#236 - Land Your Dream Sales Job With These Killer Interview Tactics (Adam Ochart @ Gong)

[MUSIC] >> Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another episode of 30 minutes to President's Club. I'm your host for today, Nick Sigelski, joined by my wonderful co-host, Armand Faroque. And today, we have got a repeat guest, Adam Ochard, who is a sales manager at Gong. And wow, if you want to learn how to land a killer sales job at one of the most killer sales orgs out there, this is a clinic. Armand, why should people listen? >> Adam has the rare combination of three things. Number one, he is a sales manager who has outstanding interviewing skills. Number two, it's not like it's been a million years since Adam was a rep, so he understands what it's like to be in a rep's shoes. But the number three he's working at one of the best companies out there in Gong. And you will get a sense of what a world-class interview process looks like, and how you can nail that process yourself. >> A three, a two, a one, a killer episode. >> Today's tactic is brought to you by Attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales busy work like CRM updates, and flag hidden deal risks. So if you want to avoid ghosted deals, end every discovery call with these three questions. Number one, do you want to buy? Okay, validate if the deal is real. Number two, when do you want to buy? Validate if it will close this year. And then number three, how do you buy? Validate that they will get you in front of power. We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes. >> Today's show is brought to you by Responsib, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal security and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends that responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes. >> Today's show is brought to you by 11X. You're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying, and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact linked in posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances, and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes. >> Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in Discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, what does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30MPC demo deck template powered by Consensus. Go check it out on the show notes. >> All right, Adam. Welcome to the show. We start every single interview with your top three action will take away. So let's get your three. >> Awesome, Nick. But today we're talking about interviewing and how to land a job in today's market. The first is about building champions, each step of the way as you go through the interview process. So first person you're going to talk to is typically recruiter. On that closing call, when you meet with that person, find that if they're going to move you forward. And at that point, set up a separate conversation with them. You should block 15 minutes to allow them to prep you for that next meeting. I would say a good portion of people do this, not as many as probably should, but people stop there. Then you hop on that hiring manager interview, run that same play. Don't stop running that play and continuously build champions each time you go through the interview step. And the time you get to the final bots, you should have an army of champions that you can read into. Beautiful. What's number two? Number two, this one's actually interesting because it's something I didn't know about when I was running through the interview process. But free draft, you're thank you emails and get those out as soon as possible. Something that I learned as a hiring manager is soon as an interview ends, I'm getting an email from the applicant tracking system, the hiring manager. And sometimes from my boss saying, I need to see back in there quickly. Let's move swiftly. We want to communicate with you really quickly. So I put my feedback, I put in my notes, and I fired that out. I would say realistically 30 to 45 minutes after, sometimes sooner. Well, what happens is people send these incredible follow up emails that actually make me more bullish on them as a person to join my team and make me think, wow, they'd be incredible if they're on my team. But it's too late. And this happens quite frequently with someone that I'm on the fence. So set yourself up for success. Have that pre drafting. Think about the things you know about the business, you know about them. Add in the few notes that show you are active in listening and fire that thing off as soon as possible. This is a huge difference maker that I think is easy. Round us out, Adam. What's number three? This one here is something that may seem obvious, but tally not a lot of people do. Have a list of unique questions. And don't be afraid to put the interviewer under the hot seat. You are interviewing for a job just as they're interviewing you, right? So interview about the business and assess the risk. Ask questions about where the business is doing well and isn't doing well. Ask them about their strengths to manage their weaknesses and manage their, and we'll dive more into this in a bit. But make sure you come prepared with questions that are going to be unique so you stand out. But also assess that risk within their business and that role. Adam, I'm actually going to reverse the interview to start this off. So let's say that we have interview number one with hiring manager Adam O chart. What are you looking to sus out or how do you structure that interview? Because that will inform how I should be preparing for it as a candidate. We look at primarily within the hiring manager interview, business acumen and skill