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Business Development Associate program is an entry level role into SaaS sales and business development at a technology company with highly motivated team members.
The interview process entails the following:
- A short first call to discuss the role and your background.
- A short-written submission – Candidate drafts a short email to a prospective customer trying to get them to book a meeting. This is a test of your basic writing proficiency since you will regularly be writing emails to prospective customers in the role.
- A second interview has two key parts. We give candidates a short cold call script and a guide to handling common objections a few days before your interview. In the interview, we simulate a 2-3 minute cold call where the candidate pretends to try to book a meeting with the interviewer. This is an off-camera exercise so you can have notes and even the script in front of you if you like. For this exercise we will re-do the practice cold call 2-3 times after giving you feedback to see how well you are able to implement feedback. The second part of this interview is regarding memorizing a series of 9 feature definitions from parts of the Northspyre product that are shared to you a few days before the interview. The goal is to be able to give clear, coherent 1-2 sentence definitions/descriptions of these features.
This interview is also a chance to see how well you are able to retain and learn new information as well as a basic screen to determine if a candidate actually cares about this role enough to do necessary prep work. For most candidates who do well, they can expect preparing for this interview and the written submission to take 2.5 to 5 hours.
Given this is an entry level role with very flexible and broad background expectations for candidates, oftentimes it attracts many candidates that auto-apply to the role but do not really know if they want a career in entry level sales. We’ve found giving candidates a taste of practicing a short cold call and learning about the product are good ways to introduce them to the role as well as evaluate who actually cares about the role. Some candidates may not spend time prepping effectively for this relatively straightforward interview, and unfortunately it shows. If you are able to do these things well, we will almost always extend an offer.
Candidates receiving offers are accepted into a well-paid 3-month program where you receive hands-on training and work towards a monthly quota target. If a program Business Development Associate hits their quota 2 out of 3 months in the program, we always extend a full-time offer. If a candidate only hits quota 1 out of the 3 months but shows a positive trajectory with rising performance each month as they acclimate into the role, we use a bit of discretion to assess whether they were a good teammate and if we believe they will continue their trajectory of improvement moving forward. The majority of program BDA members who meet these criteria will get an offer.
For background, we created the paid Business Development Associate program as a way to train entry level sales candidates who often come with little to no previous work experience and may be unsure about whether they want to pursue a career in sales. Our goal is to hire everyone in the program that meets the criteria outlined above while giving program BDAs a chance to also assess if this is the right career move for them as well while getting paid. The salary for a full-time role at the end of the program is $55-65K base salary depending on your geographic location with total earnings including commission targeted at $90-105K.
