A behavioral job interview is a popular interview tactic for sales jobs.  It focuses on finding out how the candidate handled (behaved in) specific job-realted situations.  In sales, customer interaction is key—so how you handle people in a wide variety of situations, under pressure, in different circumstances, becomes a critical factor to hiring managers. 

To help you, here’s a link to a video that I made about how to handle behavioral interviews.  Some of the main things to keep in mind are to have lots of stories ready that highlight how skilled you are, and it’s important that you are able to quantify your examples whenever possible.  (What happened when you had an unhappy customer?  How did you increase sales and by how much?  How did you save the company X amount of dollars?)  I’ve also provided a link to How to Survive a Behavioral Interview for more tips, and a lengthy list of possible behavioral interview questions for you to think about. 

Important tip:  make sure you have a brag book and a 30/60/90-day plan ready to go.  A brag book will demonstrate how you handled particular situations, since you’ll hopefully include letters or e-mails from satisfied customers or happy managers, successfully completed projects, and lists/charts of how much money you’ve saved or made for the company.  A brag book covers what you’ve done in the past…a 30/60/90-day plan covers what you’ll do in the (immediate) future.  It’s a list, segmented in 30-day time spans, of what you’ll do to get trained and up-to-speed in your new company so that you can be a successful hire for them as fast as possible.  For more information, click here.  For a template of exactly how to do one, click here.

Good luck.


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Written by Sales Recruiter - Get Interview Questions Tips & Sales Career Advice

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