How We Interview Salespeople at Cinch (Steal Our Process)

I'm going to hand you the exact process I use to interview salespeople at Cinch Home Buyers. Not the sanitized HR version — the actual filters, the role-play, and the tests candidates don't know they're taking. I'm publishing it because it doesn't help weak candidates to know it. It only helps the people I actually want to hire.

Why most sales interviews fail

Most sales interviews measure interview skill, not selling skill. Those are different sports.

A polished candidate can rehearse answers to "tell me about yourself" and "what's your biggest weakness" until they gleam. None of that predicts whether they can sit across from a skeptical homeowner and earn trust with real money on the table.

So companies hire the best interviewer in the pool, watch them miss for six months, and conclude "sales hiring is a coin flip." It isn't. They were just grading the wrong exam.

When I built the hiring process for our acquisitions team, I started from one question: what would make someone great at this specific job, and how do I see that behavior — not hear about it — before I hire them?

Everything below is the answer. Steal any of it.

Filter one: did you bother to research us

Before we talk about anything else, I want to know what you did before you walked in.

Did you read our reviews? Look at what we actually do — buy and renovate houses across North Carolina, not list them? Do you know what an acquisitions rep does all day? Can you say one specific thing about us that isn't on the first line of the job post?

This isn't ego. It's a work sample. An acquisitions rep who doesn't prepare before a seller appointment loses the deal to someone who did. A candidate who walks into an interview cold is showing me, live, exactly how they'll walk into appointments.

Fifteen minutes of research clears this bar. Most candidates don't spend it. The ones who do just lapped half the field before saying a word.

Filter two: tell me a deal story with numbers

Every salesperson claims they can sell. I want one specific story, told with specifics.

Pick a real deal. Walk me through the situation: who was the buyer, what did they need, what was at stake. Give me the objection — the real one, the moment it almost died. Tell me exactly what you said and did to close it. Then tell me what you'd do differently now.

Strong candidates answer in numbers and quotes. Deal size, timeline, what the customer literally said, what they said back. Weak candidates answer in adjectives — "I built great rapport and eventually won them over."

The last part matters most: what would you redo? Great reps review their own game film without being asked. If you can't name a single mistake in your best story, you're either not self-aware or not honest, and I can't use either.

Adjectives are what people use when they don't have numbers. Every real deal has numbers.— What I remind myself in every interview

Filter three: the role-play

At some point I'll say: "I'm a homeowner. You're at my kitchen table. I think every house-buying company is a scam, and my neighbor says I should just list with an agent. Go."

I'm not grading whether they know our scripts — they can't yet, and I don't care. I'm watching for the instincts scripts get layered onto.

Do they ask questions before pitching, or start monologuing? Do they acknowledge the skepticism head-on or steamroll it? When I push back hard, do they get defensive, fold, or stay curious? Can they be told "no" and stay warm?

Some candidates freeze here, and honestly, that's fine — nerves aren't disqualifying. What's disqualifying is arguing with the homeowner. If you fight me in a role-play, you'll fight a seller in a living room, and we'll pay for it in reputation.

Filter four: the follow-up is the real test

Here's the part of the process nobody realizes is the process: what happens after the interview ends.

A closer follows up. Not with a form-letter thank-you — with something that moves the ball. A note that references a specific moment from the conversation. An answer to a question they whiffed on. A question they thought of afterward that shows they kept thinking about the role after they left the parking lot.

Think about what this job is. Acquisitions deals are won in the follow-up — sellers rarely sign on the first conversation, and the rep who stays warm and persistent for weeks wins. A candidate who goes silent after the interview is demonstrating their follow-up muscle on the most important deal in their own pipeline: their income.

I've moved candidates from "maybe" to "offer" on the strength of the follow-up alone. I've also let strong interviews die quietly because the silence afterward told me the interview was the performance, not the person.

The word in the application

Our application instructions tell candidates to include a specific word in their submission. That's it. It's written plainly on the role page. If the word is missing, they didn't read the instructions.

You'd be stunned how many applications arrive without the word. Every one of them saved us both an hour.

If you're preparing to apply anywhere — including here — this is the meta-lesson: read everything twice. The application is the first task of the job.

What impresses me

A few things reliably move a candidate up my list.

An honest "I don't know." Candidates think they need an answer for everything. They don't. "I don't know, but here's how I'd find out" is a senior answer. Bluffing is a junior answer, and I can usually smell it.

Questions that interview me back. Where do the leads come from? What did your median rep earn last year, not your best one? What does ramp look like? Those questions tell me the candidate thinks like an operator about their own career. I keep a whole list of questions I respect when candidates ask them — use it on me, use it on everyone.

Evidence of appetite. The candidate who asks what the first 90 days look like is already mentally in the seat. That's the posture I'm hiring.

Specificity about money. Someone who says "I need to earn $X and here's the math on why" is a professional. Sales is a money job. Pretending otherwise impresses no one.

What kills a candidacy

The reverse list, just as honest.

Badmouthing every past employer. One bad boss is a fact of life. If every company you've touched was run by idiots, the common denominator walked into my office.

Vague numbers. "I was one of the top guys" — top what? Out of how many? Measured how? If your own results are fuzzy to you, I can't trust them, and worse, you can't manage yourself by them.

No questions. A salesperson who doesn't probe the biggest deal in their own life — where they'll work — isn't going to probe a seller's real motivation either. Zero questions is a silent withdrawal from consideration.

Trashing the customer in the role-play. If the skeptical homeowner becomes "a difficult person" instead of a person with reasonable doubts, that attitude will leak into every appointment we send you on.

The 48-hour promise

One more piece of the process, and it's a promise we make in the other direction: every application to Cinch gets a reply within 48 hours. Yes or no or next step — but an answer.

I've been on the silent end of a hiring pipeline and I think it's disrespectful, so we don't do it. It also keeps us honest: a company that demands follow-up discipline from candidates should be embarrassed to ghost them.

If this process sounds like a filter, good — it is. We're not trying to maximize applicants; we're trying to find the handful of people who'll thrive in a founder-led shop where the details matter and the ceiling is open. If reading our playbook made you more interested rather than less, that's the signal. That's exactly the person this process was built to find.