How this shows up in interviews — Prospecting & qualification

"How would you qualify a deal?" Name a framework, then show judgement beyond it: "I'd use MEDDPICC as the inspection lens — pain and champion first, because without those there's no deal. And qualification is continuous: every call should firm up a letter, and I'd rather disqualify in week two than lose in month six." If the company's advert names a framework, use theirs.

"Sell me this pen." The trap is pitching features; the qualification-led answer is to discover first. Ask who they write for, what they use now, what a pen failing would cost; then match the pen to a stated need or disqualify: "From what you've said you don't need this pen — but who in your office buys stationery?" They're testing whether you diagnose before prescribing.

"How would you build a territory / pipeline from scratch?" Give a sequence: define the ICP → build and tier an account list (say 100–150 accounts, by fit and signals) → map personas in tier-1 accounts → multi-channel cadences on tier 1, lighter touch below → referrals and events in parallel → instrument and iterate. Add that in life sciences the account universe is small and known, so reputation compounds — no spray-and-pray.

"Walk me through MEDDPICC." They want fluency, not recitation: walk the letters in your own words around an example deal (the Thamesway-style NHS story), and land that it's a repeated deal-inspection tool, not a discovery script. Bonus credibility: call out paper process — in healthcare, contracting and IG are where deals actually stall.

"Tell me about a time you disqualified or walked away from an opportunity." You won't have a sales pipeline to draw on, but the shape transfers from any professional or academic context: a project, client, partnership or commitment you declined or exited because the criteria, funding path or stakeholder support made it unwinnable or not worth the effort.

Have one true story ready. The shape they want: evidence → decision → redeployed effort → outcome. If nothing fits, say honestly how you would make the call, using the red flags in section 5 — judgement described precisely beats a padded anecdote.

"How would you get a meeting with a hard-to-reach NHS or pharma stakeholder?" Research-led and multi-channel: public sources first (board papers, digital strategies, conference agendas), then a short evidence-based email with an interest CTA, a permission-based call, and a warm path if one exists. Your differentiator: you do the homework most reps skip.

"Isn't cold calling dead?" No — bad cold calling is dead. Averages fell because volume-spam rose; researched, permission-based outreach stands out more than ever because AI-generated noise raised the bar. Give honest numbers (1–5% cold email replies, ~1–2 meetings per 100 dials), then explain how personalisation and cadences beat the averages.

"What would make you walk away from a deal here?" Tie red flags to their world: no route to an economic buyer, no compelling event (so the deal loses to "do nothing"), criteria written around an incumbent, or economics that make the customer unprofitable to serve. Frame walking away as protecting forecast integrity — sales leaders hire people whose forecasts they can trust.

Cheat sheet

ICP = profile of the ideal company (firmographics, technographics, signals). Persona = profile of the individual role. Focus beats volume.

Stakeholder roles:

Economic buyer owns the money and final yes.
Champion sells for you internally — influence + personal stake.
Influencer shapes without deciding.
User works with it daily — kills deals in pilots, drives renewals.
Blocker is protecting something — find out what.
Coach gives information; a champion also acts.

Channels (realistic 2026):

cold email 1–5% replies (5–10% personalised)
cold calls ~100 dials → 1–2 meetings
LinkedIn ≈ email but compounds trust
referrals convert far higher than any cold channel (30–70%+ to meeting) — work them first
events costly but highest quality
inbound converts best but marketing controls volume

Cadence: commonly 8–16 touches over 2–4 weeks (a rule of thumb, not a measured statistic), multi-channel; every touch adds new value; break-up email at the end; measure and iterate.

Cold email: short subject → personalised opener (proof of research) → their problem → one proof point → low-friction, interest-based CTA. 60–120 words; personalise at account, person and timing level (2 of 3).

Cold call: permission-based opener ("this is a cold call — 30 seconds?") → 30-second problem statement (peer group + problem + trigger + easy question) → conversation, not pitch. "Send me an email" → agree + one qualifying question.

Frameworks — every letter:

BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Fast triage; shallow for enterprise (no champion, competition or process).
CHAMP: CHallenges, Authority, Money, Prioritisation. Needs-first BANT; suits SDR/BD calls.
SPICED: Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision. SaaS/customer-success flavour; centres quantified impact.
MEDDIC: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion.
MEDDPICC: MEDDIC + Paper process + Competition. The enterprise standard — a checklist of the ways complex deals die; re-inspected at every stage, each gap generating a next action.

Disqualification red flags: no budget path; no access to power; no compelling event; column fodder (criteria written for a rival); pain nobody will put a number on; unprofitable-to-serve economics. Fast no = second-best outcome.

Three whys: Why anything (beat the status quo with quantified pain) → why now (compelling event — a customer deadline, never your quarter-end) → why us (differentiation, embedded in the decision criteria early). Settle them in that order.

References & further reading

Jeb Blount, Fanatical Prospecting (2015) — the standard text on outbound discipline: the 30-day rule, channel-by-channel technique, and the psychology of just making the calls. Read it before any role with a pipeline-generation component.
Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler, Predictable Revenue (2011) — the book that split prospecting (SDR) from closing (AE) at Salesforce and reshaped how SaaS sales teams are organised; dated in tactics, still essential for understanding why sales orgs look the way they do.
Trish Bertuzzi, The Sales Development Playbook (2016) — the operator's manual for sales development: ICP definition, cadence design, and hiring; the most practical single source on how outbound teams actually run.
John McMahon, The Qualified Sales Leader (2021) — the MEDDPICC authority, written as conversations between a CRO and his struggling sales team; the deepest treatment in print of champions, economic buyers and quantified pain.
Mike Weinberg, New Sales. Simplified. (2012) — blunt, framework-light guide to new-business selling; his "sales story" chapter is a useful counterpoint to the cold-email structure taught in this module.
Armand Farrokh & Nick Cegelski, Cold Calling Sucks (And That's Why It Works) (2024) — cold-call talk tracks backed by Gong data from hundreds of millions of calls; the current best word-for-word text on the phone channel, including permission-based openers.
30 Minutes to President's Club (podcast) — Farrokh and Cegelski's tactical show; episodes on cold calling, cold email and discovery are the closest available thing to shadowing top-decile reps.
Revenue Builders (podcast, Force Management) — John McMahon and John Kaplan interviewing enterprise sales leaders; listen to hear MEDDPICC spoken as a working language rather than recited as an acronym.