Finished Notion's AE interview process a couple months back. I was going for a mid-market AE role, $150-300k deal sizes, mostly B2B SaaS buyers. Coming from 8 years in enterprise sales. Here's how it went.
Notion's sales motion is interesting. They're not purely product-led growth but they're also not a top-down enterprise sale. A lot of deals start with a team already using Notion and the AE's job is to expand into a larger budget conversation. That context matters a lot for how you talk about your experience.
Process:
Recruiter screen (30 min) -> Sales manager screen (45 min) -> Panel interview (90 min) -> Mock discovery call.
The mock discovery call is the piece nobody tells you about. They send you a one-page company brief and give you 24 hours to prep. Then you get on a Zoom with two people playing the roles of a VP of Engineering and an Operations Director who are evaluating Notion for their team. You run the discovery.
I treated it exactly like a real call. I did my homework on the fictional company, prepared a hypothesis about their pain, opened with agenda-setting, asked open discovery questions, listened more than I talked, and tied their answers back to relevant Notion capabilities without pitching too early. After 30 minutes they stopped the roleplay and we debriefed for 15 minutes.
The debrief is where it gets real. They asked why I asked the questions I did, what I heard in their answers, and what I'd do next in the deal cycle. This is when they're evaluating your self-awareness about your own sales approach.
Panel interview:
Three people: the hiring manager, a peer AE, and a solutions engineer. A mix of behavioral questions and situational ones. The AE on the panel asked me some really specific questions about deal mechanics: how I handle multi-threader relationships, what I do when a champion goes cold, and how I've navigated procurement late in a deal cycle. These felt like real situations they'd run into.
What matters most: Have a specific methodology you can name and explain. I use a hybrid of MEDDIC and Challenger. Vague answers about 'consultative selling' don't land. Know your metrics. ARR quota, attainment %, average deal size, sales cycle length. They will ask. Have an actual opinion about how Notion competes against Confluence, Coda, and the other workspace tools. They're not naive about the competitive landscape.
Comp offer I saw: base in the $110-130k range for mid-market, OTE around $220-250k, realistic attainment probably around 60-70% of top performers based on what they told me.