The Sales Acceleration Formula

The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand.

As SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for software company HubSpot, Mark led hundreds of his employees to the acquisition and retention of the company's first 10,000 customers across more than 60 countries. This book outlines his approach and provides an action plan for others to replicate his success, including the following key elements:

• Hire the same successful salesperson every time — The Sales Hiring Formula
• Train every salesperson in the same manner — The Sales Training Formula
• Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process — The Sales Management Formula
• Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month — The Demand Generation Formula
• Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople

Business owners, sales executives, and investors are all looking to turn their brilliant ideas into the next $100 million revenue business. Often, the biggest challenge they face is the task of scaling sales. They crave a blueprint for success, but fail to find it because sales has traditionally been referred to as an art form, rather than a science. You can't major in sales in college. Many people question whether sales can even be taught. Executives and entrepreneurs are often left feeling helpless and hopeless.

The Sales Acceleration Formula completely alters this paradigm. In today's digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form. There is a process. Sales can be predictable.

A formula does exist.

Foreword Neil Rackham ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

Part I The Sales Hiring Formula 1

Chapter 1 Uncovering the Characteristics of a Successful Salesperson 3

Chapter 2 Five Traits Great Salespeople Have and How to Interview for Them 11

Coachability 12

Curiosity 16

Prior Success 19

Intelligence 20

Work Ethic 21

Chapter 3 Finding Top-Performing Salespeople 25

Build a Recruiting Agency within Your Company 26

Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates on LinkedIn 28

Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates through Your Team: The “Forced Referral” 33

Understand the Sales Talent Pool in Your Area 33

Chapter 4 The Ideal First Sales Hire 37

Part II The Sales Training Formula 45

Chapter 5 Setting up a Predictable Sales Training Program 47

Defining the Three Elements of the Sales Methodology: The Buyer Journey, Sales Process, and Qualifying Matrix 50

Create a Training Curriculum around the Sales Methodology 53

Adding Predictability to the Sales Training Formula 54

Constant Iteration on the Sales Process 57

Chapter 6 Manufacturing Helpful Salespeople Your Buyers Trust 59

Train Your Salespeople to Experience the Day-to-Day Job of Potential Customers 60

Enable Your Salespeople to Build Their Personal Brand with Potential Customers Using Social Media 62

Part III The Sales Management Formula 67

Chapter 7 Metrics-Driven Sales Coaching 69

Implementing a Coaching Culture throughout the Organization 71

Creating the Coaching Plan Together with the Salesperson 72

Examples of Metrics-Driven Skill Diagnosis and Coaching Plans 74

“Peeling Back the Onion” 79

Measure the Coaching Success 80

Chapter 8 Motivation through Sales Compensation Plans and Contests 83

Criteria to Evaluate a New Commission Plan 88

Involve the Sales Team in Compensation Plan Design 89

Promotion Tiers: Removing the Subjectivity from Promotions and Compensation Adjustments 90

Using Sales Contests to Motivate the Team 93

The Best Contest I Ever Ran 95

Chapter 9 Developing Sales Leaders—Advantages of a “Promote from Within” Culture 97

Prerequisites for Leadership Consideration 102

From the Classroom to the Real World 103

Common Potholes from New Sales Managers 104

Part IV The Demand Generation Formula 109

Chapter 10 Flip the Demand Generation Formula—Get Buyers to Find You 111

How Can Your Business Rank at the Top of Google? 113

This Does Not Happen Overnight 115

Create a Content Production Process 116

Complement Content Production with Social Media Participation 121

Long-Tail Theory 123

Chapter 11 Converting Inbound Interest into Revenue 127

Marketing’s Role in Converting Interest into Revenue 128

Sales’ Role in Converting Interest into Revenue 137

Chapter 12 Aligning Sales and Marketing—The SMarketing SLA 149

The Marketing Service Level Agreement (SLA) 151

The Sales Service Level Agreement (SLA) 154

Part V Technology and Experimentation 161

Chapter 13 Technology to Sell Better, Faster 163

Accelerate Lead Sourcing with Technology 165

Accelerate Sales Prospecting with Technology 167

Accelerate Lead Engagement with Technology 170

Automated Reporting with Technology 171

Chapter 14 Running Successful Sales Experiments 175

Generating Ideas for Experiments 176

Best Practices of Experiment Execution 178

Chapter 15 HubSpot’s Most Successful Sales Experiments 183

The HubSpot Value Added Reseller (VAR) Program 183

GPCT 186

Chapter 16 Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here? 191

Index 195

MARK ROBERGE served as HubSpot's SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services from 2007 to 2013, scaling the customer base from 1 to over 12,000 and his staff from one to hundreds of employees. Mark holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an engineering degree from Lehigh University. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Inc Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Business Review. Mark currently serves as the Chief Revenue Officer of the HubSpot Sales Division.

