Affirm Sales Development Representative (SDR/BDR) Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you had to explain something confusing or complicated to someone who wasn't familiar with it. How did you make it click for them?

2.Describe a time a process or workflow you were part of broke down and nobody could figure out why. How did you go about tracking down what actually went wrong?

3.Tell me about a time you were about to do something — send a message, submit a form, launch something — and you paused because something felt off. What made you stop, and what did you find?

4.Tell me about a time you pushed back on a decision someone more senior than you had already made. How did you raise it, and how did it end?

5.Describe a time you were given a script or a process to follow and realized partway through that it was creating confusion rather than solving it. What did you do?

6.Walk me through a time when you were responsible for a result that depended on handoffs from other people or teams — and something in that chain broke down in a way you hadn't anticipated. How did you handle it?

7.Roughly how many e-commerce merchants in the U.S. do you think could be a realistic fit for Affirm's BNPL product? Walk me through how you'd estimate that.

8.You have 20 minutes before a cold call to a VP of Partnerships at a home furnishings brand. What do you learn, and where do you look?

9.Your manager pulls you into a meeting and says open rates on your email sequences are at 22%, but click-through rates are only 1.2%. The team benchmark is 4.5%. What's your hypothesis about what's wrong, and how would you test it?

10.Affirm is launching outbound efforts into a new vertical — specialty pet supply — that your team has never worked before. You have two weeks and a list of 150 prospects. How do you get smart on the vertical fast enough to make your outreach credible?

11.Affirm's average loan size for its pay-over-time product is roughly $750. If you were told that a specific merchant segment is generating loans averaging only $180, and leadership wants to understand whether that's a problem, how would you think through it?

12.You're reviewing your last 30 days of outreach and you notice that your meeting show rate — prospects who actually attend after booking — is only 45%, while a peer on your team is consistently at 75%. Walk me through how you'd figure out why and what you'd do about it.

13.If a merchant prospect asks you why they should offer Affirm instead of just letting customers use a credit card, what would you say?

14.You're given a list of 200 cold prospects and told to book 10 meetings in two weeks. Walk me through how you'd prioritize the list and structure your outreach.

15.You're prospecting for Affirm and you find a mid-size outdoor gear retailer — solid e-commerce presence, no BNPL partner listed on their checkout page. What do you learn before your first outreach, and what's your opening message?

16.You've sent three rounds of outreach to a VP of E-commerce — email, LinkedIn, a voicemail — and heard nothing. At what point do you stop, and how do you decide?

17.A merchant you've been prospecting for six weeks finally books a demo, but during discovery you learn they primarily sell low-cost consumables with an average order value under $30. How do you handle the rest of that call?

18.You're consistently booking your meeting quota, but your AE tells you that only 1 in 8 of your meetings are converting to opportunities — well below the team average of 1 in 4. What do you investigate first, and what would you change?

19.A prospect you've been chasing responds to your email, but their first question is 'Do you guys charge hidden fees?' How do you answer that live, on the spot?

20.You just finished a great discovery call with a promising merchant, and they end it by saying, 'Send me some info and I'll share it with my team.' What do you do next?

21.You're mid-sequence on 30 merchant prospects when your manager tells you the team is pivoting focus to a new vertical — fashion — for the next quarter. Half your current list doesn't fit that vertical. What do you do with your pipeline right now?

22.You call a merchant prospect and they say, 'We already tried BNPL with Afterpay two years ago and it was a nightmare — our return rate shot up and we lost money on it.' How do you handle the rest of that call?

23.Your AE tells you she's close to closing a large enterprise merchant — think a national furniture retailer — and asks you to help warm up three additional stakeholders at the account before the contract review next Friday. You've never met any of them. What's your plan for the next five days?

24.You're doing outbound for Affirm's card and BNPL products, and you notice that a sequence your whole team is using has a claim in it that's technically accurate but feels misleading to you — it says merchants see '85% higher AOV' without mentioning the context behind that stat. Nobody else seems bothered. Do you say something, and if so, how?

25.Think about a time you needed someone's help to hit a deadline — a teammate, a manager, anyone — and they were slower to respond than you needed. What did you do?

26.Tell me about a time you had to represent a position you personally agreed with, but the person you were talking to clearly didn't — and they pushed back hard. How did you hold your ground?

27.Describe a time you were working toward a shared goal with someone whose priorities clearly didn't fully overlap with yours. How did you find enough alignment to actually move forward?

28.Tell me about a time you were the person in a room — or on a call — with the least experience, and you still had a perspective you thought mattered. Did you share it, and how?

29.You've been running the same outreach sequence for a merchant segment, and your manager tells you it's performing fine — but you've been on enough calls to suspect the messaging is landing wrong with a specific buyer type. How do you make that case internally?

30.A merchant you've been working to qualify seems like a genuinely bad fit for Affirm's products — wrong AOV, wrong customer profile — but your AE is excited about the logo and wants you to keep pushing. How do you handle that?