12 Things Top GTM Interviewers Are Doing In 2026 To Land Offers

00:00 - Cold Open: The Highest-Leverage Interview Habits, Previewed
01:31 - Welcome + Why Chris Brought a Second Voice on a "Solo" Episode
02:22 - The Premise: 12 Things Top Interviewers Do and Avoid to Land Offers in 2026
04:06 - Who Is Matt Roberts: Bartending in Santa Barbara to Crew's First Hire
09:54 - #1 Respond Back Fast: Why Speed Is the Number One Tell
14:07 - #2 Send the Thank-You: The Lost Art and How to Write One That Lands
16:23 - #3 Bring the Right Energy: The Developer-Sales Advice That Backfired
21:21 - #4 Show That You Want It: Telling a Company They're Your Number One
24:41 - #5 "Tell Me About Yourself" in 90 Seconds or Less
28:00 - #6 Be Structured: The Consulting Trick That Makes You Sound Sharper
30:07 - #7 Stack the Cards in Your Favor: Make the Case Study Easy Mode
32:35 - #8 Do the Job Before You Have the Job: Prospect and Multi-Thread the Loop
36:54 - #9 Optimize for Curiosity, Not for Proving You're Smart
42:14 - #10 Negotiate, But Don't Over-Negotiate: How Offers Get Pulled at the Finish Line
47:20 - #11 Don't Bash Companies: What It Signals About Your Resilience
49:33 - #12 Use Multiple Offers as Leverage Without Playing Hard to Get
52:48 - Wrap: Weekly Episodes, the GTM Tweet Format, and Padel in SF + NYC

They'll judge you if you're slow to respond - they’ll think: how you interview is how you sell.

This one still blows my mind. We'll intro a genuinely good AE to a hiring manager, and they'll send over their availability 36 hours later.

The hiring manager will judge: how you do anything is how you do everything.

And unlike dating, you cannot come off too eager here. Responding within the hour reads as "this person is on top of their stuff," not desperate.

A hack - schedule the send an hour out (Superhuman and Gmail both do this) - but absolutely make sure you’re doing this within 24 hours.

Control the controllables, and this one is easy.

I ask VPs of Sales on the pod how many candidates send these. The answer keeps coming back around 10%. How is this a lost art?

There are levels to it. Not sending one is bad. A generic "thanks for your time" is fine. The right version is 3-4 sentences (in total) email that reference something specific from the conversation and tie it to your why:

❝ Really enjoyed our conversation today. When you talked about the sales culture you're building, it reminded me of what we had at [old company], and it's exactly what I want in my next chapter. Looking forward to next steps - hope you have a great week. ❝

Send it the same day (see point 1). 3pm interview, thank you by that night. And you're recording your calls anyway (Granola makes this a no-brainer), so pulling the specific moment takes 30 seconds.

Remember, interview like you sell - if you don't send these, they'll assume you don't send customer follow-ups either.

In the 2025 version, this was "bring high energy." Let me update it with a story about bad advice.

When I was trying to break into dev tool sales, people in that world told me: "You're a high energy guy. Tone it down - developers hate theatrical/energetic salespeople."

So I did. I interviewed flat at a couple of dev tool companies, didn't get the offers, and the feedback was... your energy was too low.

Safe to say I was pissed and felt misled, but here was my learning:

The rule: match the energy of the person across from you. Low energy technical founder, meet them there. High energy CRO, bring it. Just match it.

You need to make everyone feel like the prettiest girl at the dance.

I learned this the hard way interviewing many rounds @ Bain. I was constantly told that I needed to tell people how they were my #1.

To me, this came off desperate - but I learned that people want to know you want it/them and you should make that known as the interview progresses. This translated to tech/startups as well (thank god I got out of consulting and back into startups, but that’s a story for another day that I told here).

The margin of error at those places is razor thin, and "we weren't sure he fully wanted it" is a real reason people get dinged.

Don't be overly eager on call one. But once you've earned the right and it's true, put a couple cards on the table: "I'm interviewing elsewhere, but you guys are my number one, and this would be huge for my career."

Send a good "why" email at the end saying you'd be inclined to accept if given the opportunity.

Companies are making a bet - make it easy for them to believe you'll say yes.

We've gotten Slack pings from hiring teams that say some version of: "this guy talked for 27 of the 30 minutes."

Even if that's hyperbole, the read is the same - lacks executive presence, can't read the room, and will monologue through discovery calls.

The interview is a preview of how you'll run a disco call.

When they ask “tell me about yourself", keep it to 90 seconds, 2 minutes max, with a tie into why this company specifically. Then have a question ready and let them talk.

You could interview at 100 companies and this pitch barely changes, so there's no excuse for winging it.

Feed your background into Claude and ask for a punchy 2-minute version, then rep it until it's automatic.

As a former consultant, here's the hack: people love structured thinkers.

Your intelligence will be overweighted (in your benefit) if you can check this box early in a convo.