set for the job. Will they hit the ground running? Do they understand our sales motion or will they be able to adapt to it? How have they been successful historically as a seller? I would say that's 80% of the interview process and then 20% is cultural. I want to get to know this person. By hire someone, we're going to spend a ton of time together. Are we going to be able to have a good working relationship and enjoy our time together? And that needs to be neutral. So those are the things that I'm typically looking for. I'm going to double that. I've had people that are interviewing me. What are you looking to uncover in this interview? My blanket answer is, first thing you should say when you jump into a call is like, hey, sometimes on these calls, I know it's behavioral. Sometimes I know it's skill based. What is the theme of this conversation? What is the main thing you want to uncover as you interview me today? That question is going to give you a blueprint of how you should structure that call. And so let's say, for example, this person gets on the interview and you've prefaced it that it's going to be 80% business acumen type of stuff, pass results, yada yada yada, 20% more cultural. My guess is you still start these interviews with some semblance of, all right, tell me about yourself. What are the do's and don'ts of walking someone through your resume? Who have you seen in the past that has nailed that? And who have you seen in the past that has driven you insane within the first 30 seconds? This is like a huge thing that's a pet peeve of mine. I start every single interview saying, I've registered resume. I've seen your LinkedIn. I briefed the higher-line industry here. Let's talk about everything before what I can see in your resume. I want to know nothing about you professionally. I want to know about you as an individual. I'll give you the floor, two, three minutes, and start wherever you want and wherever you want. It's a complete blank slate. So I start all my interviews like that because number one, we're in sales. I want to make sure like, are they storyteller? Are they captivating? Are they interesting? And I'm not saying that that is something that is one to one in how they're performed. But I think the best sellers tell a good story, hold a good conversation. The 95% of people will tell you like one small thing. I grew up in Glendale, California and I went to slow and I got my first job at Oracle and they go into like the resume. So it's like, I don't know if this person's actively listening. Number one, make sure you understand what it is if they're asking what your personal life tell that and stay there. One of the thing I'll highlight, we remember things in thirds, so do things in threes. If I was interviewing today and someone said, tell me about yourself, I have three bullet advice events or many stories that I would talk to that'll be really, really crucial. So okay, if like if you interview and said, hey, you have two minutes to tell about yourself, I'd say, okay, cool, three things you need to know about me. Number one, I was an EMT at 18 that formed my life as I was in college working neonatal intensive care. Number two, I got launched a European business unit and it was a crazy life experience. I'm happy to tell you more about that. Number three, family is the most important thing for me. And I'll believe it, and let them ask questions, let them pick and pull. But again, having a bit of structure is going to be really important there as well. I love how you talk about having different compelling life events or stories that tell a broader theme about you. The way that I've answered that question that passed myself is somewhat similar except I'll pick one and I'll usually talk about my story as a wrestler back in the day. And I'll talk about that and I'll say oftentimes describe myself as the world's most naturally untalented wrestler. And then at the end, I'll bring that home and explain how them also probably the world's most naturally untalented seller. And that's why I think I've gotten half good at this thing is because I've had to learn how to learn in many other aspects of my life. So I love this concept of like having personal stories that tell them something about you. Where do you take the interview after this? Someone's introduced themselves. One of the first types of questions that you're asking to crack open the can of what is this seller actually capable of selling at my organization? So the transition from getting to know them a little bit is we'll have a bit of dialogue there into the actual work discussion. I personally just like to get a sense of like before we dive into numbers. Why are you looking for a new role? And the question I'll typically ask is you start working at going tomorrow and we fast forward to December 1st next year. What needs to be true outside of quota attainment for you to say that that was a good move? I want to get a sense on what matters and what's important of them for work perspective. Everyone's going to say money. But what else matters? And does that align with our culture as a business? And then from there, what does a perfect day in the job look like for you? Because I want to make sure that the way that they function and what they want to do is a seller is really aligned with my rep state of they look like. And then from there, I say, okay, cool. Let's take a second and set back. I'd love to unpack. You know, your last few years in sales. Can we go over some of those numbers? I mean, we ask everyone to come prepared with numbers in terms of teaming and so on. I'm actually curious about this one, Adam, because when you were leaving a job, it's very, very