Behavioral Interview Flashcards
Tell me about you
Started my career in NYC at AlphaSights, which is also in the information services space and was inspired by Gartner & CEB and the idea of connecting clients with best practices and not reinventing the wheel. AlphaSights just did it through expert calls and surveys and worked mostly with consultants and investors.
I was there for 5 years in both IC and team lead roles that were a blend of sales and account management, mostly working with McKinsey, Bain and BCG.
I had an opportunity to become a VP over in London, but it would have removed me from a lot of client facing work and at 27 I felt like that was too early in my career to step away from that.
I decided to pursue management consulting to keep building up that client-facing skillset. I’ve been doing that for 5 years and helped partners deliver revenue targets to grow some of the largest accounts in APAC - notably Westpac for a few years for digital transformation. Also working with ELT to deliver on region strategy.
I’ve decided that I really want to get back to fully owning those targets myself and very firmly building my career in sales. I think that doing that at a strong brand like Gartner where I can get back to selling insights and arming decision makers with best practice would be really motivating for me and would probably be the perfect next step for me to continue building my career in sales.
Tell me about your roles at EY.
- Client-facing management consultant. Mostly worked with the big 4 banks to drive digital transformation in their marketing functions (i.e. cross-section between CMO and CIO), but also did some cost cutting work and board of directors reports for insurance and wealth management clients.
- Currently, my stakeholders are the C-suite of EY Oceania. I run a number of strategic initiatives internally for the C-suite (e.g. cross-functional revenue strategy and operations, cross-SL teaming, align supply to demand, etc.) to help grow revenue in our top accounts.
Tell me about your roles at AlphaSights.
Mix of account management and sales on our largest accounts, notably McKinsey, Bain and BCG, as well as sales to new labels, notably boutique consultancies and private equities.
- Individual contributor for 2 years with a target of ~$1m AUD. I was responsible for both retention and expansion within our largest accounts.
- Team leader for 3 years - started with 4 people reporting up to me and grew my team to 10 people and owned a book of ~$10m AUD across 3 territories. This was a lot of individual and team management, as well as strategically growing my 3 territories by retaining spend as well as identifying potential big spenders who I didn’t work with yet and leveraging relationships to get in front of those Partners and win their research spend.
The main goals were to capture a majority of their research spend on any given project as we would go head to head versus competitors every time (i.e. capture more of the pie), help grow their spend by challenging them to think differently and uncover new knowledge gaps (i.e. grow the pie) and expand within accounts to win new business in other parts of the organisations.
How did sales at AlphaSights work?
So I have experience with 2 different pricing models and sales cycles from AlphaSights:
- Standard account management - Annual license / package with a certain number of expert calls that the client could use throughout the year - usually 60 one-hour expert calls for $100k AUD. This is the standard starting package that we would sell to new labels you would try to upsell from there.
- This sales cycle was usually around 2 months, with the steps being 1-2 calls for discovery and alignment with their decision makers, followed by a proposal which usually included a trial of the service, where we would ask them to earmark $10k of research spend on their next project for us and we would demonstrate the value we could provide, followed by one final call to finish off negotiations, figure out how large of a package we were signing them to and close the deal.
- Key account management - For our large clients (e.g. McKinsey), instead of a set package with a defined number of expert calls, we charged them per expert call with no cap on usage. This was easier given they would have different sized research budgets for different projects so it was less predictable.
- The main goals with these clients were to capture a majority of their research spend on any given project (i.e. capture more of the pie), help grow their spend by challenging their thinking (i.e. grow the pie) and expand within accounts to win new business in other parts of the organisations.
- This sales cycle and per project revenue was highly variable, as sometimes I could sell $50k in a week or $10k in two weeks - very dependent on the client’s needs.
What have been some of your biggest achievements to date?
- AlphaSights - managing the largest sales team on the largest global business unit. Given where I started (2 trainers who didn’t care, not hitting quota first 3 months) to then managing the largest global team, smashing quota, teaching new managers how to lead teams and build team culture, as well as being trusted by the organisation to be the guy to help turn around low performers.
- EY - first project doing Westpac Marketing. With no guidance or training and visa sponsorship on the line, I led 12 workshops with 20 clients, owned design of the reporting product we were building and then pitched it to the top 70 marketing execs at the bank so we could win a $5m AUD extension, for which I was asked back to help deliver.
- Personally speaking, I’m really proud of being a first-generation uni graduate and doing it at an ivy league university. Also, most people from my hometown don’t really leave, so having life success in New York and now Sydney is really cool. I’m also proud that I bet on myself when I quit my job and moved here, and it’s all worked out so far.
