Spend twenty focused minutes, not two hours. Learn what the company sells and how it makes money, check recent news, funding, earnings commentary or job ads for signals, read the person's background and tenure, and check the CRM for prior contact. Then write down three hypotheses about their problem and the two questions you must not leave without answering.
Why interviewers ask this
Preparation is the cheapest advantage in sales and the easiest thing to skip when the calendar is full. The interviewer wants a repeatable, time-boxed routine rather than heroic research on one account, and evidence that you turn research into hypotheses rather than trivia. Reciting a prospect's funding round proves nothing; connecting it to a problem they probably now have proves quite a lot.
How to structure your answer
- Time-box the research so it stays repeatable on a busy week.
- Understand the business model before the person.
- Look for trigger events: hiring, funding, regulation, leadership changes.
- Write three problem hypotheses and two must-ask questions.
- Check the CRM so you never repeat a colleague's conversation.
Example answer
Twenty minutes, always the same order, because if it takes an hour I will skip it on a Tuesday with six calls. First the business: how do they make money, who are their customers, are they growing or squeezing costs, because those two buy very differently. Then signals. Job ads are the cheapest intelligence there is. If a company is hiring six people into one function, something has broken or something is scaling, and either way it is worth asking about. For public companies I skim the last earnings call for anything the CFO said about efficiency or headcount. Then the person: how long in the role, what they did before, because someone who joined nine months ago is usually still trying to prove something, and that is a very different conversation from a twenty-year veteran. Then I check the CRM so I do not repeat a colleague's call from two years ago. I finish by writing three hypotheses about what is probably painful, and two questions I refuse to leave the call without answering.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How long do you spend preparing for a first call?
- What signals tell you an account is worth prioritizing right now?
- How do you prepare differently for an executive meeting?
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