Clever Account Executive interview questions

There is an initial phone screen with HR and you get asked questions about your sales experience. They want to know about your toughest sale, largest sale, etc…standard stuff. Then they want you to come to their office to role play and pitch a different product, Okta, to your future boss, the Head of Growth. This is where it got kind of goofy. Okta is an enterprise class solution which is sold primarily to CIOs, VPs and Directors of IT at medium to large businesses. The premise of the role play is that you, as an Okta sales rep, reached out to Clever’s Head of Growth about Clever using Okta internally. To be charitable, I’ll characterize this format of role play as an odd approach to test someone’s sales skills. Why? Because the whole premise for this role play is totally unrealistic. This simply would never happen in the real world, so, why have a role play on it? Okta sales reps don’t target the heads of growth of 40 person companies to sell their solution. Clever is too small to even have the types of issues that Okta’s solution specializes in fixing. At this size company, there are no Okta-type problems in need of a solution. In the real world, IT people spend valuable budget dollars to buy Okta to solve real problems. I could go on, but, you get the picture. I spent a bunch of hours learning Okta in preparation for the role play. The whole role play experience was a total and complete waste of my time. If I had thought through the premise of the role play more thoroughly in advance, I would have declined the opportunity to role play. I will never do another role play again unless it is for the product I would be selling if hired. Live and learn.