How to prepare for a sales or growth interview

Most people prepare for this like any other interview: polish a few stories about past projects, rehearse an answer about a time you disagreed with a coworker. Then round two turns out to be thirty minutes of pitching their product back to them, or a case study on a funnel you've never seen, and none of the stories help.

This article covers how to tell which kind of process you're in, and what the pitch and role-play rounds are actually scoring. It also covers talking about your quota so the numbers hold up, the growth case study, and what to ask so you can judge whether the job works. Read the section that matches your next round first, because sales loops and growth loops are built differently and the prep doesn't transfer.

The advice comes from Jason Lemkin, who founded EchoSign, now runs SaaStr, and says he interviewed about 50 VP of sales candidates in a single year; Lauren Ipsen, an executive recruiter who has placed around 85 executives; Jen Abel, cofounder of JJELLYFISH, who coaches founders through enterprise sales; Elena Verna, who has led growth at Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey; Adam Fishman, the first growth and marketing hire at Lyft and later a growth executive at Patreon; Sahil Mansuri, who runs the sales community Bravado; Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Coda and formerly head of product at YouTube; plus hiring managers from Rippling and HubSpot. Every quote plays the exact moment it was said.

Why these two interviews don't work like the others

Most functions interview you by asking about your past, and sales usually doesn't do that. It asks you to do the job in front of them, on a product you don't work on yet, while they watch. Jason Lemkin is blunt about it: before you hire a salesperson, make them sell your product to you.

Growth interviews have the opposite problem. There's no agreed job to audition for. Some hiring managers want someone who has run the specific channel they're stuck on. Some want volume of experiments. Some want a person who can tell them where their growth is going to come from at all, and think channel experience is the least portable thing you could screen for. You will be interviewed by all three types, sometimes in the same loop, and they will score you differently.

So the first job in both cases is diagnosis. Work out what this company thinks it's buying before you decide what to show them.

Find out what kind of process you're in

For sales roles, the biggest variable is who's running the interview. Lemkin describes two versions of the same exercise. A transactional VP of sales hiring a lot of reps at once will spring the pitch on you early and fast, because they're doing twenty or thirty interviews a week and don't have time for anything else. A founder who's down to their final one or two candidates should be doing the opposite: telling you outright that it isn't a trick, giving you the materials, and letting you take time.

Those two setups reward different behavior. In the fast version, nobody expects product depth, so you're being judged on whether you can hold a frame and ask decent questions under pressure. In the founder version, the whole point is the preparation, and showing up with a shallow pitch is the failure. Ask the recruiter which one you're getting. That question is normal and they'll answer it.

The second variable is how you were sourced, and it changes what your resume is doing for you. Executive search starts from company brand. Lauren Ipsen describes the standard method as market mapping: figure out which companies are best at the thing you need, then look inside them. But she also warns against stopping there.

Ipsen also says the first thing you learn in recruiting is to spot candidates who jump from place to place, and that logo collecting is not something you want to be known for. So the recruiter-sourced path gets you in the door on where you worked, then immediately tests whether you were one of the people making it work.

Founder-run processes often go further and actively discount the logo. Lemkin's advice to first-time founders is to interview about 30 reps, expect twenty of them to have done no preparation at all, and ignore background almost entirely in favor of one question.

Both things are true at once, and they're not really in conflict once you see where each one applies. A recruiter running a search for a Series C sales leader will care where you worked, and a founder hiring rep number one will barely look at it. Jen Abel goes further and treats a big-company background as a liability at the earliest stage.

If you're coming from a well-known company into an early-stage one, that's the objection to answer before anyone raises it. Show a deal you created from nothing, where the buyer had never heard of your employer and you built the credibility yourself. If you're going the other way, from a startup into a bigger company, the objection flips: they'll want evidence you can work inside process and forecasting rather than around it. The positioning playbook covers how to frame a background that doesn't match the job description on paper.

The pitch and the role-play

Whatever they call it, this round has the same three parts: you explain what the product does, you handle whatever the interviewer throws at you, and you try to move the conversation toward a next step. The single highest-return thing you can do is preparation nobody else does, and the bar is lower than you'd think. Lemkin says he's been the fifth or eighth interview for a candidate who hadn't watched the product's explainer video, and that most reps never bother to search YouTube or read the homepage.

Companies publish more than they used to. Explainer videos, recorded webinars, customer testimonials, pricing pages, case studies, review sites. You don't need to know how the API works. You need to know the product about as well as the person presenting that webinar does.

