Sales candidates easily handle generic 'how would you' questions. To get a true assessment, persistently ask for specifics: 'Tell me about a specific situation when...' If they give a general answer, repeat the question. This forces them beyond rehearsed responses to reveal actual experience.

When interviewing salespeople, the biggest red flag is blame. Strong candidates demonstrate humility and self-reflection by taking ownership of lost deals and analyzing their own shortcomings. Weaker candidates deflect, blaming the product, competition, or other external factors, signaling a lack of coachability.

Senior commercial leaders are professional interviewers who excel at telling you what you want to hear. A hiring process based solely on conversation is flawed. To truly vet a candidate, you must incorporate exercises that force them to demonstrate their abilities and "show you the receipts" of their claims.

When asked about their sales process, weak candidates brainstorm a long list of activities. Strong candidates have a concise checklist for the key "moments of truth" in a deal, like discovery or proposal calls. The brevity and clarity of their answer signal true process discipline.

Top salespeople know their numbers precisely. When interviewing, demand specific dollar amounts for their quota and actual performance. Resistance, vagueness, or answers like "100-plus percent" are strong signals they are either hiding underperformance or lack discipline.

A key interview question to reveal a candidate's character is "Tell me about a deal you lost and what you learned." Top candidates demonstrate ownership by analyzing what they could have done differently, while weaker candidates often blame external factors like product or their team.

Many candidates claim credit for their team's or company's success. A key interview trap to avoid is failing to distinguish who was a key contributor versus who was just 'on the team' when success happened. Diving deep into specific problems reveals who actually did the work.

Assess a candidate's ability to handle ambiguity by asking for real-world examples of a success and a failure. The key is to deeply probe their decision-making process for both—not the outcome—focusing on how they gathered data and made choices when information was scarce.

To move beyond anecdotal evidence, MobileIron conducted a "deal grind" by analyzing 20 won and 20 lost deals in a single session. This forced exercise reveals concrete patterns about the ideal customer profile, key decision-makers, and winning arguments, forming the core of a repeatable go-to-market playbook.