The standard wisdom is that sales is art, rather than a science, which might be why so many great ideas have gone from the startup phase straight to the graveyard. Building the next hundred-million-dollar business requires building a sales team that can get the job done reliably, but, until now, there has been no predictable formula for achieving that goal. Now, a tested formula exists to turn sales from an art into a science, and it's presented in The Sales Acceleration Formula.

When author Mark Roberge joined HubSpot, it was just another software startup with a big idea but no numbers to prove it would work. In only a few years, Mark took HubSpot past the $100 million revenue mark using the strategy he outlines in The Sales Acceleration Formula. In a world glutted with consultants and thought leaders who have more personality than real knowledge, Mark's story is a significant one. This book contains practical wisdom from a practitioner who has actually overcome the biggest challenge businesses face in the early stages: scaling sales.

The Sales Acceleration Formula deconstructs the process of building revenue into easy, measurable steps. The businesses that successfully make the transition to hundred-million-dollar ventures are those that have mastered five basic tasks: hiring salespeople, training the sales team, managing sales, generating demand, and experimenting with new technologies. Each of these is addressed in The Sales Acceleration Formula, which presents concrete plans for implementing metrics-driven systems that work. Businesses encounter hurdles at every stage of the growth process, so this book provides a framework that can take you from your first sales hire all the way to a fantastic sales team with the motivation to take your business to the next level.

In today's marketplace, every action is logged, recorded, and stored somewhere. With all that information, we can uncover the scientific principles behind even the most mystifying processes. Sales is a perfect case in point—at one time, almost everyone believed that "sales can't be taught." With The Sales Acceleration Formula, Mark Roberge is disrupting common knowledge and showing that the journey from $0 to $100 million can be predicted, planned, and measured at every step of the way.

Praise for THE SALES ACCELERATION FORMULA

"A new breed of disciplined, data-driven leaders are re-shaping the field of sales. The Sales Acceleration Formula explains why."
—Tony Robbins

"A lot of factors go into building a great sales force, but those factors don't have to be a mystery. Roberge breaks down the moving parts of a sales force–recruitment, hiring, training, compensation, and performance evaluation–and describes the metrics and methods he has applied to these components to make his company a success. If you want to engineer sales success, this book, written by an engineer-turned-sales-leader, is for you."
—Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human and Drive

"The Sales Acceleration Formula provides the most powerful, practical approach yet to the total marketing and selling process from lead generation to close. It helps senior sales and marketing executives understand how to work in concert to satisfy customers, quickly close sales, and grow revenue exponentially."
—Ben Shapiro, Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

"In The Sales Acceleration Formula, Roberge provides a prescriptive blueprint for scaling a modern sales team. It should be on every sales leader's reading list."
—Kevin Egan, VP of Sales, Dropbox

"Mark has been at the forefront in figuring out the new sales methodologies around inside sales, leveraging metrics for insights, and web technologies for increased rep productivity. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone running a sales organization."
—David Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners

"Predictable scale is on every CEO and sales executives' mind. However, it is rarely achieved. Roberge provides a great tactical approach toward reaching this goal."
—Brian Schmidt, Global VP of Sales, TripAdvisor

"Early in my career, I worked as a sales representative at a Wall Street economic consultancy. Back then the salesperson had the information and therefore the power in the relationship. Now, because of the wealth of content on the web, traditional selling doesn't work so well. In this important book, Mark shares his radically successful formulas for how sales needs to change in order to be successful in our new buyer-driven world."
—David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of 10 books including The New Rules of Sales and Service

"It's time to rev up the revenue engines! The Sales Acceleration Formula transforms the mystique of selling into a scalable methodology that savvy leaders can implement."
—Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and Agile Selling

"Mark Roberge and Hubspot are one of the few places I go myself to study up on what's new and working in sales, as a legend in the making."
—Aaron Ross, author of Predictable Revenue

"An engineering mindset arms the modern sales leader with an unfair advantage. The Sales Acceleration Formula explains why."
—John McGeachie, VP of Sales, Evernote