Interview questions › Goal setting and follow-through
Tell me about a target you were measured on and did not hit. What did you do in the last month of the period?
Goal setting and follow-through · commonly asked in sales, marketing, operations, any
No account, no credit card for the first three questions.
How to answer it well
Spend most of the answer on the final month: what you stopped doing, what you doubled down on, and what the numbers were.
Two mistakes that cost you points
- Explaining the market instead of your own last-month decisions.
- Not knowing the actual final numbers.
What to do with this question today
- Answer it out loud once, without stopping. Do not write it down first.
- Read back exactly what you said. Mark the filler words, and the length of your longest pause.
- Answer it again and change one thing — usually the opening line, or the number at the end.
This question is not in the free run yet — practise the same skill with a free run, or paste a job description and we build the set around that role.
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Also searched as: tell me about a time you did not meet your target; sales target missed interview answer
Dimension: Goal setting and follow-through — the same skill is probed again with different wording, so practise the pattern, not just this sentence.