dangerous stereotypes and unfortunately their remnants persist even today. The reality is that sales has been forced to grow up in recent years. You cannot succeed in today's B2B sales world unless you embody many of the disciplines that are part of good engineering training: numeracy, logic, and analytical ability, for example. If ever there was a good case study of why these traditional engineering methods are crucial to growing a sales organization, you'll find it here in this book. Mark brought with him to HubSpot the engineer's way of thinking. He analyzed the success factors, set up logical processes, and incorporated measurement and analytics. Throughout the book, what comes through to me is a smart thinker, using his training to pinpoint crucial issues, to think about them in a fresh way, and to come up with workable solutions to problems where others might have given up.
The result has been a sales organization that within seven years grew from the proverbial three-person-in-a-garage operation into a successful $100 million company. The how-to-do-it journey that Mark Roberge describes here is unique in several respects. First, it is an outstanding example not only of how to identify the key pieces of the jigsaw (he has four that are particularly crucial for success) but also of how to assemble the pieces into a coherent and effective whole. Second, as we've already seen, it's the best case I know of how a thoughtful, analytical approach pays off in terms of sales growth. Third, his story covers the whole spectrum of sales growth. It begins with the issues of a typical start-up, such as how to hire your first salesperson, and continues all the way through to the very different set of issues that a $100 million company faces. This is soup-to-nuts with a vengeance and it makes for fascinating reading. Whether your sales force is a tiny one-person start-up or a sophisticated 500-person operation, you'll find much in these pages that is relevant, useful, and thoughtful.
Acknowledgments
The chapters within this book unfolded from the inspiration, mentorship, and support from the following people. The only credit I can take is listening to their wisdom.
Thanks to Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah for providing me the opportunity at HubSpot and for pushing me to constantly think beyond the norm.
Thanks to my first lieutenants: Peter Caputa, Jeetu Mahtani, Dan Tyre, Heidi Carlson, Andrew Quinn, Brian Thorne, Phil Harrell, Leslie Mitchell, and Joe Sharron. My leadership mission was to find people better than me, hire them, and learn from them every day. Thanks for making that mission a reality.
Thanks to our CMO and my “SMarketing” partner, Mike Volpe. The demand generation innovations executed by Mike and his team were the main driver behind our accelerated revenue success.
Thanks to my mentors and coaches, John McMahon, David Skok, and Ric Jonas, for helping me through the most challenging times of this journey.
Thanks to Will Morel for helping me bring the words in this book to life.
Thanks to Jill Konrath, Neil Rackham, Dave Kerpen, and David Meerman Scott for inspiring me to write this book and advising me through the process.
Thanks to my parents for supporting me with their wisdom in sales and in life.
Thanks to my grandparents, who taught me at a young age that the opportunity to pursue a great education and one's personal passions was not always an option for past generations. I vowed to make them proud and never take these opportunities for granted.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Robin, and my two boys, Kai and Zane, for providing the love, purpose, and motivation that drive me every day.
Introduction
“Scalable, predictable revenue growth.”
I jotted these four words down on a notepad. It was 11 p.m. on a Thursday night. I had just signed the paperwork to join a three-person marketing software start-up called HubSpot. I had met the cofounders, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, while we were students together at MIT. They were smart guys with a big mission: help companies transform their marketing from outbound to inbound.
My job was to build the sales team.
I was up late that night thinking about the road ahead and the mission I had chosen to accept.
“Scalable, predictable revenue growth.”
That's what I had to engineer.
Seven years later, HubSpot crossed the $100M run-rate revenue mark. During my tenure as SVP of global sales and services, I led the company to the acquisition of its first 10,000 customers across over 60 countries. I had a team of over 450 employees across the sales, services, account management, and support organizations. Few sales leaders have completed this journey end-to-end. In my case, I completed it without any prior experience building a sales team. As a matter of fact, I had never even worked in sales. I am an MIT graduate. I am an engineer by training. I started my career writing code. Somehow, I found myself in the sales leader seat. Throughout the journey, I challenged many conventional notions of sales management by utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which I'd been trained to see the world.
When people heard about my journey, they became intrigued. They were curious as to how an engineering methodology had successfully scaled a sales team. Their curiosity translated to thousands of phone calls from sales executives and business owners. It led to hundreds of speaking engagements. Eventually, it led to this book. That was not my intent. I was simply trying to provide for my family and contribute to the mission that Brian and Dharmesh had set out to achieve. All that said, I am happy to share my stories of scaling the team. I hope it helps many of you do the same.
I picked up the notepad again and continued writing:
1. “Hire the same successful salesperson every time.” (The Sales Hiring Formula)
2. “Train every salesperson in the same way.” (The Sales Training Formula)
3. “Hold our salespeople accountable to the same sales process.” (The Sales Management Formula)
4. “Provide our salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month.” (The Demand Generation Formula)
These four components represented my formula for sales acceleration. If I could execute on these four elements, I believed I would achieve my mission of “scalable, predictable revenue growth.” For each of these components, I devised a repeatable process, leaned into metrics, and ran calculations, making each of these tactics formulaic in nature. In this book, I refer to these predictable frameworks as the Sales Hiring Formula, the Sales Training Formula, the Sales Management Formula, and the Demand Generation Formula. These formulae reflect the majority of my journey and make up the majority of this book. To clarify, these formulae are not algebraic in nature (e.g., “X + Y = Z”). I wish that scaling sales was that simple! Instead, by using the word “formulae,” I'm referring to the collection of repeatable processes, metrics, and calculations I used to complete my mission of generating predictable scale.
In Part I, I outline the Sales Hiring Formula. You will learn how to leverage metrics to predictably hire the same successful salesperson profile every time. You will learn that there is no universal mold for “the ideal sales hire.” The ideal sales hire depends on the company's buyer context. A top performer at one company may fail at another. However, the process to engineer the ideal hiring formula is the same for every company. Devising this formula early on in a company's development is critical to ensuring that the team hires only salespeople who have the highest probability of becoming top performers. As a practical example, I share the traits that were consistent across HubSpot's top sales performers, explain how I came to this conclusion, and describe how I consistently evaluated candidates on each trait.
In Part II, I outline the Sales Training Formula. You will learn why the “ride-along” training strategy, in which a new hire shadows a top performer for a month, is dangerous. I outline how to bring scale to your sales training efforts by defining the three foundational elements: the buyer journey, the sales process, and the qualifying matrix. I outline how to bring predictability to the training program using exams and certifications. I also provide a blueprint on how to manufacture helpful salespeople with whom your prospects will actually want to interact. In today's buyer-empowered marketplace, a sales team known