Google Sales Development Representative (SDR/BDR) Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you were given a goal but almost no direction on how to hit it. What did you do first, and how did it turn out?

2.You're three weeks into a new SDR role and your outreach numbers are healthy, but your meeting-to-show rate is terrible — prospects book but don't show. How would you diagnose what's going wrong?

3.Imagine you're asked to prospect into an industry you've never sold into before — say, logistics or biotech. Walk me through exactly how you'd get up to speed and build your first outreach list.

4.Tell me about the most effective cold outreach sequence you've ever built or used. What made it work, and how did you know it was working?

5.Tell me about a time you noticed something wasn't working on your team — a process, a message, a tool — and you changed it even though it wasn't your job to.

6.Tell me about a time you were given a quota or target that seemed unrealistic at the time. How did you react, and what actually happened?

7.A Google Workspace customer you've been nurturing for three months just told you they're going with a competitor. Your AE wants to know what happened. How do you reconstruct the story?

8.Roughly how many active small businesses are there in the U.S. that could be Google Workspace prospects? Walk me through how you'd estimate it.

9.You're prospecting into a segment of mid-market companies for Google Cloud. You send 100 outreach emails. Twenty are opened, four reply, and one books a meeting. If your quota is 15 meetings per month, what does your activity model need to look like, and where's your biggest lever to improve it?

10.Google is launching a push to move a new vertical — say, professional services firms like accounting or law practices — onto Google Workspace. You're the first SDR assigned to this segment. How do you figure out what messaging to lead with?

11.Google Cloud's average deal size for new mid-market logos is $80,000 per year. As an SDR, your pipeline contribution target is $1.2M in qualified pipeline per quarter. If you're running a 45-day average lead-to-opportunity cycle, how do you structure your month to consistently hit that number?

12.Imagine Google just announced a significant price increase for Google Workspace Business Starter — the tier most of your SMB prospects are considering. You've got 40 active outreach sequences in flight and no new guidance from marketing yet. What do you do today?

13.Walk me through the math behind a basic SDR pipeline. If your quota is 10 qualified meetings a month and your cold-to-meeting conversion rate is 5%, how many outreach touchpoints are you making each day?

14.A prospect at a mid-market company clicks a Google Ads link and ends up in your CRM as an inbound lead. How do you qualify whether this is worth handing to an Account Executive?

15.You have 200 accounts in your territory and time to actively work about 30 per week. How do you decide which ones to prioritize?

16.You've sent a 5-step email sequence to 50 Google Cloud prospects and your open rate is 40% but your reply rate is under 2%. What's your diagnosis, and what do you change first?

17.A competitor is actively telling your Google Workspace prospects that Google doesn't offer adequate enterprise security controls. You're an SDR — you don't own the full deal — but this objection is killing your meeting conversion. How do you handle it?

18.Your manager tells you that starting next quarter, your team is switching from measuring SDR success by meetings booked to measuring it by pipeline dollars created — meaning you're now accountable for the quality of what you pass, not just the volume. How does your day-to-day actually change?

19.You get a referral from an existing Google Workspace customer — they say their colleague at another company is looking for a cloud solution. The colleague picks up your call but immediately says, 'I only have two minutes.' What do you say?

20.You've just booked a meeting for an Account Executive with a director-level prospect at a mid-size retailer interested in Google Cloud. An hour before the meeting, the AE messages you saying they're double-booked and asks you to reschedule. The prospect took two weeks to confirm this slot. What do you do?

21.Your manager gives you a list of 50 accounts to work this quarter — all in the healthcare sector, and Google has very few existing logos there. You notice that about 15 of the accounts are health systems that are publicly locked into multi-year contracts with a Google Cloud competitor. How do you approach the list?

22.You're running outreach to a list of small business owners for Google Workspace. You've been using a personalized email sequence that's getting a 30% open rate. A teammate shows you their templated, lower-effort sequence and says it's booking twice as many meetings as yours. How do you respond to that information?

23.You're six weeks into your SDR role at Google and an AE pulls you aside to say they've been losing deals that started as your leads — apparently prospects arrive at discovery calls with wrong expectations about pricing. The AE is frustrated. You review your outreach and realize you never mentioned pricing at all. What do you do?

24.You reach a VP of IT at a mid-market company who's a perfect Google Workspace target. She says, 'We just renewed Microsoft 365 for three years. Call me back in 2029.' You have five seconds to decide whether to let her go or keep her engaged. What do you do in this call, and what's your plan for the next three years?

25.Tell me about a time you had to get someone who wasn't your boss — a teammate, a classmate, a coworker — to do something they weren't excited about doing. How did you get them on board?

26.Tell me about a time you had to deliver information to someone — a manager, a professor, a customer — that they didn't want to hear. How did you handle it?

27.You've booked a meeting between an AE and a prospect, but when you debrief with the AE afterward, they tell you the prospect wasn't actually a fit — wrong budget, wrong timeline. The AE is annoyed. Marketing is counting the meeting as a win. How do you navigate that?

28.Your manager loves a particular outreach script they wrote — they mention it in every team meeting. You've tested it on 40 prospects and your data says it's underperforming by about 30% compared to a version you wrote yourself. How do you handle that conversation with your manager?

29.Imagine you're an SDR covering Google Cloud, and a senior solutions engineer — someone with 10 years of experience who technically outranks you — tells you to stop including a specific ROI claim in your outreach because they think it's misleading. Your manager hasn't weighed in. What do you do?

30.You're an SDR and you find out through a slack message that the marketing team is about to launch a Google Workspace campaign targeting the exact segment you've been cold-calling for six weeks — but the messaging is completely different from yours, and it's going to hit your prospects the day before you send your next sequence. You weren't in the loop. What do you do?