How to Screen Account Executives: 8 Questions and What to Listen For Screening Interview Template

What was your quota in each of the last two full years, and what percentage did you hit in each one? Where did you rank on your team?

What this assesses: One good year is noise. A pattern is signal. Strong answers give a dollar quota and an attainment percentage for each period, including the bad one, and explain what changed: a territory reshuffle, a pricing move, a product gap, six months without an SDR. Weak answers say 'top performer' or '120% of quota' with no dollar figure attached. A candidate who cannot state their quota in dollars either never carried one or never tracked it, and both are disqualifying for a closing seat.

What were you selling, to whom, at what average deal size, and how long was a typical cycle from first meeting to signature?

What this assesses: This decides fit faster than anything else on the list. Strong answers name an ACV band, the buyer title they sold to, a cycle length in weeks or months, and roughly how many deals they closed per quarter. Do the arithmetic on the spot: 40 closed deals a year at a $150k average with a nine-month cycle does not reconcile, and the follow-up is worth having. Be careful with 'enterprise' as an answer. It is a word candidates use when the deal sizes were mid-market.

What percentage of the business you closed last year came from pipeline you sourced yourself, versus inbound or SDR-generated? Walk me through what a prospecting week actually looked like.

What this assesses: Most AE hiring failures are reps who could close but never learned to feed themselves. Strong answers give a split, something like 40 percent self-sourced, name the channels, and describe a repeatable weekly block rather than a vague intention. Weak answers claim to be a hunter but every deal in the story arrived from marketing. If your team has no SDR support, a rep at 10 percent self-sourced is a real risk regardless of how good their attainment looks.

Take me through the last deal you closed, start to finish. Who did you meet first, who else got involved on their side, and what nearly killed it?

What this assesses: Ask for the last deal, not the best deal, because best-deal stories are rehearsed. Strong answers name roles rather than a process: the champion, the economic buyer, the security or procurement reviewer who showed up in week six. They describe a specific obstacle and what the rep did about it. Weak answers recite a funnel, discovery to demo to proposal to close, which usually means the candidate is describing a methodology slide instead of a deal they actually lived through.

How do you qualify a deal, and what does it take for you to walk away from one? Tell me about a deal you disqualified in the last six months.

What this assesses: Forecast accuracy is downstream of disqualification discipline. Strong answers name a framework such as MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, or BANT and then, more importantly, produce a real deal they killed and the reason: no budget owner identified, a champion with no authority, a use case the product did not serve. Weak answers say they never give up on anything. That sounds like grit in an interview and shows up later as a bloated pipeline and a commit number nobody on your team can trust.

At the start of last quarter, what did you commit to your manager? What did you actually close? How far off were you, and why?

What this assesses: This is the best single predictor of how much management overhead the rep will cost you. Strong answers give both numbers, own the gap without flinching, and name the deal that slipped along with the signal they missed. Weak answers claim perfect accuracy every quarter, or admit to sandbagging as if it were a strategy. A rep who forecasts honestly is cheap to manage. A rep who hears what they want in every call costs you a quarter of planning before you catch it.

Tell me about a deal you lost to a competitor. Who did you lose to, and what did they do better than you?

What this assesses: Tests market knowledge and honesty at the same time, and a rep who has genuinely been in competitive deals can answer it in specifics. Strong answers name the competitor, give the actual reason (a pricing model that fit the buyer better, a missing integration, an incumbent relationship three years deep), and describe what they changed afterward. Weak answers blame price alone, or hand the loss entirely to product and marketing. Everyone loses on price sometimes. A rep who loses on price every time never learned to sell value.

What base and on-target earnings are you targeting, and how is your current comp structured? How soon could you start, and are you under a non-compete, garden leave, or customer non-solicit?

What this assesses: Money and timing kill more AE offers than skill does, and finding out at the offer stage wastes a month. Strong answers give a base and OTE number, describe the current split and how much of it is realistically attainable, name a start date that accounts for notice, and volunteer any restriction without being pushed. Hedging on the number usually means the current package is higher than the range you posted. Score every candidate's answers against the same [interview scorecard](/glossary/interview-scorecard) rather than reading them in isolation, and see [structured interview](/glossary/structured-interview) and [asynchronous screening](/glossary/asynchronous-screening) for how to run this as a written first round instead of a calendar full of phone calls.