One more thing worth knowing about the person running the role-play. If you're interviewing for a leadership role, Lemkin's opening screen is to ask what you want to do in your first two weeks, and if the answer isn't meeting customers, he's out. He says most of the VP candidates he talks to don't mention customers at all, and instead describe a first month spent on process, territory planning, and the CRM. Process work is real work, but it's a bad first answer at a company under about $50M in revenue.

How to talk about your numbers

Every sales interview asks for your numbers, and most candidates answer with a single figure: quota attainment. That's the number the compensation system runs on, so it's the number people reach for. Two experienced operators will also tell you it's close to meaningless on its own.

Mehrotra says the answer sales teams actually give is about the person who can sell in a growing region or a shrinking one, on the new product or the old one. Sahil Mansuri makes the same point from inside the comp plan, with a worked example of two reps carrying identical quotas.

Rep A in Mansuri's example makes about $150,000 more, goes to President's Club, and gets celebrated, while rep B is the one whose customers stay. If you're rep B, attainment alone buries your best evidence, so bring the retention numbers unprompted.

Context matters in the other direction too. In the same conversation, Mansuri reports that 63% of sales reps missed quota in one quarter of 2022, up from 46% two quarters earlier, and that 85% missed in a single bad October. If you missed quota in a year like that, the honest framing is what happened to your whole segment and where you landed inside it. Saying "I hit 82%, and the team average was 61%" is a stronger answer than any excuse and a stronger answer than pretending it went fine.

The line between credible and inflated is mostly about specificity and about who else gets credit. Claiming a number that plainly belonged to a team is the fastest way to lose the people interviewing you, and it's easy to check in references. Say what you owned, name who else was on the deal, and have an answer ready for what you'd do differently. If the conversation moves on to money, the salary negotiation playbook has the scripts for that part.

What growth leaders disagree about

If you're interviewing for growth, you're walking into a genuine argument about what the role is for. It's worth knowing the positions, because your interviewer holds one of them.

Elena Verna's position is that most companies hire growth too early, and that a growth hire can't create growth that isn't already there.

Her conditions for the role existing at all are product-market fit plus enough users to run real experiments on. She says the first wave of growth has to be founder-led, that nobody with a shiny resume can wave a magic wand over a retention problem, and that a growth team might add 10% or 15% to a business that's fundamentally working. She's equally sharp about titles: in sales-led companies, she says, the growth marketing team is often a demand generation team renamed so it can charge 20% to 30% more in salaries.

Adam Fishman is arguing about something else. He takes the role as given and asks what it's made of, and his answer is a competency model meant to balance a whole team rather than grade one person.

Under growth execution he puts channel fluency, experimentation, and turning what an experiment taught you into something permanent in the product. Under customer knowledge, data fluency and instrumentation plus user psychology. Under growth strategy, loop modeling, capital allocation and forecasting, and prioritization. Under communication and influence, strategic communication, team leadership, and stakeholder management. He says the point is not to find someone who scores an eleven out of ten on all twelve, because that person doesn't exist, and that he'd expect a junior candidate to be weak on strategy and communication because those take years.

Put the two together and you get a practical read on your interviewer. Someone in Verna's camp will spend the interview probing whether you understand why growth work fails, and will be suspicious of a candidate who promises to fix a declining business. Someone in Fishman's camp will map you against a set of competencies and try to find the gaps that matter for their team. The first is looking for judgment about where growth comes from, and the second is looking for a specific shape of person to fill a specific hole.

You can serve both without changing your story. Lead with a loop or a funnel and where you decided the constraint was. Then show the experiments you ran against that constraint, with counts and win rates, because throughput is evidence you can execute. Then say which competency you're strongest in and which you're still building. Fishman explicitly suggests using the model in reverse: ask the founder or hiring manager which competencies they care about most for this role, then be candid about where you sit on each.

The growth case study round

Most growth loops include an exercise. It might be live, or a take-home deck, or a brainteaser. The hiring managers running them do not agree on what a good one looks like.

Jeremy Henrickson, who has hired a lot of product managers at Rippling and Coinbase, designs the case so you can't finish it.

Because it can't be finished, he can change one assumption partway through and watch what you do. He says some candidates blink and start listing the four hundred implications, and some get flummoxed, and that the difference matters enormously for how Rippling operates. He also says the prompt should always reflect the actual business you'd be joining.

