The question bank — The sales interview playbook

Thirty questions, grouped: what they're really asking, and how a candidate without sales experience answers well.

A. Motivation and career change

1. "Walk me through your CV."

They want a narrative, not a chronology. Archetype 6 verbatim — 90 seconds, one thread, ending on why this role is the logical next step.

The test is whether you can find the story in your own history; a candidate who recites job titles in order has failed a storytelling test they'll face daily in the job.

2. "Why sales?"

The question behind the question: are you running towards sales or away from something else, and have you understood what the job actually is?

Answer with evidence of a deliberate, tested choice: what you noticed about yourself (you seek targets, you like persuading, you want output-linked pay), and what you've done to test the theory — this training, drilled mock calls, conversations with working reps, any selling you've engineered into your life.

Then show clear eyes: name the unglamorous parts (rejection volume, activity discipline, pipeline admin, accountability to a number) and say you want the deal anyway. Romanticism is the red flag they're screening for; informed appetite is the pass.

3. "Why life sciences / health tech?"

Committed action, not sentiment. "I want to help people" fails; every candidate says it.

What passes is evidence: study or reading you've actually done, an understanding of how NHS and pharma buying really works (Module 07), named companies you follow and why, a real buyer problem you find interesting. Specificity is the whole test — one accurate sentence about ICS budget pressures beats three paragraphs of mission statement.

4. "Why are you leaving your current field / employer?"

Run towards, not away. One calm sentence of honest logistics or logic, framed on the future ("I've taken what that path could teach me and I've chosen commercial work — deliberately, see question 2").

Never criticise a former employer, however justified: interviewers price it as what you'll one day say about them.

5. "Where do you see yourself in five years?"

Credible ambition on their ladder: excellent in this seat first, then the next commercial step — senior AE, AM, team lead — in this sector. You're building a career in life-science commercial work, not visiting it. Avoid both "your job" (presumptuous) and "not sure" (drift).

6. "Won't you go back to your old career when this gets hard?"

The retention fear behind every career-change hire. Answer with switching costs and evidence: what the change has already cost you (time, money, salary reduction, study), which you paid knowingly — people don't pay real costs for whims.

Add the structural point: the skills compound ("my old craft makes me better at this job; going back would waste both") — and, if true, that you're deliberately flexible on base salary because you back yourself on variable. That sentence lands hard in sales interviews.

B. Sales craft and process

7. "Walk me through your sales process."

You haven't run one in a paid seat — say so once, without apology, then prove you own the concepts: "I haven't carried a deal commercially yet, so let me give you the process I've trained on and drilled."

Then the staged answer: identify and qualify → discovery before pitching → demo/proposal mapped to what discovery found → objections surfaced and handled → close with a defined next step at every stage (Modules 02–05).

If they use MEDDIC/SPIN/Challenger, map onto their vocabulary honestly. The trap is fluency without understanding — see the Field note below on doing the arithmetic aloud.

8. "How do you qualify an opportunity?"

Framework plus why: is there a real problem we solve, a budget owner, a mapped decision committee, a known process and timeline, and criteria we can win on (BANT and MEDDPICC, Module 03).

Then the commercial logic: a salesperson's only inventory is time, and bad qualification is the most expensive mistake in the job because unqualified deals consume the hours that qualified ones needed. Closing with "which is why I'd want to learn your disqualification rules early" turns a knowledge answer into a coachability signal.

9. "How do you run discovery?"

Structure from Module 04: set an agenda, open questions on the problem and its business cost, probing and impact questions, who's affected, what's been tried, how the decision gets made — written down and summarised back.

Then attach your closest real experience: requirements gathering, research interviews, support triage, needs assessment in any past role — most careers contain discovery under another name; find yours and say "I've run this motion before, just not called this."

