Interview Questions to Hire Aviation Account Manager

Your candidates will be responsible for creating and maintaining relationships with important clients for a long time. Since this role requires them to be strategic, as a hiring manager or a recruiter, you need to keep an eye out for candidates with working experience as account managers or national account managers. Basically, they must be used to being the face of the company.

As a key account manager, your candidates need to communicate strategically with clients daily. Hence, you need to evaluate their communication and negotiation skills. Candidates who can give what the client needs and promote the company are thus ideal.

Additionally, look for candidates that show interest in sales and market trends.

Take a look at the skill sets and behavioral questions to see how your candidates solve conflicts and build relationships.

Questions To Gauge Their Skill Sets

• What strategy would you use when an important client who has been with our company for a long time decided to end our business relationship?
• You're about to seal the deal with a major client, but we’ll lose our current smaller client who is a competitor to the potential new client. What would you do in this situation?
• How do you turn customer complaints into an opportunity?
• If you need to increase revenue by a certain percentage in a year, where do you turn to for new sales opportunities within the industry?
• What CRM software have you used before?
• Have you ever upsold a client? What strategies did you take?

Behavioral Questions

• What do you do in a situation where you disappointed a client?
• How do you build a strong relationship with key clients?
• When communicating with key clients, do you prefer in-person, phone calls, or email? Why?
• What information do you need to have before contacting potential clients? How would you approach them?
• How would you react when a potential client says they aren’t interested during a cold call?
• From your experience, at what point do you think it’s no longer worth pursuing a potential client?

Conclusion

Account managers are responsible for nurturing business relationships with the company's important clients. As the hiring manager, you need to look for candidates that know how to create and nurture long-term relationships strategically. At the same time, your candidates know how to mitigate any problems along the way.

While interviewing the candidates for the role, those who show effort, commitment, and determination, are able to build rapport with important clients, and thus are the best candidates.

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