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[Music] hi i'm andy white and in this video i'm going to be talking about what to do if you're interviewing for a sales role with a company that uses medic now medic or medpick as it's often referred to is a methodology commonly used by enterprise sales organizations to help improve the efficiency and predictability of their sales teams if you're watching this video then you may be interviewing with a medic company right now or you could have stumbled across one of the thousands of open sales roles that have a medic as a requirement or a desirable skill within their job description before we start i do have some good news and some bad news that i want to be upfront about the bad news is that this video will not teach you medic itself for that you can either read my book or you can run through our upcoming medic course at learn.medic.com the good news is that this video will teach you how to approach an interview with a company that uses medpic and even how to use medpick itself to win the interview process before we begin a little bit of background over the last four or five years i've interviewed literally hundreds of candidates for sales roles in my teams unfortunately the standard of interview craft set by sellers has been pretty low and to be honest it's not like i have like really high standards i actually you know make things pretty easy if you were to research me you'll find a guide i've written on things i'm looking for when i'm interviewing salespeople and that's where i want to start is research when you're approaching an interview the first thing you should do is to research the person you're interviewing with and the company themselves specifically you should research these points first you should check if you have any mutual connections with the person you're interviewing with so let's say you're interviewing with somebody called jess smith and you look at her connections and you spot that you and jess are both mutually connected with somebody called scott jones now as long as you know scott well enough then reach out to him and say you know hey scott you know he'd be good i was wondering if you could spare a couple of minutes to help me or something i'm interviewing for a role with jess smith and i see that we're mutually connected can you give me any advice now this will take literally a couple of minutes time and the upside could be huge you get some really good intel from scott about jess and he might even put in a good word for you or something along those lines there's like no downside to doing this at all next up take a look at their linkedin profile in depth what can you learn about them from their experience from their background an elite tip here is to turn on the visibility of your linkedin profile so that the hiring manager can see that you've looked at their profile although if if you if you do this be sure to actually do this well in advance the interview i can't tell you the amount of times i've gone onto linkedin ahead of an interview to look at somebody's profile to bring it up for my interview and i noticed that they've for the first time only just at that point looked at my profile that is to me mind-blowing anyway while you're on their linkedin profile can you spot any of their interests if not on linkedin do they have a twitter profile that you know is is public as always there is a moral line you shouldn't cross here don't be creepy and um you know but if the person is proactively promoting that to its page and they happen to have an interest that you yourself can show genuine interest in then it can become a good way of building rapport early on so you've done your research and you feel prepared to go for the interview itself but before you do an easy and elite move is to email the person you're interviewing with ahead of the interview it doesn't have to be too formal perhaps just attach your resume and say that you're looking forward to meeting them and you know call out any questions or specific areas that they would like you to prepare for in advance in the interview itself the first thing to do once the usual small talk a nice teaser is out of the way is to set the tone now it never ceases to amaze me how many professional sales people attend interviews and don't set the tone now what setting the tone is is where you you set yourself up for success by doing things such as a time check check that the interviewer has the same amount of time reserved for the interview as you do and then ask if they have a hard stop i was recently hiring for an account executive role and our first interview stage was about 30 minutes long my internal recruitment team was organizing the interviews on my behalf in liaison with an external recruiter the two of them hadn't synced somehow and the time the external recruiter was organizing for the session was 45 minutes long and obviously the internal recruiter was organizing 30 minute long sessions i did about 10 different interviews with 10 different candidates before i realized that the two were on a line not a single candidate had raised to me the fact that we have a a 45 minute session or any asked me any questions about my own timing now fortunately for those candidates i had set time aside at the end of my 30 minutes just in case i came across a really good candidate and i had time to sell to them a little bit on the roll but not every manager will forge you the luxury to run over like that so be sure to type check next set the agenda you don't have to own the agenda but just be sure to get the things you want to discuss out in the open so the time is left at the end of the interview to do so generally to obtain a job from a medic company you have to go through a number of different interview stages these interview stages typically include an initial call with a recruiter or either internal or external interview with a hiring manager a second interview with a more senior stakeholder and then they may even finish a presentation or panel stage type interview now you'll be judged on several elements throughout all of these stages but the one factor that will universally