How to hire a Sales Operations Manager
What the role does, the job description, the interview questions, and the 40-minute screening pack that tells you who can do the job before you book a single interview.
The role
What a Sales Operations Manager does
A Sales Operations Manager sits in the Sales function. The sections below give you the job description, the interview questions and the screening pack for the role.
Screen before you interview
The Sales Operations Manager screening pack
Sales process, CRM, analytics and continuous improvement. Every applicant gets one link. You get one ranked report.
- 1
How do you design territories and quotas that reps believe in?
- 2
Describe a CRM cleanup or process change you led.
- 3
How do you forecast, and how accurate have you been?
- 4
Which sales metrics matter, and which are noise?
- 5
How do you get reps to actually use the process?
Interview questions
Sales Operations Manager interview questions
For the candidates who pass the pack. Each comes with a sample answer on the full page.
Ask these after the screening pack, not instead of it. A candidate who has already scored on B2B Sales Management, Salesforce CRM, Data Analytics in Excel, Process Improvement has shown they can do the work, which frees the interview to do what a test cannot: find out how they think, how they explain themselves, and how they behave when something goes wrong.
- Ask every Sales Operations Manager candidate the same questions in the same order. Comparable answers are the whole point; a different conversation with each person tells you who you liked, not who was strongest.
- Look for a specific example with a result, not a description of how the candidate would approach it in principle. Follow up once with “what happened next?” and stop talking.
- Score each answer before moving to the next question, and write down what was said rather than the impression it left.
- At volume, record the first 4 of these instead of calling. Candidates answer on their own time, the answers are transcribed and scored, and you keep live interviews for the shortlist.
The pack takes a candidate about 40 minutes, so a Sales Operations Manager applicant arrives at this interview already measured on the parts you can measure without a meeting.
- 01
What drew you to sales operations rather than a frontline sales role?
- 02
Tell me about the scope of a sales ops role you have owned.
- 03
How do you define success in sales operations?
- 04
How do you partner with sales leadership without owning a quota yourself?
- 05
How do you administer and optimize a CRM like Salesforce?
- 06
How do you build a forecasting process leadership can trust?
- 07
How do you approach territory and quota planning?
- 08
How do you use analytics to find where the sales process is breaking?
Frequently asked questions
Send every applicant one link that carries 4 skills tests (B2B Sales Management, Salesforce CRM, Data Analytics in Excel, Process Improvement), a personality inventory and 5 one-way video questions. springhire scores everything automatically and ranks the candidates, so you interview the top few. The free plan covers 10 candidates a month.
About 40 minutes for the tests, plus 10 to 15 minutes for the video questions. Candidates complete it on their own time, on any device.
A short brief, key responsibilities, must-have and nice-to-have skills and the requirements. The JD generator writes one for this role in a minute.
Questions that ask for a specific past example and a walkthrough of how the candidate thinks. This page lists 8 with sample answers, and the full bank has more.
Yes. The free plan includes every screening tool with 10 candidate credits a month and no card. Paid plans start at $39 a month.
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