The following are exercises for sales positions.
- Sales Development Representative
- Enterprise Account Executive
- Sales Engineer
- Solutions Engineer
- Sales Operations
Objective: Find three companies that fit the ideal candidate profile that you put together during your take-home exercise. Your interviewer will provide you with the verticals that they would like you to go after with the expectation that you will find three companies that fit the ICP. You will have a chance to ask the interviewer questions before you do independent research.
Candidate Prep: You will have 20 minutes to identify 3 companies before the interviewer will come back into the room to discuss. To prepare for this interview, think about what online tools you would use to identify the companies.
Objective: Please create an outbound campaign of 3-5 steps funneling into the sales flow.
Candidate Prep: Pick one company that you identified in your take-home and choose one person from the company that you would be communicating with. You will then build out an email campaign with messaging and intended actions for the person you identified.
Objective: This interview is a build on the Campaign Process interview. When an SDR creates a cadence, the process is not simply about starting and sending. It’s building a cadence that ensures the outreach is going to be successful and not sound like spam. Based on the 1-2 profiles that you built with the interviewer in the Campaign Process exercise, outline how you would tailor outreach based on your contact’s role at their company.
Candidate Prep: Keep in mind that it is important for SDRs to send unique content to people in different roles and that the cadence will also shift depending on the role. Additionally, think about how would you determine if the content and cadences are effective.
Overview: This interview dives into how Account Executives approach triaging aspects of the sales process. For example, if features don’t exist that a customer is looking for, how would you handle this from customer and internal angles?
Candidate Prep: For this exercise, consider how you would balance customer needs and reasonable expectations for the technical team. In addition, think about how you communicate in delicate situations to maintain both customer and internal relationships as well as how you manage customer expectations.
Objective: You will give interviewer an overview of your cold outreach strategy.
Candidate Prep: To close deals, you must turn leads into qualified leads, and then nurture them until they become a core or enterprise customer. Knowing who to reach out to within organizations, your process behind outreach and how to nurture leads are all very important. To prepare for this exercise, think about how you navigate objections, what tools you use for outreach campaigns, and your business development process more generally. You are encouraged to use the whiteboard.
Objective: You will define and storyline your sales strategy.
Candidate Prep: Driving revenue for any territory requires a well thought out plan. Knowing the customer, territory, product and strategy plan in advance will define your success and allow you to hit the ground running. Consider how to effectively develop a go-to-market strategy, what steps you would take throughout the process, and how you would structure deals. You are encouraged to use the whiteboard.
Objective: You will select an enterprise infrastructure or technical software product that you know well or have sold before. The product need not be related to CockroachDB. It is best to select a topic that enables the candidate to demonstrate strong product knowledge and confidence. Please come prepared to sell the product to Square.
Candidate Prep: The presentation portion of the interview should last 20 minutes. You should be prepared with a PowerPoint (or similar) presentation and present a business and value proposition with the intent of selling your software. Concepts of business and light technical value should be included, why they’re selling to you, value and should either present or be able to discuss competitors and why their solution is superior.
Objective: This exercise is a deep-dive discussion on your technical background and specifically, your technical expertise of databases.
Candidate Prep: You should be able to explain what X component of a database is and then describe its trade-offs. Your interviewer should also learn from you what the technical reasons for the trade-offs are. You will be asked to discuss one of the four technical areas: feedback on monitoring, install, elastic scale out/scale in, or performance.
Objective: Your interviewer will ask you to discuss lead generation, project management, competitive situations, and individual expectations in sales processes.
Candidate Prep: Sales Engineers work closely with sellers and should have an in-depth understanding of the sales process and what is required. You should come prepared knowing how CRDB is different from other platforms and the benefits the product presents.
Objective: You will walk the interviewer through the take-home exercise and discuss the 4 objectives we shared with you.
Candidate Prep: The objectives of the exercise are: 1. Describe the experience of installing and monitoring CRDB and the pros/cons to the approach you took 2. Describe your understanding of the pros and cons of CRDB’s distributed architecture 3. Failure scenarios: thoughts on how CRDB behaved when things went wrong 4. SE’s view on architectural constraints of CockroachDB design that resulted in observed pros/cons
Objective: In this interview, you will be led through a discussion on the organizational structure of Cockroach Labs' documentation. You will provide feedback on these docs and compare them to others you've seen in the past.
Candidate Prep: Discussion on the organizational structure of the documentation.
Objective: This exercise is a deep-dive discussion on your technical background and specifically, your technical expertise of databases.
Candidate Prep: You should be able to explain what X component of a database is and then describe its trade-offs. Your interviewer should also learn from you what the technical reasons for the trade-offs are. You will be asked to discuss one of the four technical areas: feedback on monitoring, install, elastic scale out/scale in, or performance.
Objective: This conversation is a deep-dive discussion on your technical background, specifically, your technical expertise of databases. For example, you should be able to explain what X is and then describe the trade-offs. The interviewer should also learn from you what the technical reasons for the trade-offs are.
Candidate Prep: The interviewer will ask you to pick one of the four technical areas: feedback on install, monitoring, elastic scale out / scale in, or performance.
Objective: In this exercise, we will share the forecast of the revenue growth for the company with you. We ask that you look at this data and turn this into meaningful information that you can share with the board. On-site, you will review this presentation and discuss further considerations with your interviewer.
Candidate Prep: It is encouraged that you use presentation format (e.g. PowerPoint or similar).
Objective: In this interview, you will look at financial statements and be asked to figure out how to take the last 2-3 quarters of financial statements to update the current model.
Objective: In this interview, we will be diving into how to set up sales compensation plans and incentive the sales force. We will provide you with sample compensation plans on-site.
Candidate Prep: Think about effective ways to structure commission and provide detail on how to supplement it. Feel free to ask any questions needed to make thoughtful recommendations.
Objective: Salesforce provides the one source of truth for sales and marketing to develop a well-understood, connected marketing and sales funnel for the business. There are many challenges in interpreting data, making it usable, and ensuring its integrity within Salesforce.
Candidate Prep: Marketing and Sales want to understand what specific content and channels are generating the most successful sales opportunities. This will allow us to make smarter investments with the objective of constantly improving our ROI on marketing dollars spent. Think about how you would build reporting specific to various marketing and sales stages (what tiers would make up the core funnel?), common Salesforce challenges, and how you ensure and enforce data integrity using this tool.