win you positive marks is setting the tone for every interview in my current role my team and i judge each interviewer score out of 10 as well as a rating of a strong no a no a yes or a strong yes i've never scored a candidate better than a soft yes if they failed to set the tone in an interview regardless of how well they did anything else the crazy thing is this it's such an easy thing to do it takes literally seconds to set yourself up for success and to indicate to the interviewer that you're a professional candidate it really is easy it's as simple as just sort of saying hey so thank you for taking the time to talk to me today before we get too far into interview just wanted to check that you have 30 minutes to talk today great and do you have a hard stop on the hour great so i'm sure you have lots of questions for me should i start by just giving you a brief introduction about myself perfect oh and uh is it okay if we reserve five minutes at the end as i may have a few questions for you simple as that so uh now we've got the basics out the way uh we can dig into how we can use medpick itself to land you a dream job with a medic company again you should only approach this section of the video with at least a basic understanding of medic or med pick first up is the metrics so the first thing to do is ask the hiring manager what are the metrics that most closely align with the most successful sellers it could be things like how long do they spend discovery how many stakeholders they bring to the sales process what's their success rate of engaging with the economic bar etc etc once you've established the metrics that represent successful sellers you can adapt your talk track to describe how you can deliver against those metrics elite level interviewers will back the talk track up with data and anecdotes of successes that they've had that are applicable next up is e for economic buyer now in in medpick the economic bar is the person with overall authority in the buying decision where we're using medpick for hiring the economic buyer or perhaps we should say economic hirer becomes the authority in the hiring decision so just like in the deal the economic hire can vary depending on several variables it could be or not limited to the size of the company so in a small company the economic hirer could be a founder or ceo the role itself you know if it's an individual contributor role then the economic higher could be the vp of sales if it's a manager's role it might be a the cro or something like that in an interview process you need to obtain access the economic hire just as you would the economic buyer in a deal and that the best way to do this is of course through your champion and you will learn later on in this video that the champion is likely to be the hiring manager and of course the same rules apply when you're meeting the economic hirer as they do when you're meeting the economic buyer you need to talk in their language and focus on the things that they will be looking for next up is the first d and this one stands for decision criteria this should be an easy one this is pretty much identical to how you would use the decision criteria in a deal the decision criteria in hiring is could be things like you know the salary requirements the location the industry experience it could even be that you have experience of medic that could be part of the decision criteria itself quite meta really just as you would with selling get the decision criteria out in the open as early as possible or not only aligning yourself against it but try and lace in some of your strengths to differentiate your value versus other candidates just as we're selling it is good practice to gain commitment and consensus that you are meeting the decision criteria not just the start but throughout the hiring process the next d is for decision process and just like a deal where you're interviewing there should be a clear process in which the evaluation is running upon if there isn't a well-structured process then this is a major red flag for you not only does it indicate the organization you're interviewing with may not be organized but without a clear decision process then it's going to be challenging to run a fair and thorough evaluation process fortunately most medic organizations will have a comprehensive interview process that you should uncover early in the process and once you have uncovered that decision process be sure to triangulate it with every person you speak to to ensure you have the full version likewise it's good to close each interview stage against the decision process now closing at the end of uh interviews is common practice and i've never hired a salesperson who didn't close me at the end of their interview that said it's become a bit cliche and it's no longer the differentiator it once was therefore to take it to the next level the decision criteria and the decision process use them to close the interview for example jess thank you very much for your time today i have enjoyed our conversation and um you mentioned earlier that you were looking for someone who has the following criteria five years of enterprise sales experience uh success in selling into the financial services sector and a good understanding of data analytics let's say i wanted to get your feedback on how you think i align against that criteria now if you hear negative feedback then you know this is your chance to try and work on it just as you would overcome any objection but if you hear positive feedback and simply say well that's great and you mentioned the next step is to meet your manager who is the cro would you be able to introduce me to them ahead of the meeting so i can break the ice with them now i cannot imagine a scenario where the hiring manager would disagree with this if they do then you certainly have more convincing to do with them and this should act as a red flag to your progress within the process you're in next up is the p which stands for paper process now the paper process is not such a big thing in the hiring process my advice here is to use the paper process an opportunity to show good practice and attention