What motivates you professionally?
I have big aspirations in both my career and my life. I am motivated by 3 things: 1. Impact/Significance (for both my company and my clients), 2. Competition (notably against external competitors), 3. Money (I want to make a lot of money). I think sales lines up with these motivations really well.
Professionally, I want to either start of my own company one day or put myself in a position to be in charge of GTM strategy for a company (e.g. VP or CRO role) in the next 8-10 years. In the next 3-5 years, I’d like to get back to running a commercial team again as a stepping stone towards that goal. In the interim though, I want to be the absolute best individual contributor I can be though, re-establish myself as a sales gun and make a lot of money. I need to take steps in my life (e.g. engagement ring, buy a house, etc.) and I want to make bank.
Tell me about a time you influenced or managed a difficult stakeholder / had to deal with an objection.
Situation: I was leading a cross-functional workshop with a bunch of clients for a digital marketing transformation project at Westpac. I was leading the build of a reporting dashboard that would provide new insights to Westpac’s marketing team and be equally relevant for all users, which was a tall order given the variety of stakeholders in the room (ranging across all consumer products and digital marketing channels). I had one client stop the meeting and say “Why are we building it this way? We have this golden opportunity to build something amazing that tailors to all of our individual needs and we’re not taking it.”
Task: Now, this could have derailed the whole workstream by undoing months of work and really expanding the scope of the project. So my task was to keep control of the room and keep everyone’s eyes on the bigger picture of what we were trying to accomplish.
Approach: First lead with empathy to show that I understood where she was coming from instead of fighting her on it right away. Then I brought the whole group back to the mission-critical priorities that we were trying to solve for the CMO and CIO, one of which was having a reporting tool that was easy to use for the entire marketing function. That made it land a lot better when I explained that building in customization for everyone would make for a more confusing user experience and also threated to both slow down the technical performance of the dashboard.
Result: That objection was not raised again by the group and we were able to proceed with the workshop as planned. So bringing them all back to the mission-critical priorities and overall big picture of what we were there to accomplish was pivotal in handling that objection.
Talk to me about how you best learn.
I learn best in an environment where I know I have some support and where there is transparent feedback. I tend to really lean into feedback and I feel like I’m more comfortable receiving it than a lot of people are with giving it, so I try to make people really comfortable being brutally honest with me about what’s working and what’s not.
Tell me about a time when you took on feedback and implemented it.
Situation: Managing Christian at AlphaSights and he wasn’t getting promoted.
Task: I needed to deliver the tough news to him.
Approach: When I did it, he told me he was surprised because I had never given him as direct of feedback and gave him the chance to improve in advance.
Result: Now I never shy away from having the tough conversations when I need to.
What feedback did you get in your first 3 months at AlphaSights when you weren’t hitting quota?
A lot of it was actually related to not building a robust-enough pipeline as quickly as I needed to in order to hit my targets. A lot of it was just learning better sales funnel management practices. But I re-learned everything anyway just to ensure I had a really solid foundation, which helped me really take off in my second month with a new trainer.
Tell me about a time when you needed to be resilient.
Situation: When I started my first job at AlphaSights, it was a scrappy start-up with no formal training program. You had a trainer assigned to you who was pretty hit or miss with their coaching skills and you just learned on the desk. I had 2 different trainers in my first 3 months - both of whom were on their way out of the company and didn’t even make an attempt to really train me. So, for my first 3 months I wasn’t hitting quota because literally no one coached me at all. This was really scary because it was the start of my career and I was failing for one of the first times.
Task: So I was falling behind my peers and needed to figure out how to make up the skill gap from not being coached and try to accelerate my development.
Approach: I did my own research at night on tips to be more effective on calls, how to be better with time management, etc., but more importantly once I finally had a coach who wasn’t on their way out of the company, I set my ego aside, went back to the week 1 basics and made sure to soak up every bit of training that I could and pulled late nights for a few months to get extra practice reps and mock calls in.
Result: I ended up smashing my monthly quotas from there on out and being promoted on schedule. I also remembered what it was like to have trainers who didn’t care, which made me that much better as a trainer and, later, as a manager and I eventually was asked to “fix” some low performers and even coach other managers on how to build high-performing teams.
How have you performed in recent years?
Typically between 100-120% of quota as an IC.
As a team lead, I beat quota by a lot and achieved 150% growth over 3 years ($4m –> $10m).
EY I have always progressed and exceeded expectations.
Tell me about the products that you’ve sold.