Voice from the field
When Neil Rackham's team at Huthwaite analysed 35,000 sales calls across 23 countries — the research published as SPIN Selling (1988) — what distinguished successful calls wasn't better pitching or cleverer closing: it was that the buyer did most of the talking, steered by the seller's questions. Question quality, not closing technique, separated top performers from the rest.

10. "How do you handle objections?"

Method, then an Archetype 3 story: listen, acknowledge, question until the objection is specific, isolate ("if we resolved X, is anything else in the way?"), respond with evidence at the right depth, and confirm it's resolved — converting it into something testable where possible (Module 05).

The story proves the method isn't recited — pick your best real sceptic-conversion, from any domain.

11. "How do you manage a complex, multi-stakeholder evaluation?"

Show you know that enterprise and NHS deals are committee decisions, and that each stakeholder needs their own proof: outcomes for execs, workflow for users, integration for IT, information governance for data controllers, commercials for procurement (Module 07 has the full NHS cast).

Then your best "aligned several parties" story — Archetype 5 or 10. Naming the stakeholder types accurately does more for your credibility than any claimed experience.

12. "What does a good POC or pilot look like?"

From Module 04: success criteria co-written with the customer up front, a defined test plan and timeline, named stakeholders on both sides, feedback loops during the run — never an open-ended "free trial" with no exit criteria.

The line that lands: whoever writes the success criteria wins the POC. Understanding this marks you as evaluation-literate in a way most junior candidates aren't.

C. Metrics and track record

13. "What's your quota attainment?"

For a first sales role the honest answer is the only survivable one — delivered without flinching: "I haven't carried a quota — this would be my first quota-carrying seat, and that's a deliberate choice. What I can show you is what I've delivered elsewhere: [YOUR NUMBER: your best two or three quantified results, any domain] — and what I've done to prepare: [YOUR EXAMPLE: this training, drilled role-plays, funnel maths you can do cold]. What I can't show is an attainment percentage, and I won't pretend otherwise."

Then pivot to appetite: a number on your head is precisely what you're seeking. Never inflate adjacent experience into quota experience — sales leaders detect it in seconds, and the detection costs you everything else you've claimed.

14. "You've never sold anything — why should we risk you?"

The most dangerous question you'll face; meet it head on with a four-step:

Concede honestly. "You're right — I haven't closed commercial deals, and I won't pretend otherwise." No flinch, no filler.
Stack the evidence. Your transferable proof, concretely: persuasion with outcomes (Archetype 3), targets hit (Archetype 9), resilience (Archetype 2), demand generated from nothing (Archetype 4) — plus the preparation: you've trained the process end to end and drilled the role-plays they're about to test you on.
Reframe the risk. Experienced hires carry habits that may not fit, and their references rarely reveal it; you're a known-clean slate who will run their playbook, and coachability is the strongest predictor in the best-known data on the question — Roberge's HubSpot study (see Section 5). If the role is in a technical or clinical market and you bring domain fluency, say so — domain credibility is the usual failure mode of experienced reps switching sectors.
Close the close. "What would you need to see from me in the first two quarters to know the bet paid off?" — then treat the answer as co-written success criteria, and say that's what you're doing. The question is the demonstration.

15. "What's your biggest achievement?"

Archetype 1 or 9 — led by the number. Be precise about your role: "I contributed to" versus "I owned" versus "I supported". Accuracy on the small claims buys trust for the big ones, and sales interviewers cross-examine claims for a living.

16. "Tell me about a time you failed."

Archetype 2. They're testing self-awareness and process learning, not tallying failures. Own the error, name the lesson, show the fix operating later.

17. "How would you build pipeline in this territory?"

Sources plus maths. Sources for a UK health-tech patch: conferences and professional networks, trust/account-level research, referencing existing customers, disciplined follow-up of marketing leads, targeted outbound (Module 03).

Then work the funnel aloud — see the Field note — and close by asking for their current source mix ("what's the split between marketing-generated and self-sourced today?"). Never imply pipeline just appears from marketing.

