My Favorite Senior-Level Job Interview Tip

0:00 From these one-on-one coaching sessions that i've been having with people a lot of senior people telling a lot of senior stories and a lot of senior stories require you to articulate how you would build out do build design implement things start up a new group you're the chief revenue officer how are you going to build out the sales team we are making a shift in our product and service offering to the world how would you go about designing

0:36 the blueprint for us to do this so how would we bring ourselves to market how would we rebrand ourselves how would we then recalibrate the team and so on hey we want you to build out a marketing engine hey we want you to design a new product for us that entails okay these these are the kind of things now your story can be anything but this is going to be especially critical the more senior you are and the more freedom you have

1:05 in creating the blueprint there is a and by the way even if you were a technologist and you were telling a story like this this technique is really helpful i've talked to you about when you are talking about how you would do something this is a few already a futuristic question okay so so my my my keys to storytelling when you're in an interview is you want to protect yourself from the interviewer not getting everything that they need in order

1:39 to know that they should hire you and also making it as easy on them as possible to imagine you in the role so the more you're talking about your past and how you did things the more difficult it is for them to see exactly how you would operate within their environment there's one thing that i want you to to think about as you're telling your stories if you are asked to make presentation or tell me how you would do this or any of that stuff and you have to give them a step-by-step

2:08 approach that requires multiple stages that you're going to go through well the first thing is i would look at the customer segmentation i would see who our primary customers are you know who's contributing to 80 of the revenue that small group where they're located what they're buying what their problems are then what i would do is i would reach out to the new markets i would look at this where geographically is our possibility then i would build a team then it's that kind of

2:35 stuff that multi the multi-step process one of the things that is incredibly attention grabbing the it will also help the other person know that you are a strategic thinker it will also help them help them understand that you have experience or in in what you're telling them you're going to do or that you have enough experience to be able to handle something that you have not yet done

3:06 okay so here's what you need to do at each stage wherever it's critical you need to tell them the problem they are going to encounter that they have not yet encountered so it is a phenomenal sales technique for all you sales people with your customers but it's equally as effective in a job interview so what do i mean by this so we had a situation i don't know if she's here but she is in a in with a in with a startup this is a this

3:38 is a classic story shin was a startup it's a artificial intelligence technology company they have an open source product they're looking to her to potentially be the chief revenue officer and they they have basically this free software that a lot of their customers use and they're looking to now try to go break into the paying or higher paying more enterprise and all this other good stuff later well it's not like you just build a product you go out and you sell

4:11 it because you you already have an established brand that you that you've already created and the people you're going to target are going to be the people that are already using your product as an example so when she's asked well how do you act how are you actually going to go about you know generating x amount of revenue in the next x number of months or years when this is our current situation right because they're looking to hurt they're trying to hire her to create the solution

4:40 she could just go in and say well all right well the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna look at the customer segments the second thing we're gonna do is then we're gonna put the team together and we're gonna start pushing this out into the world and blah blah blah then we're gonna build our channel partners then we're gonna do this then we're gonna do that then we're gonna do that as if nothing will ever go wrong and that is how a lot of people tell

5:00 stories right first you do this then you do this then you do this even when they go back into their past and they say well here's the first thing that i did and here's the second thing that i did and here's the third thing that i did smooth sailing right but it was never smooth sailing ever i don't know anything in my life that's smooth smooth sailing but when we tend to tell stories that's what we do and when we tend to tell stories about

5:25 something that's going to happen in the future it sounds idealistic when we do it that way but it's wholly different when you say well first thing that i would do is i would actually look at the customer segments and i would figure out based on what our current buyers look like what that avatar whatever you call customer profile whatever you want to call it looks like we will segment them and we will pilot them to go after them this way now when we get to the second layer

5:56 and so it shouldn't be too difficult that they've already engaged they've already started buying our services now we're going to be providing them some additional services so that's about showing them the additional value that they're going to get but there's a real opportunity in this middle layer where people are using this for free now whenever you encounter something like that you're going to have an education problem because in a rebranding problem and you're going to have

6:19 to actually explain to them why they now need to pay for a product that they've been using for free okay so you insert the problem and then you say this is naturally what's going to occur so the first thing that we need to do in order to augment and sell to that market it augment our portfolio and sell to that market is we need to hold we would likely need to hold some rebranding efforts things like virtual summits educational webinars this and that and the other thing

6:48 and you know and this and this and this and this because that's a problem we're going to have i'm assuming that you you recognize that but if not we're going to encounter that so we we may as well start putting efforts into doing that now then what i would do is so as you go through this process think about how smart you're gonna sound when you insert that problem and recognize that i'm already thinking about the challenges now the interviewer may or may not

7:16 have thought about that already depends on who you're speaking to but if they haven't thought about it you're a genius if they have thought about it already you're still super smart and get equal number of points positive points let's call them because you knew that you thought of that now you could say if you did do this well this is just and the reason i know we're going to encounter that is because when i was implementing this other thing where we were breaking into a

7:42 new market based on the service we provided for free initially here's what happened or you if you don't have that experience to draw on if you do i would say it if you don't it's okay you'd say well naturally you're going to have that because they've been using it for free you don't have to over explain something that should be that obvious right so so of course that i would expect that to happen either way we need to be ready for that kind of thing so you want to make sure that you

8:07 are inserting the problem that they are going to have in the future and we call it in sales we call that surfacing latent pain but in interviewing to in interviewing speak i call that just being a badass and making sure that you're you know that you are actually going to get some points by telling your story that way because it never it never happens perfectly so when they see that you recognize that there are going to be challenges and you've already anticipated them and you're

8:33 already talking to them about what their solutions are going to be you're going to you're going to be way ahead of the game you will because no one does this they just don't the only time they answer problems is when i ask you well what problems do you anticipate when we get to that stage and most of the time the interviewer will not ask you that until you go through the process in the story you wanna you wanna intercept that question you wanna proactively answer that stuff

9:02 especially when you're telling a build-out story or a design story or even if you're a technologist like i said hey when we build this environment you know these are the top five problems we're going to have at these stages so i'm going to share with you how we're going to implement it smoothly and how we're going to eradicate all those issues that i'm going to anticipate that we're going to have that i know we're going to have you know that kind of stuff but inserting that problem

9:27 is a great thing to do you do not it doesn't need to be huge it just needs to be recognized surfaced and squashed okay so so so try try that out i think i think that that will get you lots of points i know a lot of you guys are senior out there i've been reading your stories i talked to you know in the in the in the zoom sessions and all that so i i i think i think that will really help you as you go through

9:53 your stories just don't forget that those those problems need to be part of your storytelling