rarely. It's like, oh, yeah, gone was truly the the coolest company in the world. And I saw you on an ad and I just had to apply there and leave the place for things were going great. Most people in their leaving jobs, they've got some grievances. How do you want to hear from the person that you're interviewing the reason that they're looking to leave and the reason that they're looking to go? - Yeah, I actually have to give credit to Wendy Harris, who's my mentor or one of my mentors, who I reach out to her about this. I started managing and interviewing in the midst of the largest layoffs in Tech History. I think we're gonna crest a quarter of a million people in Tech Layoffs, which is just a crazy number this year. I think the only thing that really matters is accountability to ownership. If you haven't been successful for a really long time, it's gonna be hard for me to justify moving you forward. But if you've had a good career, you had a bad experience at your last role or you had a couple bad quarters or anything along those lines, I just wanna hear ownership. I wanna hear that you have a clear understanding of why that situation happened. You had a plan to overcome that. You tried it, maybe it did or didn't execute and now you're moving on. But again, it's all about accountability to ownership. So it's funny because I've had people that left just because they were ready to move on. But the story was the company was a mess and they didn't know what they were doing and they start pointing fingers and that's me's an immediate red flag. And I had people that might have been tipped out and they'll open it up and just say, hey, I didn't perform well the last three months and here's exactly why. And here's what I'm gonna do to fix it moving forward. When I hear that kind of accountability, that to me translate to someone that's gonna own the sales process, they're gonna own their own development, they're gonna own their growth and they're gonna be successful. Adam, one of the things that you mentioned in your top three actionable takeaways was creating a two-way dialogue where you're putting the interviewer in the hot seat also and you're asking them hard questions. And I'm curious, we've talked a lot about how you should be responding to these questions with your things in threes and the taking accountability at what point in the interview? Let's forget about how I ask the hard questions but at what point should I start to turn questions back on the interviewer? Because my guess is you're a little off-put if they start smacking you with tough questions in the first two minutes. - Yeah, I can only speak to my process, right? And I'm interviewing salespeople for a sales role that sells to sales leaders. So what I appreciate might not be the same for someone selling to I.C., but there's a bit of a aggressiveness that I think sometimes it takes me back, but I'm impressed to see. So the first thing I'll say is, I don't know if it's necessarily ever too early. I definitely think that you should sit back and let the interviewer run their process. But do you have questions in what I've said the best people do? Just say, "Hey, I have a question up. "Should I jot it down?" Or do you mind if I ask it now? Because Candelese, the person that runs a ton of interviews, sometimes it's nice 10 minutes in to be like, "No, I'd love to hear your question. "What's going to make it a two-way street?" So I would ask for permission on that, but definitely don't be afraid to write it down and bring it up later. - Adam, I want to press on the previous point of being transparent if you were underperforming, for example. And if I just play the role of a rep who might be in that position interviewing today, there are a lot of sellers who are being laid off let go because companies are going under and all of these other things. And it's very unlike 18 months ago, when if you're looking for a job, even if you're a middle performer, you might be the best person that that company's looking at. If you're an underperformer, you're probably competing against other top performers now in an interviewer process. And my concern as a rep would be, shoot. If I tell people that I only got to 60% and I quote it in my last job, why in the world would they pick the 60% of quote a person? Aren't I better off just not talking about that at all and avoiding the performance conversation or even possibly lying and say I did well or at least average instead of drawing attention towards my underperformance? That's what I would imagine a rep in that situation would be thinking, how do you think about that? - I think any good interviewer is going to get to that information, whether it's on the call itself, whether it's on the reference check, at some point we're going to want clarity around that. So I think it's something that you need to address as my opinion. I also operate and I think that being honest is the right thing to do. I know that it's, we'll talk about action here not about fluffy things, but I think you should have a clear conscience and sales you need good karma, you didn't do it on your side. So look, it's been a crazy, crazy 18-ish months and a lot of very good sellers are on the market right now. A lot of good sellers didn't perform and it was an 100% under their control. The market shifted, everything was just completely in flux. Business is a shifted on belly up. If I was in the position of, hey, I was at 60% and I was part of a massive RIF. Number one, own it. Number two, it's funny, there's a line someone said to me, I was part of a RIF, but I have to be transparent. I probably could have survived and I can tell you what I wish I did differently. It's just