Inspiration from Sales
The strongest candidates I have coached never memorized answers. They walked in already talking like they worked there. A client would sit across from a hiring manager and, instead of reciting the rehearsed version of her own résumé, ask something specific about the business, proof she had already spent an hour on their problem before anyone paid her to. The room changed. The conversation stopped being an evaluation and started being a discussion between two people who both had something to lose.
That is exactly the mechanism Vijeth From Saaspire from Saaspire names in Two Things That Get People Hired Into Tech Sales. His subject is narrower than mine. Mine is broader than his. Both of us are describing the same thing.
His Argument, Compressed
Vijeth is writing about the SDR interview. SDR stands for Sales Development Representative, the entry level seller who finds prospects and books first meetings for a more senior closer. His claim is that an SDR interview is not a test about sales. It is a sales call, and the candidate is the product being sold. As he puts it, the hiring manager is quietly asking one question the whole time: “if I put this person on a call with a prospect tomorrow, would I be embarrassed.”
Two habits answer that question, he argues, better than any rehearsed line. The first is treating your research like an audition, four plain facts about the company: what it sells, who buys it, what is currently happening there, and who will be sitting across the table. The second is asking for the next step out loud instead of signing off with a version of thanks so much, hope to hear from you. Not asking, he writes, is simply “a quiet no.”
He is right about all of it, and he is right for a reason that has nothing to do with sales.
Where He Is Right, and the One Thing I Would Add
Both habits work because they are demonstrations, not declarations. The candidate who asks a sharp question about the buyer has not claimed to be good at research. She has just been good at it, in front of the one person whose opinion currently matters. Vijeth’s own example line makes the point: “From what I’ve read, it looks like your main buyers are operations leads at mid-market logistics companies. Is that right? And what’s the objection your SDRs hear most from them?” That is not a pitch. It states an observation and invites correction, which is harder than confidence, and almost nobody trains for it directly.
The one thing I would add is this. Those two habits are not interview skills. They are the same two habits that get you promoted, staffed on the good project, and trusted with the relationship nobody wants to hand to someone unproven. The interview is just the first place the stakes are high enough that people finally perform the version of themselves they could have been showing all along.
Which means the useful question is not how do I interview better. It is why did it take an interview to make me do this.
What a Career Adds
Every meeting you sit in during your working life runs the same evaluation Vijeth describes, whether or not anyone calls it one. The client call where you bring three specific facts about their business, or generic enthusiasm. The cross functional ask where you state what you believe is true about the other team’s constraint and invite correction, or ask them to explain their whole world from zero. The promotion conversation where you name the next step you want and the date you want a decision by, or say something that sounds like patience and functions like invisibility.
The audition never ends. It just stops being labeled one.
So basically, the reason Vijeth’s two habits work so well for interviews is that they are the two habits that build a career, and the interview is just the one moment where the absence of them gets punished immediately and visibly. Everywhere else, the absence of them gets punished slowly, in the form of being the person nobody thought to ask.
The Frame
Run this through the three stages that we at RISEUP@work prefer to use (vs. term s like early or mid or late career), and the pattern holds at every one, though the application shifts.
In the Launch Stage, roughly your first 4 years in college and 2 years at work, research as audition looks like showing up to a kickoff already knowing the client’s last two quarters, because you decided to be the person who already did the reading. Asking for the next step feels hardest here, because you have the least standing to ask for anything. Ask anyway. A twenty three year old who says what happens next and by when reads as someone worth developing, not someone overreaching.
In the Foundation Stage, the decade after that, research shifts from proving you did the reading to proving you understand the business behind the business. The next step habit shifts from asking about your own advancement to asking on behalf of the work, when do we decide, who else needs to weigh in. That version signals ownership rather than ambition.
In the Dividend Stage, both habits become what you teach rather than only what you do. Research becomes the question you ask a junior colleague before a room, did you find the one thing that would surprise them. The next step habit becomes making sure nobody on your team leaves a meeting without saying what happens next.
The Move This Week
Pick one recurring meeting on your calendar. Before it, spend four minutes finding one specific fact about the other side that you did not know last time. Before it ends, say out loud what you believe happens next and ask the other person to confirm or correct you.
Do this once and it will feel like effort. Do it for three weeks and it will feel like who you are.
The Close
I want to thank Vijeth directly, because what he wrote about a twenty minute conversation with a hiring manager is really a compressed argument about an entire working life, and I do not think he set out to write that. The best pieces rarely announce how far their logic travels. His did. I just followed it further than the interview room.
The role you are being interviewed for is rentable. Whoever hires you can let you go, reorganize you, replace you. The two habits Vijeth named are not. Research as audition and asking for the next step out loud are yours, and they compound every time you use them, whether or not anyone is deciding whether to hire you that day.
Dr. Deepak Bhootra spent 34 years in leadership roles and 14 years as an ICF certified coach, touching the lives of 1,500 people. Those learnings led him to found RISEUP@work, a career operating system that accompanies professionals throughout the full arc of their working lives, organized into three stages, Launch, Foundation, and Dividend. RISEUP@work is raising capital now, with a minimum investment of $100 to keep participation broad. Invest at wefunder.com/riseupatwork.