Career

Salesforce Ops Interview Questions & Tips

By Sarah Bell

There’s nothing quite like the thrill of getting the job you’ve invested weeks, maybe months, into pursuing. However, getting to that point isn’t always an easy, carefree process if you’re like the 93% of us who get stressed by interviews.

But there’s good news. Thoroughly and adequately preparing for an interview puts you leagues ahead of your competition. And as the RevOps market continues to grow, there’s never been a better time for Salesforce Admins, ops folks, and go-to-market (GTM) team members to get a new job as a RevOps practitioner.

To demystify the interview process, we’re giving you an inside look into typical RevOps interview questions and the best approach to each answer.

RevOps Interview Questions

1. How do you stay on top of tech trends?

One of the best ways to stay in the loop on what’s happening in tech is to be part of the right community. For example, ops communities like Wizards of Ops have 3,000+ members discussing their tech stacks and how they’re using tech to solve problems for their companies.

If you’re involved with any relevant communities, such as Wizards of Ops or Trailblazer, focus your answer on how the community’s members help you keep up with the latest trends.

Another great way to stay plugged into the latest tech trends is listening to podcasts from ops and RevOps leaders. Share any podcasts you regularly listen to, like Rosalyn Santa Elena’s The Revenue Engine or Operations with Sean Lane.

2. How do you strategically plan for downstream impacts that could happen 6-8 months from now?

It can be tricky to know all of the impacts a change can have down the road, especially if you have poor documentation.

Talk about the importance of documentation and how a single source of truth helps you navigate change confidently and avoid downstream impacts.

3. Do you have experience managing a tech stack?

Your natural instinct for this question may be to start listing off the technologies you have managed previously. But what the interviewer is really trying to understand with this question is your ability to solve problems with technology.

Use this opportunity to share a story about a time when you solved a problem for a company using tech. If you have a lot of RevOps experience, this will be an easy answer. But if this is your first RevOps role, you can focus your answer on examples that showcase your aptitude for problem-solving.

For example, if you have sales or sales enablement experience, focus on the Salesloft cadences or Outreach sequences you built and how you thought about integrating this process with Salesforce. If your expertise is in marketing, highlight the reports you created or analytics you managed that spanned multiple systems. From a CX perspective, talk about any tools you used to understand how customers engage with your company. This could range from a platform that gives you insight into a customer’s product usage to a tool that allows you to better manage ticket volumes.

Score major bonus points by also highlighting any involvement you’ve had with evaluating or implementing change management.

4. What’s your experience with Salesforce?

This is another loaded question. Instead of focusing on how many years of experience you have with Salesforce, talk about the problems you have solved with it.

This is also a great chance to highlight any SFDC certifications you have.

5. What are your best practices for capturing tickets and requests from your GTM teams? How do you know what to say yes to?

This is truly the age-old ops dilemma. As natural problem solvers, we love the chance to fix things. But saying “yes” to every request that comes your way and not having the right processes in place can overwhelm you with reactive tactical work.

Start answering this question by sharing why it’s important to shift your mindset from saying “yes” to asking “why” when you get a request. By understanding the real problem behind the request, you can know if you should take it on and how to prioritize it.

From there, talk about the importance of building the right process for receiving requests. Share why it’s essential for requests to come from specific members of your GTM teams. Who that includes will depend on your company size, but it will likely be stakeholders in sales management. Implementing the right process can better protect your time, avoid duplicate requests, and keep your inbox from overloading.

Also, be sure to highlight any project management tools you use to intake requests, like Jira or Trello. Discuss how a system that’s specifically used to input tickets can help your GTM team understand what requests are accepted, what’s being worked on, and what’s completed.

6. What’s your process for running impact analysis on changes before you make them?

Understanding and evaluating the impacts of your changes is nearly impossible without a Change Intelligence platform. If you’ve used one previously, talk about how it helped you gain total situational awareness of the impacts and dependencies necessary to manage complex technology.

This is also a good time to bring up that Change Intelligence tools complement your project management platform. Using them together, you can create tasks and organize scope, and relate it back to the specific ticket logged by your stakeholders.

If you don’t have experience with Change Intelligence, discuss other ways you have found dependencies to manage change successfully. Talk about the importance of documentation and how it provides your team with an understanding of the changes you made and why you made them. Also, highlight why it’s vital to have good communication with your ops team. By maintaining an open line of communication with your team, you can run changes by them and ensure there will be no negative impacts.

7. How do you go about understanding what your end-user is trying to accomplish with a report?

RevOps teams often have a never-ending list of report requests. It can be easy to create the report the user is asking for with no questions asked. But you can save yourself time in the long run by asking questions that dig into the why behind the report and the problem the end-user is trying to solve.

Talk about the significance of fully understanding the goal of a report upfront, so you can provide the right analysis and data.

8. Tell me about the most complex dashboard you created for an executive and your involvement in that process. How did you help them answer the questions they were trying to solve?

It’s all too common for a CRO, VP of sales, or VP of marketing to ask the ops team to build a dashboard. While this may seem like an easy task, dashboards get complex quickly. Instead of throwing any relevant graph, chart, or stat you can find on the dashboard, it’s better to prioritize simplicity.

Talk about how less is more when it comes to dashboards and why it’s essential to keep them as simple as possible.

For example, let’s say the VP of sales asked you to build a dashboard that showcases their team’s revenue to date and how it’s trending. After chatting with them further about their goals for the dashboard, it’s obvious that what they really want to understand from it is how to more regularly hit their team’s sales goal.

So, you start with top-line clear indicators that have a strong correlation to revenue. Once you add those indicators, you reach the tricky part. You’re likely going to be tempted to add in other correlations and downstream indicators that also have an impact on revenue. But this is when less is more. Only add in the most important metrics. Otherwise, you’re going to lose line of sight on your goal for the dashboard.

9. What are your best practices for documenting scope and dependencies when doing project planning or process change planning?

The challenge with scoping your dependencies is if you’re not using a Change Intelligence platform, it will be static and outdated the minute you complete it.

If you use a Change Intelligence platform, talk about how it helps you take a proactive, holistic approach to change by documenting everything automatically.

If you don’t have that experience, focus on other best practices for documenting scope and dependencies. This could include manual documentation that lives somewhere accessible to your ops team and helps you easily connect the dots, like Google Sheets. You can also mention project management tools. They’re a helpful way to add more context to your documentation and draw parallels between your work to discover how everything connects.

Summary

Ready to find your new RevOps job? It’s within your reach. Follow these steps to get started:

  • Join the Wizards of Ops community to meet other ops pros and grow your network.
  • Follow the Wizards of Ops’ #careers channel to be the first to know who’s hiring for RevOps.
  • Study up for your interviews, following the four steps outlined in the next article in the Winning at RevOps series, “How to Land a RevOps Job.”

The Author

Sarah Bell

Sarah is the Content Marketing Manager at Sonar, the leading Change Intelligence platform for smart, agile operations teams.

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