so impressive when you have that level of ownership and the third thing is individuals that have been performance managed out or maybe haven't achieved the glorified numbers that you put in your LinkedIn profile, have someone on deck ready to talk to that person that's willing to go to bat for you. So hey, look, I was only at 60% and I wanted to discuss that. And here are the reasons why the other thing I want to note, my manager at the time will go to bat for how hard I worked and will tell you everything that I did and will tell you that they'd probably hire me back in a second. I'll send you their information after this call I'll include it in my follow up. But again, it's having social proofs and I think that's a huge factor as well. - That's a killer talk track there. I really love that. I actually want to press on that talk track even further. You talked about reasons why someone didn't perform and things they would have done differently. What are things you would like to hear? If I'm a rep interviewing with you at 'em and I'm like, I didn't do so hot, what are good reasons that I didn't do so hot? And what are good things that I wish I had done differently? I think a bad thing that I wish I had done differently is yeah, I wish I had pushed to be moved to a different team because mine was a mess and the other team did really well. What are things you're hoping to hear because so much of this is how you position and tell the story. - Yeah, what I would like to hear is just any sort of thoughtful approach that utilizes data and utilizes the mentality that like marginally I could improve. And an example of that would be, you know, hey, it's 60%. Well, I sat down with my manager and I ran the numbers and I was slightly under the top performers when it came to self-sourced pipeline. My middle of the funnel was pretty weak and I lost one really big deal that I probably could have closed if I ran the title timeline. So what I did moving forward was I actually partnered with our top performing SDR and we had rolling one on ones. The second thing I did was to clean up that middle of funnel was actually extended our deal reviews 15 minutes as I manager and I made sure to talk about middle of funnel deals. And then regarding that last deal that pushed, I've actually really, really dug into medic and adopted a very deep approach of medic on my deals and that way it doesn't happen again. So again, that's kind of like shooting off the cuff but like that type of very clear and concise breakdown. I thought people do similar things and it takes something that's negative and I'm like, holy crap, this might get diming in the rough. So Adam, we've talked a lot about the qualification questions of an interview, your quota attainment, why you're leaving, tell me about yourself, walk me through your resume. Eventually we start to get into actual sales questions. In other words, how do you sell? How do you run a discovery call? How do you open up your calls? How do you drive timeline, things like that? I'm curious, we can't go through every question under the sun, but I have asked rap simple questions like how do you run a discovery call and gotten a 70 minute monologue. And I'm curious, is there a magic formula or a way that I as an interviewer should think about answering questions about my sales process in a way that is clear, concise and compelling? Yeah, I think first and foremost, directionally you shouldn't be blindsided at all. One of the first things I talked about was have a chant in that the recruiter and the hiring manager and they should tell you, these are the types of questions you should be prepared for and this is what you should have. So we ask a lot about process. A big part of my team is they build their own pipeline, their commercial sales order. So they're out there prospecting like lunatics. Well, I'm gonna ask every single person, what is your process for managing building pipeline while also managing deals that are in flight? So have process related questions. I don't think it needs to be like a super sophisticated answer to speak concisely, word economy is really important. So when you think about your process, it's not gonna be a long form podcast. It's gonna be, here's exactly how I break down my day. Here's the things that I need to do or what I have a discovery call, here are the three things I do to prep, here are the five things I wanna leave that call with and then here's the one thing I make sure I do when I follow up. You gotta be precise. If I could just double down on that, what Adam just rattled off is oftentimes what I want the first answer to be from an interviewer. If I'm asking you, how do you structure a discovery call? I wanna know a high level understanding of step one, agenda, step two, high level discovery question, step three impact question, step four, next steps. I don't need to know all of the details of every example of discovery question you could possibly ask, but I wanna know the big buckets. And so what I will oftentimes do as an interviewer where I've seen other interviews due to me as the interviewer is they've said, I'm gonna give you a 30 second, 60 second overview of my process, tell me where you'd like me to elaborate. Here's step one, two, three and four, is there one place you'd like me to give more detail? And we show that level of control of an interview and control of answering the question and understanding that you might not wanna demo the whole feature, you wanna give the harbor tour and let the prospect ask questions. You're starting to see how you would also control a sales conversation without rambling for days and days and days. And that's exactly what you just did