How to prepare for a Salesforce Account Executive interview
Preparing involves figuring out how to concretely prove past sales overachievements and determining realistic salary ranges, commission structures, and average quota attainments. Without knowing how to handle revenue, pricing, and upselling expectations, applicants get stuck wondering whether they should just recite textbook basics or showcase a unique sales personality.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Reviewing company playbooks, preparing to run discovery calls during interviews, and gathering pay slips or internal reports to prove past quota achievement.Did this help you?
- 2Writing a one-page account review for a fictional customer to demonstrate commercial judgement without having held the role.Did this help you?
- 3Asking the interviewers what their current CRM process looks like and where they feel the gaps are.Did this help you?
- 4Signing up for the company's emails to analyze their existing customer lifecycle campaigns.Did this help you?
- 5Framing revenue growth and upselling as the natural outcome of keeping clients satisfied rather than aggressive sales tactics.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Hello, I've applied for a CRM role in the UK as I feel I have some positive transferable skills, but when it comes to revenue and pricing, upselling and cross selling, I'm a little bit lost and hoping to gain some advice or real life experience from customer relationship managers.”source ↗
“I do have a first stage interview, and I'm trying to do some good prep beforehand.”source ↗
“I'd like some advices or just an opinion on how to succeed and your experience if you have any.”source ↗
“What's the %average quota attainment for SMB's AE?”source ↗
“How is the commission/variable structured?”source ↗
“What a realistic salary range with my background I should try to push on?”source ↗
“What kind of proof I can bring to demonstrate I've overachieved three years in a row in my current workplace?”source ↗
“Things to avoid or to look into? Should I just learn the "basics manual" to pass the interview or should I aim at showing a unique sales approach and personality?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to talk about financial experience in an executive interview
- 11How to prep for an interview when you haven't interviewed in years
- 10How to figure out what to study for technical interviews
- 4Why do I keep losing final round interviews to more experienced candidates?
- 50How to break into accounting as an international student with a low GPA
- 2How to find out what a company is really like to work for