- Knowledge in the form of expert calls and surveys.
- Digital transformation for marketing technology. I specialised in developing and selling reporting and insights to help digital marketing teams improve their performance.
Tell me about a time when you influenced executives.
Westpac Marketing Showcase
Tell me about another time when you influenced executives.
Context: I was working with a partner in McKinsey’s Consumer practice. He was consulting a retail client on delivering better customer experiences and was seeking expert perspectives from within that industry.
Approach: I delivered on his requests but also challenged him to consider perspectives from companies outside of the industry like Amazon and Apple. I explained that based on the experts I’d spoken with, customers probably weren’t benchmarking his client against its direct competitors, but rather against the best in class customer experiences they received from other companies, regardless of industry.
Result: He took my advice and it completely changed his deliverable to his client. In the future, he ended up sending his teams to me and telling them “Tell Dan exactly who our client is, what we’re trying to solve and what our budget is. Then just let him tell you how to spend that budget.”
What would you consider to be your most significant sales achievement to date?
Westpac Marketing - $5m on-sell
Tell me about the toughest sale you’ve ever made.
Situation: ANZ Bank MarTech - working with the Head of MarTech for ANZ Bank to pitch them on a digital marketing transformation that would improve their personalised marketing capabilities and enable them to compete better with the other banks.
Task: First we had to win the Head of MarTech. Initially we tried pitching him on the customer-focused outcomes that we could drive for the bank (i.e. the marketing and people side of this) because that’s how we had found success previously with this solution. We found that he didn’t want to engage with the people side as much, however, and wanted to get super technical. As we discovered this, we brough in some of our data colleagues to talk him through the finer technical details that he cared about, which ultimately got him over the line.
The bigger task though was when we learned that the Board of Directors needed to sign off on this deal and that they had already earmarked the money for another initiative. The Head of MarTech needed to present to the Board, but he was highly technical and was having trouble framing these issues as mission-critical priorities that the board would actually understand.
Approach: We recognised that the stuff he cared about was going to put the Board to sleep and he would not be able to win this deal for us. So, we shifted our focus towards actually just building his Board presentation deck and presenting it to him a few different times so he could see how we were framing things and explaining how the technology would enable the people-focused outcomes and effectively teaching him how to get this over the line with the Board.
Result: He got the funding and was able to proceed with the digital transformation - big win that led to a multi-year deal that my old team is still delivering on and has brought in ~$15m AUD. It was definitely tricky though because what got him over the line was different from what got the Board over the line, and we were removed from the decision makers so really needed to coach him on how to sell this.
How have you managed a territory before?
Situation: I managed 3 territories at AlphaSights - they were industry verticals within McKinsey and I owned CPG, Healthcare and Financial Services.
Task: I needed to figure out how to manage my time most effectively to drive retention and growth within my territiories (and teach my team to do it too).
Approach: I adapted the BCG Growth-Share Matrix to be a 2x2 with revenue on one axis and strength of client relationship on the other (measured by a mix of Share of Wallet, NPS, referrals given to new clients and competitive intel provided) and mapped all my existing clients within that 2x2 to show me where my quick wins and most lucrative opportunities were, as well as where my long-term strategic opportunities were.
Result: I drove significant revenue growth in my accounts (50%, 50%, 30% Y/Y) and was able to leverage strong client relationships into intros to senior partners and win their research spend.
Tell me about your experience prospecting.
3 types of prospecting:
1. Expanding within existing accounts - typically leveraged relationships
2. Selling to new accounts - based on company profile and knowing we were currently working with competitors of theirs
3. Daily prospecting of experts to sell to my clients
Tell me about a time when you have consulted with C-level executives to develop and implement an effective, enterprise-wide strategy.
Situation: EY has traditionally been a disconnected firm (e.g. siloed, not a lot of cross-SL communication), which has made it challenging to expand in some of our largest accounts because we’re missing out on opportunities to team effectively. The disconnect also makes it harder to make sure our best people are staffed on our most important projects.
Task: The Deputy CEO asked me to break down the problem into core drivers and potential solutions.
Approach: I had some hypotheses about what the issues were and I ran discovery calls (stakeholder interviews) with senior leaders from across each part of the business to test them and understand their processes, as well as their KPIs to see how those KPIs lined up to this mission critical priority for the firm.
Result: There were several things hindering EY’s ability to do this, but chief among them was a misaligned KPI and partner incentive structure. I presented my findings to the Deputy CEO and one of the ELT members then ran a trial of a new incentive structure which ended up later getting rolled out across the business.
