Revenue Operations & Growth Topics
Revenue operations, sales pipeline management, and acquisition-focused growth. Includes sales analytics, pipeline management, revenue forecasting, and customer acquisition strategies. For post-sale customer success and retention, see Customer Success & Experience.
Objection Handling and Overcoming Customer Hesitation
Discuss your approach to handling customer objections: price objections, competitive positioning, concerns about company viability or product roadmap, concerns about implementation risk, or concerns about team fit. Show that you view objections as buying signals and opportunities to address real concerns rather than obstacles. Prepare responses to common objections specific to Sales Engineer deals. Demonstrate empathy while maintaining conviction. Know when to escalate to engineering or leadership vs. when to handle yourself. At mid-level, handle most objections confidently; escalate strategically when needed.
Sales Process Design and Optimization
Covers the end to end design, analysis, optimization, and scaling of sales workflows and go to market processes to improve conversion efficiency and revenue effectiveness. Candidates should be able to map current sales stages and stage criteria, diagnose pipeline and funnel issues, refine lead qualification and account segmentation, design lead routing and territory assignments, and define handoffs and service level agreements between marketing, sales development representatives, account executives, and customer success. Topics include defining activity level metrics and stage gating, improving pipeline hygiene and forecasting accuracy, aligning incentives and role responsibilities, creating playbooks and standard operating procedures, selecting and configuring customer relationship management systems and automation to reduce friction, and planning enablement and adoption. Assessment focuses on identifying bottlenecks, proposing measurable improvements, tracking impact through conversion rates, sales cycle length, average deal size, sales velocity, win rate, and quota attainment, and on change management strategies for scaling processes across larger teams.
Sales Methodologies and Deal Progression
Knowledge of structured sales frameworks and the practical skills to qualify and advance opportunities through a complex buying process. Interviewees should be able to describe methodologies such as Sandler, MEDDIC, and consultative selling, explain how they identify and engage the buying committee and economic buyer, set measurable next steps and success criteria, manage stages and handoffs between sales engineering and account executives, and decide when to escalate versus resolve blockers. Expect scenarios that probe qualification criteria, pilot and proof of concept gating, forecasting judgement, risk mitigation in a deal, and tailoring process to customer buying behaviors.
Sales Metrics and Key Performance Indicators
Covers the selection, design, interpretation, and operationalization of sales metrics and key performance indicators to measure and improve revenue generation, pipeline health, sales productivity, and customer retention. Candidates should be able to define leading versus lagging indicators and activity metrics versus outcome metrics, and construct a balanced metrics framework that aligns measurement to strategic objectives while avoiding perverse incentives. Core metrics include pipeline value and pipeline velocity, pipeline coverage, win rate, average deal size, average contract value, sales cycle length, conversion rates by stage, lead to opportunity conversion, quota attainment, forecast accuracy and bias, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, churn and retention rates, and representative productivity measures. Discussion should include how metrics vary by business model such as subscription software as a service, enterprise sales, direct to consumer, and channel models, and how to segment metrics by representative, territory, product, or customer cohort to surface meaningful insights. Practical implementation topics include clear metric definitions and ownership, data quality and governance, reporting cadence, target setting and thresholds, dashboard design and automated reporting, cadence reviews and root cause analysis, and how metric design influences coaching, compensation and incentive design, forecasting, resource allocation, and cross functional decision making. At senior levels expect to explain how to implement dashboards and data pipelines, establish metric driven routines, and redesign metrics to drive desired behaviors and strategic outcomes.
Customer Relationship Management and Sales Tools
Covers practical competence with customer relationship management systems and complementary sales tools used for account management and revenue operations. Candidates should be able to demonstrate hands on experience using platforms such as Salesforce or HubSpot to log customer interactions, maintain accurate contact and account records, create and track opportunities, manage opportunity stages and pipeline health, and support forecasting. Expect questions about building and running reports and dashboards, using automation and workflows to reduce manual work, maintaining data quality and hygiene, importing and exporting data, and connecting customer relationship management data into account planning and sales strategies. Also include familiarity with user navigation and shortcuts, permission and role management, customizing fields and layouts, basic system administration tasks, common integrations with other business systems and business intelligence platforms, and how these tools drive customer insights and measurable outcomes such as retention, upsell, and pipeline velocity. Interviewers will assess both functional usage and strategic thinking about how to leverage tools to improve sales effectiveness, adoption, and account outcomes.
Closing Skills and Getting Commitment
Discuss your approach to closing: trial closes to check readiness, explicit closes (asking for commitment), addressing final concerns, and ensuring internal alignment before closure. Share examples of deals that took multiple close attempts and how you persisted. Discuss your comfort with direct asks: 'Are we ready to move forward?' vs. ambiguity. Show willingness to escalate to leadership or legal for final negotiations if needed. At mid-level, close most deals independently with confidence and professionalism.
Revenue and Commercial Impact
Prepare three to four examples that demonstrate how your work affected revenue, commercial operations, monetization, or business model outcomes. For each example describe the initiative, your role, the levers you pulled such as pricing, sales process improvements, go to market initiatives, partnerships, or product monetization, and the concrete business outcomes such as revenue lift, pipeline increases, reduced sales cycle, margin improvement, or forecast accuracy gains. Include how you measured and validated the commercial impact and any cross functional coordination with sales, marketing, or finance.
Account Expansion and Growth
Strategies, processes, and execution for growing revenue and customer value within existing accounts through upselling, cross selling, seat expansion, broader adoption, new use cases, and expansion into additional teams, departments, or regions. Covers how to identify signals of expansion readiness such as high product usage, new user personas, team growth, unmet needs, and workflow changes; analyze usage, customer health, and account data to surface qualified opportunities; quantify incremental value and return on investment for the customer; and build consultative, value based proposals, pilots, and packaging. Includes methods for sequencing and prioritizing opportunities using criteria such as revenue potential, implementation complexity, strategic importance, customer readiness and timing, implementation cost, and risk. Emphasizes cross functional coordination and handoffs between customer success, sales, product, finance, and channel partners, designing repeatable expansion playbooks, account mapping and stakeholder plans, objection handling and ethical selling that preserves trust, and training and enablement for scaling. Defines success metrics and measurement approaches including net revenue retention, expansion rate, churn rate, customer health indicators, attach rate, average expansion revenue per account, deal size, and expansion velocity. At senior levels, candidates are expected to design phased growth plans, bundle complementary offers to increase efficiency, account for company resource constraints, and document scalable processes that deliver measurable outcomes.
Sales Enablement and Revenue Collaboration
Covers the full partnership between marketing or enablement functions and sales and revenue teams to drive customer acquisition and deal velocity through targeted content, tools, and processes. Topics include creating and managing sales collateral such as battle cards, case studies, product guides, and competitive intelligence; understanding sales challenges and buyer pain points through feedback loops and field interviews; prioritizing and delivering content that shortens sales cycles and improves conversion rates; tracking and reporting revenue impact using relevant metrics and key performance indicators; aligning positioning, messaging, and go to market motions with sales strategy; coordinating enablement programs such as onboarding, training, and playbooks; managing external resources and vendors to scale content production; and balancing acquisition velocity with sales effectiveness through iterative testing and close collaboration with revenue leaders.