Just got a email from an Amazon recruiter that said I moved past to the phone screening stage. Anyone have any tips for this? I’m going to do my due diligence and research on my own, but always welcome outside advice. Thank you!
Which AWS offices do Inside Sales Rep work at?
AWS Inside Sales Reps are mainly in HQ1, Seattle and HQ2, Washington DC. However, everyone is currently working from home.
How many years of experience do you need for this role?
For someone coming in as an L4 Account Manager, you should have at least two years full sales cycle experience.
For someone coming in as an L5 Account Manager, you should have at least seven years full sales cycle experience.
For someone coming in as an L6 Account Manager, you should have at least twelve years full sales cycle experience.
Ideally, the prior sales experience is in SaaS or Technology sales.
Tell me about a time you were 75 percent through a project and had to pivot quickly. How did you handle it?
Life happens when we are in the middle of projects, and Amazon leadership will want to know how you handle these types of situations when they occur. You could encounter this question for many different types of roles, including technical and management positions. Your answer should speak to your agility, leadership, and problem-solving skills:
At my last job, I was leading a project that was near completion. Everything was moving smoothly and on-target for timely completion. Then, one of our partners providing one of the software upgrades that were to occur at the 90 percent mark encountered a breach of their systems and was estimated to delay the project by two to four weeks.
I had to review our plans and come up with options to keep the project on target as much as possible. Going with another software provider wasnt a viable option, as the groundwork had been laid to go live with the current provider, and starting over would have delayed the project even more. Instead, we were able to allocate two resources to support the provider in recovering from the breach in less than half of the time that was projected.
As a result, we were able to complete the project only two days after the originally scheduled completion date. Fortunately, since we had built in a cushion for contingencies, we were able to go live on schedule.
What are Inside Sales Reps known as at AWS?
Inside Sales Reps are known as Account Managers or Account Executives externally. This is what you’ll see on job boards and LinkedIn. Look for keywords in the job posting to distinguish between a field sales and inside sales role as they are both known as Account Managers and Account Executives.
Inside Sales Reps at AWS are overlay sales reps and their main responsibility is to go after lower priority accounts in the territory or different lines of business at a priority account.
Can you choose what account size you will sell into?
After you get an offer, yes, as your recruiter will ask ideally how many accounts you’d want, and then they match you to a team that fits your criteria. So if you want enterprise accounts, tell your recruiter that you want ideally less than 20 accounts, and your odds of getting an enterprise account patch go up. If you want greenfield accounts, tell your recruiter you want hundreds or thousands of accounts.