Amazon Sales Development Representative (SDR/BDR) Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a prospect or customer who had a frustrating experience and came to you upset. What did you do, and how did it end?

2.Tell me about a repetitive or time-consuming task in a previous role that you made faster or easier. What was the old way, what did you change, and what happened?

3.Walk me through a time you saw something going wrong at work — outside your direct job — and decided to fix it anyway. What was the situation and what did you do?

4.Describe a time you had to decide whether to pursue a prospect or opportunity when you didn't have all the information you needed. What did you decide and how did it turn out?

5.Tell me about a time you realized your outreach approach, pitch, or prospecting strategy wasn't working — how did you figure that out, and what did you change?

6.Tell me about a time you helped a coworker or newer teammate get better at something — what did you teach them, how did you do it, and what changed for them?

7.You have 100 AWS prospect accounts and only time to call 20 today. How do you decide which 20?

8.Amazon Business is targeting companies with 500–5,000 employees. Roughly how many businesses like that exist in the US, and what does that tell you about the size of the opportunity?

9.Your open rate on AWS prospecting emails suddenly drops from 22% to 10% over two weeks — nothing obvious changed. How do you figure out what happened?

10.You're building a prospecting list for AWS and you find a company that looks like a great fit on paper — right size, right industry — but their LinkedIn shows they've been hiring aggressively for on-premise data center roles for the past six months. How do you factor that into your decision to reach out?

11.You've been given a quota of 30 sales-qualified leads per quarter for AWS. It's week 10 of 13 and you have 18 SQLs. How do you evaluate whether you can hit the number, and what do you actually do?

12.Imagine AWS launches a new service specifically for small manufacturers — strong product, real use case, but the SDR team has zero experience in that vertical. How would you build the knowledge you need to start effective outreach within a week, and what does 'effective' actually mean to you in week one?

13.If you're prospecting into AWS cloud buyers, how do you figure out which companies to prioritize — what signals tell you a company is actually ready to buy?

14.Walk me through what a good cold email to a VP of Infrastructure looks like — what has to be in it, and what do most SDRs get wrong?

15.You've been making 40 dials a day but your connect rate is 4% and your meeting-set rate is 25% of connects. What levers would you pull first to get more meetings booked, and how would you know if it's working?

16.You've been assigned a territory of mid-market companies that could buy AWS or Amazon Business. You have no previous rep's notes, no existing pipeline, and 30 days to show activity. How do you build your account list and prioritize where to start?

17.You've been running a three-touch email sequence to 150 AWS prospects for two weeks — 18% open rate, 2% reply rate, zero meetings booked. A colleague running the same sequence is booking 4 meetings a week. What's broken in your approach, and how do you figure out which part to fix first?

18.Your manager asks you to forecast how many sales-qualified leads you'll hand off to AEs next quarter. You have 8 weeks of your own activity data. Walk me through how you'd build that number.

19.You just booked a meeting with a VP at a mid-market company for an AWS demo next Tuesday. The morning of the call, you find out the company announced layoffs yesterday. Do you keep the meeting or reschedule — and what do you do in the next two hours?

20.You're prospecting into a list of 50 accounts for Amazon Business and you get a reply from a procurement manager who says, 'We already use Amazon.com — what's the difference?' How do you respond, and what's your goal in that exchange?

21.You're halfway through a quarter and your meeting-set numbers are on track, but your manager tells you that the AEs are saying your leads are low quality — deals are stalling after the first call. What do you do with that feedback, and where do you start?

22.A prospect you've been nurturing for six weeks finally agrees to a meeting — but they want it with the CEO of their company present, two AWS solutions architects, and your VP of Sales on the same call next Friday. You've never coordinated something like this. Walk me through how you make it happen.

23.Your manager wants you to start calling a new list of 200 accounts in a vertical you've never prospected before — healthcare companies evaluating cloud compliance solutions. You have two days before you're expected to start making calls. How do you get ready, and what does 'ready' actually mean to you?

24.You've been told by your manager that a large enterprise account in your territory has been a bad-fit customer — they've complained multiple times, required excessive support, and churned from AWS last year. A different contact at that company just responded to your outreach asking for a conversation. Do you take the meeting?

25.Tell me about a time you needed help or information from someone who wasn't your manager and wasn't required to help you. How did you get them on board?

26.Tell me about a time a teammate or someone you worked with closely disagreed with how you were handling something. How did you work through it?

27.You book a meeting for an AE with a prospect, and the AE comes back to you after the call and says it wasn't a good fit — but you're pretty sure the AE dismissed it too fast. What do you do?

28.Imagine you're trying to get a piece of marketing content or a campaign asset built to support your outreach, but the marketing team says it's not on their roadmap for six weeks. You need it in two. How do you handle that?

29.You're six weeks into the role and you notice that the AEs on your team are consistently updating the CRM incorrectly in a way that's making your lead handoff reports look inaccurate. You didn't build the process, and no one asked you to fix it. What do you do?

30.A prospect you've been nurturing has finally agreed to a meeting, but right before you loop in the AE, the prospect says they've had a bad experience with Amazon before and they're skeptical. The AE doesn't know this yet. What do you do with that information before the handoff?