I was referred by an employee at LinkedIn, so the process went rather quickly. I had two phone interviews. The first was a basic qualification conversation with someone in HR, it was really easy and I passed that round with flying colors. The second interview was a Q&A / mock discovery call with two sales managers at LinkedIn. Before the call they sent me the following email, outlining how the call should go.
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Issues with the Call
I had two problems with this stage in the interview process. First, I've been a successful SDR for years before being an account executive and know from experience that it's impossible to conduct a SUCCESSFUL discovery call within 15 minutes while also trying to build rapport with your prospects. The second problem with this is that once I got on the call they didn't stick to the agenda of the call and were disorganized and didn't keep track of our conversation points. For example, beforehand I came up enough questions to last about 10 minutes with five minutes to build rapport and to close out the call, seeing that they explicitly mentioned to not go over 15 minutes. However. the first thing they said on the call is to not worry about the time, it's not that important unless it takes 30 minutes or so. That through me off, because I had prepared in advance to ask the most important questions to push the call forward. They also finished with a Q/A instead of beginning with it. Call me crazy but when you set an agenda for how a call should go, you should stick with it. They clearly didn't do this which was frustrating.
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The Mock Discovery Call
Based on the email I knew I'd to cover the following things.
1. Build rapport with the attendees on the call
- To build rapport in a quick amount of time I saw that the company is based in Chicago and coincidentally was being hit with a storm, so I used that as a talking point to build rapport for a minute or two.
2. Ask necessary questions only about their business and recruiting challenges
- I asked the necessary questions about their business and recruiting challenges. I dove into the companies history, capabilities, etc asked compelling questions to understand what the companies goals are as a whole, how hiring new employees would help them achieve those goals, the quality and characteristics of employees that they're looking for to fit in culturally while being able to perform their job requirements, what their experience has been in using job boards / recruiters and the pros and cons of using each, etc.
3. Uncover all BANT criteria and familiarize myself with the Sandler Sales method
- I found all of BANT criteria and asked questions related to the Sandler Sales method.
4. Familiarize myself with the talent solutions tools
- I spend two hours looking at videos and reading material on LinkedIn's website about their talent solutions and knew all six of their tools and where the value lies in each tool.
5. Take notes to use for next steps
- I took notes for the follow up, and asked questions that would set me up to address some objectives thought I could potentially see arising during the demo.
6. Determine if next steps are appropriate getting them to schedule a demo, if so get a commitment.
- At the end of the call I summed up our entire conversation, their pain points, their goals, and got them to accept a demo.
Side Note - Just to make sure I would hit a homerun I called my contact at LinkedIn to get some clarification on some of the tools they offer and this person said it's not going to be product focused (But I learned to tools anyway just in case, no big deal), but based on my ability to uncover three things and to ask questions around these.
1. the quality of the candidates they want
2. the cost of hiring candidates in the past and in future
3. time period they are looking to hire
All of which I did, extremely well. At the end of the call I a really good picture into their hiring needs and expectations and insights into these three agenda points.