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Business Development manager interview questions
If you’re hiring a business development manager, your organization is poised for growth. You need someone who can step in be the jack of all trades with sales expertise and a Rolodex of existing relationships. How do you ensure that you’re hiring a business development manager that aligns culturally with your organization and has the functional expertise to do the job well? To ensure you get to the core of your interview candidates, we’ve created a list of 10 business development manager interview questions that will touch on the different aspects of the role.
Define relationship selling and how you implement it in your job?
The most important aspect of a business development manager role is managing your relationships. Business success is much more sustainable with referrals and repeat business. That success starts with your biz dev manager and the way they can implement relationship selling in their role.
What is more important to you: maintaining clients or growing the business?
This is not contrary to the last question. Maintaining clients matters above all, but you might be in a situation where your company is trying to expand. That is when a business development manager focused on growth is more appropriate.
Besides cost-reduction, how would you go about raising our profits?
Cost reduction is more of an operations perspective. Give the candidate the opportunity to give reasonable measures to increase profits from the sales side.
What do you think is the manager’s role in closing deals?
This will vary from company to company, and person to person. But by now, your company no doubt has its model for the manager. See if there is any contradiction.
Name a time that you lost a client and why.
Force the applicant to give a low point. We all have lost clients. The important part is if they identify the root cause.
What is your strategy for converting a no into a yes?
The interviewee will give an explicit response to their sales strategy, and how they adapt to situations.
Take an item from the room and sell it to me.
Test their most basic selling techniques. Look for a focus on differentiation and value.
How do you qualify leads and decide which deals are the most strategic to pursue?
Pursuing the right leads is something that is hard to learn. But too often salespeople waste time chasing down a more affluent deal, even if there are too many signs that it won’t work.
What does your ideal customer look like?
Asking for the respondent to personify the model of a customer will give you their priorities for how they search for clients. It will also reveal the way they want their customers to react to their proposals.
As a business development manager, how do you utilize all the various departments in an organization to spur success?
This is the overarching business development manager interview question that truly identifies their company-wide perception. Sales teams forget that each department props up the whole. A great manager will answer with their interpretation of group strategy. The goal is to ask questions that force an applicant to think about their wider role of managing the relationships that the company has. This means clients, partners, and their team. Keep these types of business development manager interview questions diverse. A great business development manager will have already shown the capacity to grasp their corporate relationships. Then as long as they can show cognizance of how a team should operate, they are a great option for the role.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