to detail for example all roles will require references so being proactive on this front will show confidence in your track record and a thorough approach next up is the eye now the eye stands for implicating the pain and this is a big big big big big part of the hiring process yet it's also massively overlooked by candidates why why are you even being interviewed you know that there will be a pain it's likely to be one of three things the first is that the organization is in growth mode and they need more sales people to to cover the growth the second is that somebody's been fired and the third is that somebody has resigned now all three have different pains that are likely to be associated with them and it's your job to uncover the pain and adapt it to how you can solve it so here's a brief guide if the organization is in growth mode they'll want somebody who can come in and hit the ground running you need to be able to demonstrate your ability to on board and learn quickly if you feel confident that that's something you can do then you need to be able to implicate the pain of what would happen if they hired someone that didn't learn quickly that didn't on board quickly to help really implicate them in the pain of what would happen if they didn't hire somebody like you if somebody's been fired and this is a golden opportunity for you to implicate your predecessor's pain and flip the situation to highlight how you are the person who will solve all of those pains what was it they were bad at what was it they got fired for pipeline generation were they a bad forecaster could they not close were they rude to customers or colleagues find the pain and dig in deep to it and highlight it in in relation to your strengths third if somebody's resigned first you need to determine if it was a regrettable loss as often people will resign if they're about to be fired or they jump ship because they're not performing so you need to dig into this um and and this is a good idea good opportunity to showcase your discovery skills and give yourself the knowledge to align yourself ingly if the resignation is regretted it will be essential for you to showcase your loyalty and give the impression that you won't become a regrettable loss as well if the resignation isn't regretted then dig deeper to the reasons just as you would if they were fired next up is the first c it stands for champion and you may have heard the term no champion no deal you've probably not heard the term no champion no job but it's as accurate in the hiring process as it is in a deal your champion in the hiring process is most likely to be your hiring manager if your hiring manager isn't a champion of yours then you're in trouble and it's unlikely you're going to be successful in getting the role just like in a deal you've got to test your champion the same rules apply they have to have power and influence within the organization they have to be selling internally on your behalf and they should have a vested interest in your success now the first one first criteria apparent influence should be easy to identify the second will come down to you uncovering that that a good way of doing that is to ask your champion the hiring manager about conversations they have with about you with other stakeholders and whether there was any feedback and how they reacted to that feedback many organizations will use recruiting software to capture feedback so obtaining genuine feedback should be pretty easy to do the third criteria should be a prerequisite in a sales uh in sales with a sales manager you know that they have a vested interest in your success but it's still worth digging into this point what are their goals what are what is it they want to do what are they trying to overachieve against the targets do they want to be promoted they want to expand and think about how you can help them towards their goals the second c is for competition now remember the competition is anything that will rival your success whether it be another person internal or external or another initiative that could take the same resource let me elaborate imagine you are a london-based seller interviewing for a uk county executive role at series c startup the hiring manager is responsible for the emea region and currently has one open head counter fill in this scenario most candidates would think their competition is other account executives in the process however in this case the emea manager is considering free options the first to hire an accounting executive the uk market that's that's the role you're going for the second option is to promote internally an sdr to that role and the third is to actually hire an account executive but for a different region inside of amir maybe the nordics or france or spain something like that if you approach your competition with only the first option in mind you'll be opening yourself up to risks where the head count could shift to another region or to the sdr themselves to prevent losing to the competition be sure to dig in deep with thorough discovery not just for the role but for the hiring manager strategy too once you know who your competition is be sure to understand where they are in the process if you've entered the process late then you will want to make sure there isn't anyone too far ahead of you as the role may be closed before you get the chance to run through the process so there you have it some super high level tips for approaching a sales interview and how you can use medpick itself to help yourself ace the interview remember at its heart medpick is a methodology that helps you to qualify opportunities as much as you should use it to help you succeed in your interview process don't lose sight of another significant benefit which is to help you qualify if the role itself is right for you i know this is easier said than done but over the course of a year or two making a bad decision on a sales role will cost you far more than what waiting a couple of months to find the perfect role for you will cost you good luck out there and if you found this video helpful then please drop me a like and subscribe for more of our content see ya