Here are a couple of things that you should think about as you’re preparing for an interview with a potential employer:

First of all make sure that as you prepare for the interview, you learn as much as you can in advance about the company. What are its core markets? Which customers does it target? Who are the competitors? What is the company unique selling proposition? What is management’s vision & values? What does the leadership stand for? What is the culture about? These are all things that you should study and research prior to going into your interview.

You should also prepare questions to the hiring manager on these issues. Their answers will help you to determine the fit between yourself and the company as you explore the job opportunity, and it will demonstrate an advanced understanding of the company to the interview team. This will give you a leg up on other interviewees who don’t do this advanced preparational work. I’m amazed by the number of candidates I meet who can’t think of one intelligent question to ask about the company or the opportunity!

When you’re preparing for a sales and marketing interview, make sure that you have a clear set of responses that are prepared for standard questions, such as “what are you looking for?,” “where do you see your career going?,” “give me an overview of your career”, “tell me about your achievement track record?”

Prepare a succinct profile that outlines your specific achievements and experience in the position that you’re looking to be hired for, and how those skills and experience are relevant to the exact job that you’re interviewing for. This can best be done on a sheet of paper using bullet points and can be a complementary document to your standard resume. Employers are impressed when you come prepared with a fact sheet that lines up your skills and experience with the exact criteria that they’re looking to use in order to fill a job.

Most importantly, when you’re asked questions, provide succinct and relatively short answers. Don’t ramble on and on. Lots of sales and marketing people are extroverts and as a result they tend to like to talk a lot, but there is nothing worse than having somebody who talks too long and provides overly embellished rambling answers to each question. So make sure that when you prepare your responses for each interview question that they’re short and to the point.

As you prepare for a job interview, develop a series of stories around your core skill sets, and around specific experiences, situations and accomplishments that you had in previous job positions. People don’t want to hear the answer to whether or not you’re a good sales person; they want to hear examples of how you’ve shown your sales talent in different situations. Demonstrating your skills by telling true stories from your past will help you to stand out in a crowd.

If you can follow these simple tips as you prepare for interviews, you’ll find that you can increase your chances of being strongly considered for sales and marketing jobs. There’s a huge difference between those who are experienced and skilled in interviewing and those who aren’t. If you’re getting prepared to do your first job search in a long time, perhaps it makes sense for you to get some coaching from some career professionals or counselors before you actually initiate your search. This will greatly increase your effectiveness as you prepare to go out and find that next great job.