Sales Development Representative interview questions for the first round.

Updated 5 October 2026

What should a first-round sales development representative interview cover?

This role is about volume, rejection and learning quickly. Cover these areas and ask for real examples rather than opinions about sales.

• Outreach habits: how they find, prepare and reach out to prospects.
• Resilience after rejection: how they keep their activity steady after many refusals.
• Listening and qualifying: whether they ask good questions and notice what the prospect says.
• Coachability and self-review: whether they learn from feedback and measure their own work.

Sales Development Representative interview questions

Outreach habits

1. Walk me through how you would research a prospect before the first message. Listen for: specific sources, a short list of things they look for and a clear reason to reach out.
2. Tell me about a cold message you wrote that got a reply. What was in it? Listen for: relevance to the reader and a single clear ask.

Resilience after rejection

1. Describe a stretch when nobody replied to you. What did you change? Listen for: a change in approach based on a hypothesis, not only trying harder.
2. Tell me about a prospect who said no. What did you do next? Listen for: a respectful follow up and a record of the reason.

Listening and qualifying

1. A prospect says they are happy with their current provider. What do you say next? Listen for: a curious question that learns something, not an argument.
2. How do you decide that a lead is worth passing to an account executive? Listen for: criteria they can name, such as need, authority and timing.
3. Tell me about a call where you changed your plan because of something the prospect said. Listen for: evidence that they were listening.

Coachability and self-review

1. Tell me about feedback from a manager that was hard to hear. What did you do with it? Listen for: a concrete change, not only agreement.
2. Which numbers do you track about your own outreach, and what have they told you? Listen for: named measures and one decision they made from them.

How do you score the answers?

Score each area on the evidence in the answer. A candidate with a smaller background but a clear routine and honest review often scores higher than a confident talker with no examples.

Which mistakes do interviewers make with this role?

• Rewarding a polished pitch. The first round is about habits and learning, so a smooth speaker with no examples should not score well.
• Asking hypothetical questions only. Ask what they actually did last month.
• Treating confidence as skill. Ask what they would do differently on a past call.
• Skipping the check on how they handle a pushy prospect honestly and without pressure tactics.

How does an AI interviewer run this first round?

AI Interview Agents (AIIA) can run this first round for you. You enter the job title, the job description and the areas to cover, and the AI interviewer builds the questions from them. For this role you might list areas such as outreach habits, resilience, listening and coachability. The candidate joins a two-way spoken interview in the browser from an invitation link sent by email or WhatsApp, with no app install. When an answer is vague, the interviewer asks a follow-up based on what the candidate said. Interviews can run in English, Hindi or Arabic.

For each candidate you get a transcript and an interview report with scores and written reasoning tied to what the candidate said. A recording is included when one is available. A person on your team makes the hiring decision, because AIIA scores and reports and does not reject anyone on its own. You can read how the AI interviewer works, or build a question set for this role with the interview kit generator.