Senior Sales / Account Manager — Sales account manager interview questions

How would you design territories and quotas for a growing sales team?

Territories need to be sized on realistic addressable opportunity, not headcount fairness — an evenly split territory in an uneven market sets half the team up to miss. I'd build quota bottom-up from historical win rate and deal size by segment rather than top-down from a revenue target, because a number that doesn't map to what a rep can actually sell just produces sandbagged forecasts. Reviewing and rebalancing territories yearly matters more than getting the initial split perfect.

How do you think about compensation plan design and its effect on rep behavior?

A comp plan is the actual strategy — reps will optimize for whatever it pays out on, regardless of what the strategy deck says. If I want retention-minded selling, some portion of pay has to depend on renewal or usage, not just new logos. The failure mode I've seen is a plan that pays the same for an easy renewal-shaped deal and a hard net-new deal — reps rationally chase the easy one, and new pipeline dries up.

How would you build a key account strategy for your largest customers, distinct from the standard playbook?

Standard playbooks assume a single buyer and a short cycle; key accounts have multiple buying centers, competing internal priorities, and risk that's measured in relationship, not just revenue. I'd build a named account plan per key account — mapping stakeholders, whitespace, and renewal risk — and review it quarterly rather than only reacting at renewal time. Losing a key account rarely happens at the renewal call; it happens months earlier when nobody was watching for the signal.

How do you improve forecasting accuracy across a team, not just for your own deals?

I'd standardize what each stage actually means so "commit" isn't a feeling that varies rep to rep, and I'd track each rep's forecast-to-actual variance over time rather than trusting the roll-up number cold. A rep who's consistently optimistic needs coaching on stage discipline, not a bigger forecast haircut applied after the fact — the haircut just hides the real problem. Accuracy is a coaching output, not a spreadsheet formula.

What's the trade-off between an enterprise motion and an SMB motion, and how would you decide which to build a team around?

Enterprise means longer cycles, multiple stakeholders, and higher deal size — it rewards a small number of skilled reps who can run a complex sale, and it's forgiving of a higher cost per rep. SMB means volume, shorter cycles, and process that has to be repeatable across a large team, so it rewards playbooks, tooling, and a lower cost-to-serve more than any one rep's skill. Trying to run both motions through the same team and comp plan usually serves neither well — the enterprise reps under-earn on velocity and the SMB reps get lost on a complex deal.