Field note
A reliable tell interviewers watch for: the candidate who can recite a qualification framework but can't do the arithmetic aloud. Any pipeline claim invites "so how many meetings gets you to quota?" — and the strong answer works the funnel out loud (quota ÷ average deal size = deals needed; deals ÷ win rate = opportunities; opportunities ÷ conversion = meetings), using placeholder numbers you name as placeholders. Reciting MEDDIC fluently while fumbling that multiplication is exactly how "memorised, not lived" gets diagnosed — and for a candidate with no sales history, doing the multiplication smoothly is one of the fastest available credibility wins.

D. Role-play setups (asked as questions)

18. "Sell me this pen."

A qualification test in disguise: never pitch the pen. Ask what they write, when they last needed a pen and didn't have one, what they'd pay — then position against what you heard, or disqualify politely. Selling without discovery is failing.

19. "Cold-call me."

They score structure: a permission-based open ("Have I caught you mid-something? Thirty seconds and you can tell me to get lost"), one sharp relevance statement, one discovery question, and a close for a meeting — not a sale. Under three minutes; ask who they're playing first.

20. "I'm the customer and I say you're too expensive. Go."

Isolate and discover before defending: "Against what — a competitor, doing nothing, or the budget you've been given?" Each branch is a different conversation. Price is only discussable against established value; if value isn't established, that's the real objection.

21. "Run a discovery call on me."

Set an agenda, ask permission to take notes, run open → probing → impact questions, summarise back, and close for a defined next step. Section 5 covers the scoring.

E. Company-specific

22. "What do you know about us?"

Have five things:

what they sell,
to whom,
their buyer's world (for NHS: trusts/ICSs, procurement frameworks, winter pressures, elective backlogs),
one recent proof point (verified with a live search that week — company facts age fast), and
one intelligent question their website can't answer.

Build a one-page brief on every company before any screen.

23. "How would you sell our product to an NHS trust?"

Show you know an NHS deal is multi-stakeholder and evidence-driven: clinical champion, transformation/digital lead, information governance, procurement, finance — each needing their own case (Module 07).

Sketch the sequence: find the clinical problem and its owner, build the local case with evidence, widen to the committee, respect the procurement route. Use the vocabulary accurately and never overclaim NHS experience you don't have — the accurate map is the credibility.

24. "Who are our competitors and how would you position?"

Homework per company; the pattern is what matters: never rubbish the competitor, position on the buyer's criteria, and say you'd want their win/loss data before trusting your outside view. That last clause reads as experience.

25. "What would your first 90 days look like?"

The learn → build → earn arc from Section 6 in one minute. Bonus: ask what their ramp expectation is first — "so I can answer against reality rather than guess."

F. Culture, resilience and the awkward ones

26. "How do you handle rejection?"

Concrete, not philosophical. Sales is structurally a rejection business — most of the pipeline says no — so bring real evidence of absorbing no's and continuing: fundraising or door-knocking you've done, competitive sport, auditions or trials, a job search run with discipline, any pursuit with objective feedback and frequent failure.

Your pattern: post-mortem the losses that teach something (Archetype 2), don't ruminate on the rest, keep activity up. One concrete incident beats any amount of "I'm resilient".

27. "Tell me about a conflict with a colleague or another team."

Archetype 5. Show you surfaced it early, represented both sides honestly rather than "winning", and landed a workable trade. Add the mapping if it's natural: the AE seat sits permanently between customer promises and delivery capacity — this is a core job skill, not an HR checkbox.

28. "Tell me about missing a target or deadline."

Archetype 2, or a second miss if you're saving your best failure story for question 16. The scoring is identical: own it, diagnose it, show the fix.

29. "What are your salary expectations?"

