I am interviewing for a chief of staff role and have encountered behaviorial questions...

I would advise you to highlight that you have the same skillset needed for sales roles but acquired in consulting (i.e. great stakeholder management skills and relationship building, outstanding communication and persuasion skills, etc.). You can further emphasize on through your experience in consulting (i.e. convincing clients with recommendations hard to digest, etc.)

Hey,

If the question was around having $ responsibility as part of selling and you don't have any experience doing this, obviously you cant make bold claims. That would be lying.

On the flip side, as a consultant you are in “sales mode” pretty much all the time not only with clients but also internally. These include pitching ideas, influencing key decisions, project extensions & much more. So, you can always highlight the key “selling skills” you have picked up and demonstrated and say you can learn what's needed quickly i.e. taking responsibility/accountability of $ targets.

As a general principle, there are always “transferrable skills” you can highlight without having to say outright No.

As a consultant, you face the customer the WHOLE time. You need to get “buy in” for the consulting firms recommendations frequently, and to do that you need to know how to navigate the comapany and convince people at different hierarchical levels, you need to understand their needs and concerns and develop solutions to address those, you need to communicate in an effective and convincing way… you need to constantly “sell” that it is worthwhile to pay your employer's fees.

You already do a lot of sales, you just didn't realize what it was.

The key is to clarify the question always. More often than not - different people speak different languages. For example, there are different kind of sales experiences.

• If the interviewer meant door-to-door selling then you might not have had that experience.
• However, if the experience was around convincing a client or pitching proposals - then as a consultant you would have had that experience.

The next time you encounter an unknown question - try to drill down the question and understand the essence of it. Try to also sense along what lines is the interviewer looking for an answer. You don't need to simply start answering the moment a question is asked. You need to work your way into the question.

Happy to discuss more techniques to overcome tricky situations in behavioural interviews. Feel free to message me.

Hello,

I'm sorry this happened to you, it certainly sounds frustrating. You definitely don't want to overexaggerate your experience in an interview, but in these sorts of situations I would lean more into the skills rather than the role. Even if you never had a specific position in sales, I suspect you had many opportunities to talk to customers, pitch ideas and products (project proposals?), and so on. So I would think about what experiences you had that are close to sales, and be open about the fact that you didn't have a position in sales but you do have some skills that you believe could be applicable.

Hi there,

I'm sorry about this - it's tough getting a question you didn't expect in a fit (that's why we have to train our adaptability/flexibility).

I think the issue here is you didn't quite clarify what he meant by sales experience. If you had, you would have realized that you probably have plenty (as the other coaches have said).

I actually got a similar question a couple of years back, and I talked through how I had identified a radiation/sell-on opportunity at a client site while talking to the client, “sold” it to the client, and flagged the opportunity to my manager and led the introduction/handoff to get additional work.

I think there's a fine line here: You don't want to lie and exaggerate, but you also have to recognize what they're asking for! They're really trying to figure out if you know how to talk to customers/clients to drive business…you do!

So, when this happens again, just make sure to get clear on what they're really asking, then pivot to demonstrating how you can do that.