just wrapped the Affirm AE interview for an enterprise merchant partnerships role. if you're coming from SaaS sales this is a bit of a different animal because the product is financial infrastructure, not software. here's the full breakdown.
recruiter call: more of a real conversation than screening. she wanted to know about deal sizes i'd owned, sales cycle length, and whether i had experience selling to finance buyers (CFOs, VP Finance, treasury). that's the buyer persona at affirm for large merchants, not just ecom managers.
sales manager interview: first real round. he asked me to walk him through a recent deal. not a summary, the whole arc: how i found the account, how i multi-threaded, what objections i hit, and exactly how i closed. he drilled into the parts where i was vague. be ready to go deep on any deal you cite.
mock pitch: this is the key round. they give you a fictional merchant (gave me a mid-market electronics retailer) and you pitch Affirm's BNPL solution. they want to hear you tie affirm's features to AOV uplift and cart conversion data, not just product description. i prepared a mini deck, others go whiteboard. they asked how i'd handle price objections and questions about the merchant fee structure.
cross-functional interview: one round with a product or partnerships person. they're testing whether you can work with non-sales stakeholders. asked about times i collaborated with product or engineering on a deal that had custom integration needs.
final: VP of sales, 30 min. pretty high-level, mostly about long-term vision and how i think about building a territory.
comp (rough): base in the 110-130k range for mid-market AE from what i heard, OTE roughly 2x base. heavily variable. ask about quota attainment rates in the first call, they'll tell you.