Answer first, then reasons, then tie it up. "Why do you want to join us? Three reasons come to mind: A, B, and C." A couple sentences on each, then close the loop.

Structure signals smart thinking, and interviewers will overweight your intelligence because of it.

Stripe heavily indexed on this back in the day, and the cerebral AI-natives hiring for the seller/builder profile still do.

Matt's note: almost nobody does this at the SDR/BDR level, which makes it an even cheaper way to separate yourself early in your career.

When you get a vague prompt for a mock pitch or presentation round (it's vague on purpose), your brain should go to one place: what's the easiest version of this? how do I stack the deck in my favor?

Pick their most common ICP. If they sell to software companies, your mock prospect is a software company. Don't reach for some obscure vertical hoping they'll think "wow, unique insight." Nobody cares, and if it doesn't land, they won’t be able to distinguish if you’re bad at sales, didn’t prepare, or can’t communicate well generally.

Make up hypothetical things "they told you" in call one that set up your pitch, and come in with the back-of-the-napkin ROI already built: "$10M of revenue lift, and the product costs $100K."

Interviewing is hard enough - stack the deck.

This one is Matt's, and it's most obvious for SDR/BDR roles: the interview process is a live audition for prospecting, so prospect.

Research the company and the interviewer. Send a cold email. Hit them on LinkedIn. Some candidates cold call the hiring manager or send a coffee gift card before the first call even happens. You're literally demonstrating the job.

The advanced version: multithread it like a deal. Jack Gashi (VP sales @ Avoca, more on their growth here) told us on the podcast about a candidate whose own future teammates started lobbying him with "you need to hire this person." The candidate had talked to 6 or 7 reps on the team, their questions got sharper with every conversation, and they built internal champions who closed the deal for them. Matt still remembers candidates who did this 6-7 years later.

And qualify early, like Liam Mulcahy says in the podcast we did with him: call out the gaps in your background before they do.

"If I were you, I might want the Snowflake rep with 5 years of dev tool experience. I don't have that - here's how I close the gap.”

They’ll appreciate you doing the job before you have the job.

Especially early in your career, coachability is the #1 thing sales leaders screen for - and flexing kills it. Leading with your numbers and domain expertise is more off-putting than you'd think when what they actually want is someone hungry to get 1% better every day.

The problem is "be more curious" is squishy feedback. Nobody thinks they're not curious, the same way nobody in sales thinks they're not technical. So I asked Todd Busler, Enterprise Sales Leader @ Clay how you actually demonstrate it. Two hacks:

Ask questions with friction in them. "With this new model release, I'd worry it cannibalizes part of your business - how are you getting ahead of that, and where am I wrong?" Provocative plus researched equals respected.

Go multiple layers deep. They mention a big deal just closed? Tell me more about it. How'd you source it? Who was in the eval? Same lane, one layer deeper each time. It's discovery 101, and it reads as genuine curiosity.

Bonus: this is also just how you make people like you. The person asking questions and actually listening always beats the one talking about themselves.

We have watched offers get pulled over someone over-negotiating. Some tips:

Ask once. Pick the levers that actually matter to you, see what moves, and land the plane. Going back and forth 4, 5, 6 times doesn't make you a killer - it makes the hiring manager think "this is how he's going to negotiate with our customers," and now you're starting the job with a team that's half-annoyed you're there.

Anchor on the one thing you actually want. At Series A/B, the smart candidates anchor on equity - some deliberately trade OTE for it, knowing a lower number means hitting accelerators faster.

And remember: you can win the negotiation and lose the war. The best execs I've ever reported to got great deals from me, and I somehow walked away feeling good about it. That’s the S-Tier.

When we tell a candidate "you're entering over-negotiating territory," remember our incentives - we want you to get the best offer possible. There’s definitely a goldilocks zone here.

Vent to us all you want. Behind closed doors, that's part of what a recruiter in your corner is for, and it helps us position you. But never do it in the interview.

Here's why it never works, even when you're right: some people genuinely got oversold a role and never had a chance. Others were just bad employees. Both come out of it bashing the company, and the hiring manager has zero context to figure out which one you are. The burden of proof lands on you, and you can't meet it without being weird about it.

It also reads as low resilience. Sales is hard everywhere - if the story is that you're great in good times and miserable in tough ones, that's the preview they'll assume.

Earlier in my career, I thought the move was telling each company they were the only one I was talking to. I was wrong.

You want multiple companies pursuing you. It creates urgency, it creates leverage, and it makes you more desirable. That's just how humans work.

But pair it with #4 above - as things progress, tell your actual number one exactly that. Leverage and clarity are not in conflict.

And if an offer lands while other processes are mid-flight, there's a good sweet spot: "this is a big decision, I want to be thoughtful, and I'll have an answer by Friday." Totally fair.

Dragging it two weeks to farm leverage from companies you'd never join is how goodwill (and sometimes the offer) evaporates.