Sales Engineering Interviews are unique in some ways. During the interview, many of the conversations are behavioral, and it’s easier than other positions to move industries. However we do have to prepare for the interviews, and in this video, I will discuss what you should do, at a minimum, to prepare for the interview.

1- Get the Interviewer’s Name

The first thing you need to do before you hang up the phone with the recruiter who may or may not have all the information is asked, who you will be interviewing with. I know, I know, this sounds intuitive, but I’ve interviewed many people who didn’t know who I was, and because of that, they had no idea what was important for me.

We need to get the name of the interviewer for every interview and what is important for them. The recruiter would know the name of the person, but may or may not know what’s important for them. They can, however, give you tips that you would utilize in the interview.

What I like to do while I’m getting the name is actually type it into LinkedIn right away in case there’s a typo. Not all names are easily spelled. Take my name. Most people would spell it as Ramsey Marblablablah.

Don’t be shy about checking out their LinkedIn profile. Early on in my career, I would feel shy about checking out someone on LinkedIn, because I would appear as one of the people who viewed their profile. Now I think of it as a positive thing. It is being proactive to actually go research their profile before an interview. You would do the same thing before going to a customer meeting. So why not do it at an interview? And when you’re looking at their profile, you can come up with some discussion points.

2- Download Their Free tools

Most companies have freebies, especially with SaaS today. You can go on their website and download a free version of whatever software they offer or create a free account and try it out for 30 days. You can play around with it and see how powerful it is. See how complicated it is.

You’d be surprised at how many people don’t do that.

Also, most companies have online courses to show you the basics of how to use that product. So it’s not just you fumbling around, you can actually get some learning out of it, and that will help you in answering questions by the interviewers, 

If there aren’t any online courses for that specific company on their website. Go check out all O’Reilly Learning, go check out Pluralsight. They might have more information. And if they don’t have any more information, you can always go on YouTube because there’s almost everything on YouTube. It’s just not organized.

3- Prepare Questions:

Prepare some questions throughout your research that you’ve done through look going on their LinkedIn, downloading the product. You can come up with a lot of questions. I mentioned in one of the podcasts that we did recently, the 10 Noncommon Interview Mistakes that Derail Your Chances and one of the mistakes is that we don’t ask questions or we’re waiting till the end of the call to ask questions. So figure out how you can integrate them into the conversation with the interview work. Remember, you’re interviewing them as well. 

4- Prepare Stories

The interview will contain a lot of behavioral questions. They’re going to ask you, how did you win this deal? How did you speed up the cycle for this deal? What’s the greatest opportunity that you’ve worked on. How have you dealt with a bad customer? You need to prepare stories for those. You can watch the video to hear about my stories.

5- Understand their Needs

The last thing we need to do is understand what each specific interviewer wants or needs. That’s why you ask the recruiter about this when they set up the next interview.

One thing I’d like to highlight is that we first need to know which jobs to hunt after. The best way to do that is to know the titles that could mean “PreSales”. Check out this blog post where I discuss the different and confusing titles for those in this role.