Christopher Miller, who runs product growth at HubSpot, used to enjoy estimation questions and now limits them.

Right after that, Miller says he tries not to overdo those questions because there's a lot of inherent bias in them, and that he looks for prompts anyone joining his team could relate to. He leans instead on self-awareness questions, like asking how the people you most recently worked with would describe you, and he follows up with real references.

Both of them care about your reasoning rather than your answer, and both think the prompt should be relatable to the job. Where they split is how much the exercise decides. Prepare for the version that decides a lot by bringing your assumptions out loud, keeping a running number, and staying steady when someone changes the setup on you. Then prepare for the version that decides very little, where your references and your ability to describe your own weaknesses carry the outcome instead.

What to ask them

Sales and growth roles fail more often for structural reasons than for skill reasons, so the questions you ask matter more than usual here. Joseph Fitzgibbon, founder of the growth advisory Growth & Company, says growth roles in particular are frequently scoped badly.

His practical version is to find out who held the job before you and why it didn't work. A company that can say "we hired for brand and we needed commercial, we got that wrong, here's what we're looking for now" has diagnosed something. A company that can't will hire the same mismatch again. He also warns about the situation where the business is struggling and everyone quietly expects you to be the fix. A turnaround they've named out loud is workable, and an undeclared one usually isn't.

Adam Fishman asks a version of this from the candidate seat.

Fishman goes further than most candidates are comfortable going. He asks to sit in on a leadership meeting or an offsite, and says candidates rarely think they're allowed to ask. He does back-channel references on the company the way an investor would, calling former employees who aren't part of the interview loop and therefore aren't selling. One PM who interviewed with him asked for a list of people Fishman had managed, and called them. Fishman was happy to provide it, and says a manager who won't tells you something.

If this is your last round, the final-round playbook covers preparing for the rest of the panel around these. And most loops still include one conversation about your past work, which the behavioral interview playbook covers separately.

Frequently asked questions

They asked me to sell them a pen. Should I refuse?

No. Lemkin's framing is that the exercise is fine but the object is wrong, and the better version is selling their actual product. If you get the literal pen, do it seriously for a minute, then say something like "happy to keep going, and I'd rather show you this on your product, since I've spent time with it." That turns the exercise into your prepared version. Refusing outright makes you look fragile, which is the one thing this round is testing for.

How much should I prepare for a role-play I know is coming?

Enough to know the product without notes, which is usually two or three hours. Lemkin says he'd expect a candidate to have watched the explainer video and a webinar, and that almost nobody does. That's a low bar and clearing it visibly is most of the advantage.

I missed quota. How do I talk about it?

With numbers around it. Say what the quota was, what you did, what the team did, and what changed in the market or the territory. Mansuri's data shows majorities of reps missing quota in bad quarters, so hiring managers who've been in sales know it happens. What they're listening for is whether you diagnosed it. "I hit 78%, team average was 65%, our two biggest logos froze budget in Q3, and here's what I changed in my sourcing after that" is a good answer.

My growth results were a team effort. Won't specifics make me sound like I'm taking credit?

Only if you don't name the team. Say what the group achieved, then what you personally decided, built, or convinced people of. Interviewers get suspicious of the candidate who says "we" for everything, because it makes the contribution unfindable. Miller's habit of asking how your last coworkers would describe you, plus real reference calls, means the inflated version usually comes out anyway.

Should I do the unpaid take-home?

It depends on the ask. A few hours on a realistic problem is normal in growth hiring and it's often the round where candidates without the standard background win. A full strategy deck on their live business with no discussion is a different thing, and it's reasonable to ask for scope, a time limit, and real data. Fitzgibbon's advice is to ask for the real numbers anyway, since a company that won't share them at that stage is telling you something.

How do I interview for growth if my experience is one channel?

Say so, and use Fishman's model to place yourself. Deep channel fluency is a genuine competency, and the honest version ("I'm strong on paid acquisition and instrumentation, I've done less on monetization loops") beats an implied claim of range you can't defend. It also lets you ask which competencies they most need, which is the whole point of the model.

Is a growth role at a struggling company always a bad idea?

No, but the expectations have to be stated out loud. Verna's advice for companies is to stop the decline first and hire growth once there are signs of life, because a growth team can add 10% or 15% to something working and can't reverse something broken. Fitzgibbon says the same from the candidate side: an acknowledged turnaround with a real mandate is workable, and a company that thinks you're the silver bullet isn't.

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