LinkedIn Sales Development Representative (SDR/BDR) Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you realized an outreach approach you were using wasn't actually helping the people you were trying to reach. What did you do about it?

2.Describe a time you had to win over someone who really didn't want to engage with you — a gatekeeper, a skeptical professor, a tough customer. How did you get them to open up?

3.Tell me about a time someone gave you critical feedback on how you communicate — in a pitch, an email, a presentation. What did you do with it?

4.Tell me about a time you held yourself to a higher standard than what was asked of you — in a job, a class project, or a volunteer role. What drove you to do more?

5.Tell me about a time you tried something unconventional to get a result — a different pitch, a new channel, an unusual angle — and it didn't work. What did you learn and what would you do differently?

6.Tell me about a time you spotted a problem that wasn't technically yours to fix — in a process, on a team, in a workflow — and you took it on anyway. What happened?

7.LinkedIn has roughly 1 billion members. If you had to estimate how many of them are realistic prospects for Sales Navigator, how would you think through that?

8.You're assigned a list of 50 companies to prospect for LinkedIn Recruiter. You have one hour before your manager wants to review your outreach plan. How do you spend that hour?

9.A mid-market company you're prospecting has 500 employees, is growing headcount 20% year-over-year, and their HR team is three people. How do you estimate whether they're a realistic candidate for LinkedIn Recruiter — and at what tier?

10.You're told that LinkedIn's average Sales Navigator deal for a small team license closes in 45 days and requires four touchpoints before a prospect responds. You have 30 days left in the quarter. What does that tell you about what you should be doing right now — and what's already too late?

11.LinkedIn is about to launch a new feature in Sales Navigator aimed at helping reps find buying committees, not just individual contacts. Your manager wants you to build a target list of 30 accounts to pilot outreach for this feature. What criteria do you use — and how do you know if your list is good?

12.You've been selling Sales Navigator for three months. Your reply rates are solid, but your meeting-to-opportunity conversion — the rate at which your booked meetings turn into real pipeline for your AE — is well below team average. Your manager gives you the data and asks you to diagnose it. Where do you start?

13.Walk me through the key metrics you'd track week-over-week as an SDR. What numbers tell you your pipeline is healthy?

14.You're prospecting into a company and you have five minutes on their LinkedIn company page and Sales Navigator. What are you looking for before you write your first outreach?

15.You've been tasked with booking 10 qualified meetings in a month. Three weeks in, you've booked four. What do you do?

16.A prospect responds to your outreach saying, 'We already use LinkedIn Recruiter and we're not looking at anything else right now.' You're selling Sales Navigator to their VP of Sales. How do you respond?

17.You've been given a territory of 200 accounts and told to prioritize 20 for outreach this month. Walk me through exactly how you'd build that list.

18.Your sequence has a 2% reply rate across 500 touches over the last three weeks. Your colleague running a similar territory has an 8% reply rate. How do you figure out what's different and what do you change?

19.A prospect picks up your cold call, listens for 20 seconds, and says, 'I'm not interested — take me off your list.' How do you handle the next 30 seconds of that call?

20.You're on a discovery call with a prospect and they ask you a product question you genuinely don't know the answer to. How do you handle it in the moment?

21.Your manager asks you to push a batch of outreach to a list of HR leaders this week, but you notice the list includes several contacts you've already reached out to twice with no response in the last 30 days. Do you send it as-is, flag it, or do something else?

22.You book a discovery call with a VP of Sales at a mid-market company. The morning of the call, you do a quick LinkedIn search and find that she posted 48 hours ago about laying off 20% of her sales team. The call is in two hours. What do you do?

23.You've been working a deal for six weeks — multiple touches, a great discovery call, strong intent signals on Sales Navigator. Your AE asks you to hand it off because it's leaving your segment. The new AE wants to restart the entire qualification process from scratch and re-engage the prospect directly. What do you do?

24.Your manager tells you that starting next month, your quota is going up 25% but your territory isn't changing. You think the increase isn't achievable given current market conditions in your segment. How do you handle that conversation?

25.Tell me about a time you needed someone's help to get something done, but they had no real reason to prioritize you. How did you get them on board?

26.Have you ever been caught in the middle of two people who disagreed — a manager, a teammate, a professor — and you had to figure out how to move forward without picking a side? What did you do?

27.Imagine your AE tells you to stop prospecting into a specific vertical because a big deal in that space just fell through and she doesn't want more pipeline there right now. But your manager is still holding you to quota. How do you handle that conversation — with the AE, with your manager, or both?

28.You book a meeting for your AE with a director-level prospect. The AE comes out of the call and tells you it was a waste of her time — wrong level, wrong pain, unqualified. You listened to the recording and you think the call actually had strong signals. How do you handle that conversation with your AE?

29.Your manager wants you to co-present your prospecting strategy to the broader sales team next month. You've never done this before and you're the most junior person in the room. How do you prepare, and how do you establish credibility with a room full of senior AEs?

30.A marketing team sends you a new campaign sequence to run and tells you it's been approved by leadership. You test it for a week and the data is clear — it's performing worse than what you were doing before. Marketing is proud of it and your manager seems neutral. What do you do?