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Intro to Customer Interaction Interviews

Solutions architects spend the majority of their time with prospective clients. This means prepping for discovery calls, demoing solutions, and handling objections. Typical interviews don't assess these skills well, so you'll face something unique when interviewing for SA roles - customer interaction interviews.

What Are Customer Interaction Interviews?

Customer interaction interviews can take many forms, but the aim is the same. Interviewers want to see how you'll interact with clients. They do this by roleplaying as customers while you go through a live discovery call or demo.

Customer interaction interviews typically happen during the panel interview. You'll either be given a scenario in advance and asked to provide a solution tailored to the customer (usually in the form of a demo or presentation), or you'll be given a challenge on-the-spot.

If you're given a scenario in advance, your goal will be to present customer-specific solution(s) to the panel.

If you're given a challenge on-the-spot, your goal will be to whiteboard a solution & "pitch" to the interviewer.

Note: In either case, be prepared to do some discovery upfront (investigate requirements & identify customer pain points) and handle objections as they come up.

Sample Interview Questions

Scenario-based questions are usually given in advance and can be very vague or very detailed. Here are some examples.

  • "Demo Snowflake for a banking client in the US."
  • "Demo Salesforce for an ecommerce client who is looking to better secure customer data and guard against malicious actions."
  • "Demo a cloud-based ML/AI analytics solution for a staffing agency looking to source better leads for its clients."

"Day-of" challenges look similar, but more open-ended (as there's nothing to demo!)

Hint: If you're asked for a recommendation, you're expected to go through the discovery process.

For example:

  • "Say you're an SA at Snowflake, meeting a US banking client for the first time."
  • "Imagine you are an SA at Salesforce, and an account executive has set up a meeting with a prospect in the ecommerce business. They have experience with Salesforce, having built multiple SAAS products built through Salesforce's app store, but they are interested in a more integrated solution with better security."
  • "Say you're an SA at AWS meeting with a staffing agency interested in ML/AI solutions to better source job candidates with its clients."

This may sound scary, but it's not meant to be! Over the course of the next few lessons, we'll teach you frameworks for handling discovery, demos, and objection handling, and share some examples.

Let's dive in.

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