Three rules:

Research before any screen: the advertised band if published, comparable adverts, and salary data for the role type and city — walk in knowing the realistic base/OTE shape for an entry or career-change AE seat in your market.
Answer with a range and a question, never a point: "Based on the adverts I'm seeing for this kind of role, I'm expecting a base in the £X–Y range with OTE around double that — can you share this role's band and the base/variable split?"
Signal the sales-native posture: you care about total compensation and a variable plan that pays when you perform, and you're realistic that changing career means the base reflects the sector, not your years elsewhere.

At recruiter stage the only goal is staying in-process without capping yourself.

30. "Do you have any questions for us?"

Never "no", and never only logistics. Use the tiered bank in Section 7 — and end by closing the stage (reservations question, next step).

5. The role-play stage: how it's scored and how to prepare

What assessors actually score

Mock discovery, cold-call and objection exercises are marked on process, not polish. A stumbling candidate who runs the right structure beats a fluent one who pitches at everything — which is exactly why this stage favours the well-drilled career-changer. The typical scorecard:

Opening/agenda: did you frame the call, set purpose and time, ask permission?
Question quality: open first, then probing, then business-impact ("what does that cost you?"). Talk ratio matters — the "customer" should talk 55–60%+.
Listening: did you build on their answers or run your script regardless? Summarising back ("so what I'm hearing is…") is scored heavily and rarely done.
Objection handling: Module 05's LAARC order — listen → acknowledge → explore to the root → isolate → respond → confirm — without getting defensive.
Next step: did you close for something specific and time-bound? An excellent discovery call that ends "great, well, thanks!" fails the exercise.

Field note
In practice, many assessors form a judgement early and complete the form afterwards. What survives to the debrief is disproportionately your opening (did you set an agenda?) and your close (did you ask for a next step?), because those are the easiest moments to recall accurately. Nail both and a scrappy middle gets remembered more generously than it deserves; fluff both and a competent middle disappears.

The meta-rules almost nobody uses

Ask setup questions before starting. "Who are you playing — clinical, IT, procurement? Is this cold or requested?" Asking is scored positively — it's qualification.
Pausing is fine. Silence after a customer statement reads as listening, not weakness.
Take notes. Announce it: "Mind if I take notes?" — exactly as on a real call.
If you crash, restart. "I've gone down the wrong path — can I take that again?" shows coachability, a top-3 trait sales leaders screen for.
Stay in character until they break it. In the debrief, self-assess before they do — naming your own mistakes first is another coachability signal.

Voice from the field
When Mark Roberge screened hundreds of sales hires while building HubSpot's sales team — the analysis reported in The Sales Acceleration Formula (2015) — he ran the numbers on which interview criteria actually predicted post-hire performance. Five traits made the cut — coachability, curiosity, prior success, intelligence and work ethic — with coachability the strongest single predictor. The traits interviewers traditionally prized, such as aggression and closing flair, correlated weakly or even negatively with success.

Read that finding as a no-experience candidate and notice what it means: of the five predictive traits, only "prior success" references a track record at all — and prior success in any demanding pursuit counts.

Coachability, curiosity, intelligence and work ethic are all fully demonstrable in the interview itself. The evidence says the deck is less stacked against you than it feels.

Preparation drill plan (start ~1 week before any stage-3 interview)

Daily (15 min): speak two story-bank stories aloud, rotating; record and listen for "we" instead of "I" and stories running past 2 minutes.
Three sessions: mock discovery with a partner playing an NHS or lab buyer. A partner can be a friend with a persona brief — or an LLM told to play the buyer: give it the role, the company type and an instruction to be busy and mildly sceptical, and you have an infinitely patient sparring partner. Score yourself against the checklist above.
Two sessions: cold-call drill — 3 minutes, opener → relevance → one question → close for a meeting, against the interviewing company's actual product.
One session: objection gauntlet — partner fires "too expensive / we use a competitor / clinicians won't adopt it / send me an email"; run listen-acknowledge-explore-isolate-respond-confirm on each.
Before the real thing: re-read your company one-pager and pre-write the three discovery questions you most want answered by their typical buyer.