there, Adam. - Yeah, I mean, it's so smart. What you're doing is you're sort of pulse checking of like, hey, I'm gonna give you the high altitude answer, know that I could go way, way deeper. And it's sort of similar to what you mentioned earlier, Adam, about asking permission to ask those questions made interview 'cause you don't always know where the interviewer is and where their head is at. And when you do those little pulse checks of like, hey, I think you want me to like give the high level, but just in case you were looking for the long monologue, I can give that to you. I don't want you to think that I only have this shallow answer. It's very, very smart. I wanna go to what you were talking about in the beginning of the actionable take away. which was prepping these unique hard questions for the interviewer. And I'm wondering if you can elaborate on that a little bit. Yeah, so I think first and foremost, you should have a lot of time to ask questions. I try to give people at least 10 minutes on a 45 minute interview. And what I'll typically do is give 15 minutes and then utilize the backend for next steps. So it's an opportunity for you to ask questions. But in my opinion, it's an opportunity for you to be unique, for you to stand out, and for you to showcase that you can think critically right about a business. And the last thing that'll add, committing to a job is a huge, huge thing for an individual. This is your opportunity to stress out risk. So be prepared with questions that might put some of the hot seat. And when I think about the best ones that have been asked to me, one of them is what's one thing you change about GONG, or what's one thing you change throughout the sales process? That put me in the hot seat of like, I don't necessarily want to lead and say like, I don't love these things. But maybe think about what is an area of the business that I would change. And that led to a really good conversation about like, why don't you think they're doing that today? Or why wouldn't the business do that? And I left that conversation to be like, this person has a really good business find. Another one, and people sometimes ask, you know, why is this spot open? The reason I don't love that question is because people can get promoted. Someone could have just left for whatever reason. It's kind of an easy out. I would ask, why is the bottom performer and your team currently struggling? And then from there, it's a long tail. Okay, cool. And like, how would you try to help them? And what is your plan moving forward? Like, what happens if that person doesn't necessarily improve in that area? Like, run discovery on that because that'll allow you to get an understanding of how does a manager deal with someone that needs improvement? And does that align with how you like to be coached? And how you like to be managed? That's another one. And the third one that I'll point to, people always ask, are you going to move forward to the next round? And you're very seldom going to get the answer that you want. It's usually going to be, hey, we got to circle the wagons at the end of the week. We get to look at all the candidates. We're going to read all the reviews. We'll reach out to you on Friday. That's like a typical normal edge or something along those lines. I would ask, if you had to point to one reason, you wouldn't move me forward in the process, what would it be? And what that does is it puts the interviewer on the hot seat of like, okay, I'm going to pick out one thing and I'll be up front when I'm interviewing someone. I find a bunch of great things. I find a bunch of, okay, things that typically find it's you, beige red flags. I'd bring it up. I would tell you directly, okay, cool. Here's like the one thing that's kind of holding me back. And then you'll have an opportunity to object your handle and or quickly fire that follow me now, right? Hey, the one thing you said might hold you back is ABC. We'll put in some proof there as to why that shouldn't be concerned. So you were telling me in the prep for this that part of the reason you want your interview, e to put you in the hot seat is you want them to show that they have some of that natural aggression to feel okay, pushing the other person a little bit. And they're also having an opportunity to start to sauce out risk related to this role that hopefully they're going to be offered. What should I be doing as a candidate? If I get to this point and I'm like, I don't think I should even be sussing out risk yet because I don't think Adams really sold on me yet. So what are things I should be thinking about doing maybe in that back half of the interview if I'm like, this is going all right, but like I really need to tip the odds in my favor before I press on the risk related to the role. Yeah, I think that you bring up a really good point in that it's not natural to like start poking into the role if they're not a believer in you. I think that you still should have that equal business that you still have that aggression or that bullishness on yourself, but you should dig in instead of the business. You should dig into that interview and how they feel about you. And I'll tell you a huge part of sales is like reading the room and understanding what's happening back and forth. That's a huge part of interviewing. It's usually pretty obvious when we hit a little bit of a rough patch when it's your turn. Ask questions is like, Hey, can I address the elephant in the room when you asked about A, B and C? It felt like my answer didn't really resonate. I'd love to understand like, do you see that as a bit of a red flag? Like, what are your thoughts on that? Get there. And then again, I