to keep up.
wrong answer is cutting price. "that is like bleeding in front of a shark." i made her repeat that because i thought it was funny. she did not laugh. she has fifteen objections memorized. rattled off every single one at chipotle once eating a burrito, did not put the burrito down, did not pause between bites. i lost count at eleven.
i actually got to watch her work once. she was doing a demo from my apartment because her wifi was out, laptop on my kitchen counter, AirPods in, and i was pretending to do dishes three feet away. the guy on the call kept saying "we are happy with our current vendor" and she just went quiet for maybe four seconds which felt like forty. then she said "totally fair, what made you take this call though?" and he laughed and started talking about all the stuff his current vendor could not do. she did not interrupt once. just let him go. wrote something on a sticky note, held it up to me. it said "he is selling himself." i almost dropped a plate. fifteen minutes later the guy was asking HER what the onboarding timeline looked like. she muted herself, looked at me, whispered "that is a buying question" and unmuted and answered like nothing happened. after the call she peeled the sticky note off my cabinet and stuck it on my forehead. i wore it for an hour because it was the wildest thing i had ever watched someone pull off on a phone call. she told me later that the four second pause was on purpose, that silence makes people fill space and they usually fill it with what they actually care about. "most reps panic when somebody goes quiet. do not panic. just wait." she said she learned it from a manager at her second job who used to put his phone on mute and count to five on his fingers every time a prospect said no. weird dude apparently but she said it changed everything about how she sells.
oh and research. a candidate walked into her panel once and could not name a single competitor. she threw a napkin at the trash telling me about it. missed. "what problem does our product solve. one sentence. if you cannot do that get out of my office." her move is walking in and saying "i noticed your G2 reviews mention implementation speed as the thing that wins deals, is that actually coming up when you talk to bigger companies?" one line. worth more than an hour of rehearsed answers she said.
i did not take the BDR job lol. recruiter cold emailed me about something different, said yes because broke. months later i was doing mock practice rounds and i still had that napkin with the skull drawing in my desk drawer and every single thing she yelled at me over pad thai and chipotle and that seven dollar latte was just playing on loop. sales interviews have no whiteboard no code, thirty to sixty minutes of talking while someone decides if you get the job.
so here is the InterviewMan thing. i had been running it for the mocks and one session, wednesday i think because i had just come back from getting groceries, it flagged me for talking three straight minutes without asking the prospect a single question. THREE. MINUTES. right there on the screen. i could hear Terri in my head immediately. she would have chucked a shoe at me for that. seventy percent listening in discovery she said. seventy. and there i was doing a monologue like a TED talk nobody asked for lol
different round same week. behavioral. interviewer asked about bouncing back after a rough quarter. my brain went straight to this product bug fix story, had the opening sentence loaded already. InterviewMan pulled up a different one. the one i had tagged for exactly this. rebuilding everything from scratch after losing my two biggest accounts the same month.
that was the right story. obviously.
could i have caught it myself? maybe. probably not. brain was already locked into the wrong one and Terri has told me a hundred times "you commit to the bit even when the bit is wrong" lol
texted her about it later. she wrote back "see." one word. classic.
then she called me at like 11pm on a tuesday. i was half asleep. she started mid-sentence like we had already been talking, which is just how she calls people. "every number memorized. every objection ready." i mouthed the next part along with her because i have heard it so many times. "every story rehearsed." she heard me doing it and hung up lol. called back ninety seconds later. "i am not kidding. FAANG-level places score every answer on a sheet. you think a handshake beats someone who prepped five stories and knows their quota to the decimal?" i said no Terri i do not think that. "good." then she told me about her salary negotiation at her current company again. fifteen percent bump. nine minutes on the phone. she has told me this story at least four times and i let her tell it every time. "it is literally what they hired me to do." i could hear her eating something. i asked what. "pad thai." cold obviously. 11pm. i did not ask any follow up questions. you learn not to with Terri.
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