would have some sort of like transition like, hey, okay, cool. And generally speaking, does it feel like I'd be a sit for the role? Okay, cool. Boom. Now we can go into talking about the actual role. So I never thought of that way, Nick, but that's a great breakdown. Like, first, let's talk about myself and make sure that we have a green light. Then let's talk about the actual role itself. It's almost like talking about timeline and discounts. It's like, I mean, don't you want this yet? What Adam is doing is similar to the concept of breaking the third wall in acting. In other words, oftentimes there's this fake transparent wall that sits between someone who wants a job and someone who has a job to offer. And they both have questions in the back of their mind and objections in the back of their mind. But for one reason or another, they're not actually comfortable sharing them. And what happens when you punch through that wall of transparency, you actually get your interviewer to open up as a real human as well. I remember the first ever sales interview I bond. It was actually for drift funny enough. And he ripped me apart on a mock discovery. And at the end of it, I was like, look, that was one of the worst sales calls I ever run. If I was running this differently, I know I'm probably not going to get another chance at it. Here are the four or five things that I should have done better. And I took the words out of his mouth. And you could see he just sort of eased his foot off the gas pedal as he was getting ready to give me all this feedback. And next thing you know, he actually passed me to the next step. And the person in the first round of the on sites was like, someone told me that you seemed like a really, really hard worker that cared about your own development. And it's because I did that thing to break the third wall. So I love how you talk about that man. Another place that you talked about doing that is after the interview. Can you talk about interview closes minutes are going by. I'm punching my one, two, three, four rating on this candidate. What should I be doing as an interview? We to make sure that it's either a three or a four. So first and foremost, the speed of you sending out that follow the email is so important. And I talked earlier about being at EMT. The golden hour is a huge thing. If you get a patient back from the incident to the hospital an hour, the chances of survival go through the roof. Well, think of it like that. The golden hour as soon as that interview ends. And I would probably say, has an hour fire off that follow up. Make sure it's thoughtful. And look, I don't want to get to in the weeds. Tactically, but you should be blocking the 30 minutes after an interview to do these things. You don't want to roll right into a sales call or something else that you have to do. That's the first thing. The second thing is you should be already connected with them on LinkedIn. You should have sent that days ago. Message it right away. Hit them on the multiple mediums. And then tying back to the first thing that I said about building a champion, you should be texting and or calling the champions you have, which if you're talking to hiring manager, it's through the recruiter texting or calling them. Give them a really quick brief. I thought it went well. Here are the things that went well with here is where I have concern. I would love any direction that you have. And I promise you that recruiter who's incentivized to move you down the funnel if they sourced you will reach out to the hiring manager and say, how did it go and they'll get it inside school. So the three breakdown there, it's fast follow up as soon as possible. Some that thank you note. Second thing is you should be connected with LinkedIn send them another paint. And then last but not least, reach out to your champions, your recruiter and so on and give them the load out. Adam, thank you for meeting with me today. I look forward to hearing next steps. I'm curious. This is a question for both of you guys. What does a great follow up email look like to that interview? What should be included? I think the most important thing is you want to do two things. You want to be unique. You have to stand out and you want to prove that you're actively listening. So the B unique part is harder to coach on, but the yourself, the active listening part though, put in the things that were like important to you that you thought were relevant. Hey, I love tell you talked about going to market strategy forward is XYZ and the things you're excited about are those two new product launches. That's really awesome to me. And that makes me further excited because ABC, right? Because I did that already at my previous company. So something that shows active listening. If there was any sort of red flag that was discussed, address that as well. And I'll give you an example. Oftentimes people that I interview, I get nervous that they may not be as bullish on prospecting as they need to be to be successful in my role. A lot of people will send me, Hey, here's an example of a few of my best cold emails and I'll have screenshots in there. You just had two minutes. It doesn't take that long, right? Or a shout out they got on LinkedIn for credible prospecting. Or it could be a shout out they got on Slack for being the top performer for booking opportunities that month. So you can put some social proof. And if you're really good, you're going to align that to red flags and beige flags that they called out in the interview. So when you ask like, what does a really good follow up email sound like? It's original and authentic. It's going to be concise and it's going to show your active listening and it's also going to help you overcome some objections you might have heard. Dude, that's so brilliant. And I would implore if you're listening this episode and if you're not looking for a sales job, start keeping a file today of all of those greatest hits. The awesome shout out from your manager, the really, really great creative prostate email to book you a meeting with the CEO, etc, etc. So then as you get deeper into your career, you can point to this awesome swipe file of how amazing you are. And speaking of amazing, you're amazing Adam, but we're running out of time and we got to move to the final question. And so the final question is this we've talked about a lot of really great things salespeople should be doing when they're interviewing. Now I got to ask you about a shouldn't. And so my last question is what is one bad behavior that you see folks exhibiting when they're doing these interviews or in the interview process that you think they need to break because it's hurting them more than it helps. I think it is the need to describe everything. The need to be long winded and not be concise. And Armand and I both kind of touched on it multiple times. Do not be afraid to be concise. Do not be afraid to be almost a little bit bay and get people the opportunity to unpack the answers further. Long winded answers are the main of my existence and I'm sure I'm not alone. We think very quickly so be very concise with your answers. Amazing. Adam, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Today's show is brought to you by Titan X which helps you connect with prospects instead of dialing into the void. So look, you can make 100 cold calls a day but if nobody picks up your burning time. So Titan X literally guarantees you will triple your cold call connect rate or they will pay you $10,000. So the link in the show notes down below will show you that they match literally 5,000 credits for every 5,000 you buy. Go check it out. I use it personally and it's a phenomenal way to get more conversations on the phone. Today's show is brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. Try this. Stack your tier one highest intent leads at the front of your morning dial block. So if someone signs up for a trial, visits your pricing page, dial them first before any other accounts before you open your Slack, your email, before anything. Unify makes it stupidly simple to surface those tier one accounts automatically. Be built to guide with Unify on how to get 100% of BDR's 2.25 in 2026. Go check it out in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early. So pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has risk and I have something I can coach to. Be built to guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again. And you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Textus, which helps you keep deal momentum moving at every stage of the sales cycle. Texting is one of my favorite ways to sell between meetings. I use it for post big team meeting debriefs and also for game planning with my champions about how to navigate the politics of their org. And I've found that when you move somebody off company email, it makes folks a lot more open and honest. Now we put together a guide with our friends at Textus on how to revive ghosted deals and keep your deals moving at every stage of the funnel with texting that you can get for free in the show notes. Your top four actionable takeaways from this episode with Adam Ochar is number one. Be concise when answering questions. Word economy matters. It's all right to give the four bullets of an answer and then let the interviewer know that you can go deeper on things if they would like you to. Number two is do not neglect the golden hour. It's really the golden 30 minutes like Adam said what you should be doing is post interview sending out a follow up thank you that is creative and shares how you could be great with the recruiter and the interviewer. One tip is to pre draft this so you have it ready to hit send very quickly. Number three, going into your interview, never be surprised. Get the cheat code questions to the interview from your recruiter and your interviewer. If you're hearing surprise questions and you had no idea this was going to be the topic that's probably your fault. And lastly, number four, if you have the unfortunate circumstances of possibly going through a riff that is okay. It happens to everyone. It's happened to me. Hit adversity head on. Tell them, hey, if I were to survive, maybe I could have heard how I would have done it instead. Arty Nick, how could people help us out? Well, if you've not sent Adam Ocharth a message on LinkedIn saying thank you, thank you, thank you for this amazing interview. It would mean a lot to Adam and actually to us. If you would thank our wonderful guest, he took a lot of time out of his data prep for this. He literally had a forecast call right after this and he stayed with us for an amazing interview. So send Adam a thank you notes. That's it. And we'll see you next week on the show. Today's show is brought to you by Mu and E the AI agent that helps you personalize your buyer's experience and beat the competition. The best sellers connect the dots between what they learn and discovery and everything else they share with their prospect. Every demo you show and every piece of content you share, you need to explicitly tie back to. I'm presenting this to you because you said X. Now the supplies to business cases, proposals and more and we partnered with Mu and E on the three magic sales templates to help you move your deals without needing your marketing teams help grab it in the show notes.