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#3 - The Sales Acceleration Formula

Eli Lipshatz

Unlocking Profitability Through Offshoring & Systemization

发布日期: 2021年2月15日

Mark Roberge, an MIT engineer, found himself as employee #3 at Hubspot, tasked to construct a sales operation from nothing, with no existing sales background. In just 7 years, he intelligently designed a sales team that took the company from $0 to $100M in annual revenue. The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team.

As someone who is not from a sales background, I anticipated that this book would be a grind, and predominantly validate my decision to stay away from sales positions. However, the key takeaways of the book are the processes and methodologies that Roberge employed to assemble a team from scratch and streamline them towards sustained success. This is not a handbook with sales micro-tactics. This is a strategic approach to building a team that is genetically programmed to accelerate.

In fact, we made this book compulsory reading for all department heads in our team, even if they had absolutely nothing to do with the sales cycle. Roberge breaks his process down into five sections, navigating the reader through the success story of Hubspot in an instructional, direct manner:

The Sales Hiring Formula – Hire the same successful salesperson every time.

The Sales Training Formula – Train every salesperson in the same manner.

The Sales Management Formula – Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process.

The Demand Generation Formula – Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month.

Technology – Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople.

My Most Important Lesson from this Book?

Metrics-Driven Culture - As you would expect from an MIT engineer that builds a sales funnel, Roberge was fixated on building a metrics-driven culture, in which every aspect of the business performance was quantifiably measurable. He was pedantic about making data-driven decisions in every aspect of their department, frequently adjusting coaching plans and compensation packages to intelligently motivate his team to excel.

But more importantly, Roberge wanted his team to live and breathe the metrics as he was, and have them hyper-aware of the impact of their performance on the business whole. He frequently involved the sales team in designing an updated version of the compensation plan, stressing that it was no a democratic process, but that he wanted their input.

Roberge’s ability to break the numbers down into digestible, actionable metrics meant that no decision was ever left up to a hunch. When the data is objective, other elements of the business, such as management, compensation, office politics, and career development are suddenly so much more simple.

How we’ve used this lesson in our company?

It almost happened overnight that our departments of 2-4 per team, expanded into full-fledged teams of 10-15 employees. At a size of 2-4 players per department, it is far more difficult to play the data-driven game. The law of small numbers dictates that the data is bound to be misleading, and statisticians would caution from confusing correlation with causation.

However, between June-August, our internal team exploded, and all of a sudden our Recruitment team, Account Management team, Marketing team, and Escala were all genuine divisions of the business, too far spread to manage based on ‘gut-feeling’.

We assigned each department with an OMTM - Only Metric That Matters, and it became their core function in the business to maintain the health of that number. Each month, we set targets for that number and attached an incentive program for the department should they meet the number. The role of the department head is to reverse engineer that single metric into granular metrics to assign to individual team members. These metrics are to be the basis for performance reviews, promotions, coaching plans, or attritions.

We’re still carefully incorporating the metric-driven culture into our team, cautious to not create unhealthy competition amongst the team members. A sales function has a very specific cultural stigma for good reason, and that cut-throat environment may not necessarily be the correct culture for an Account Management team.

Additional Nuggets of Gold

Hiring Formula - Roberge begins his hiring process by defining the traits that make a successful sales rep. Acknowledging that this can change from company to company, he narrows down the 5 most important traits for hiring, and designs creative interview techniques to test for all of them. The Hubspot Hiring Formula focuses on Coachability, Curiosity, Intelligence, Work-ethic, and Prior Success. Interestingly, Roberge placed ‘Closing Ability’ as a negative trait, claiming that old school, aggressive, pushy sales tactics are no longer effective, yet people with those attributes would consistently attempt to fall back on them.

Inbound vs Outbound - Roberge essentially dismisses outbound sales as a relevant strategy in today’s climate, in which the internet has caused a shift in power from the salesperson to the buyer. He claims that “pull” techniques, such as SEO, blogging, social media, and content marketing, are far more effective than traditional “push” techniques such as cold calling.

Relationship between sales and marketing - Roberge details how the sales and marketing teams should interact with each other to ensure that the right quality leads are being delivered at the correct times in the month.

Who Should Read this Book?

The title would suggest that only salespeople should read this book, but I would extend the invitation to anyone who is building a team from scratch. While the focus is focused primarily on closing, the processes are universal, so much so that I would change the title to ‘The Acceleration Formula’.

This is a shortcut to sustainable, scalable success in a very practical, step-by-step fashion that may even frustrate the impatient reader. The Sales Acceleration Formula philosophies are embedded deep into the DNA of our company...now to follow in Hubspot’s trajectory!

Favorite Quotes

“The Internet’s rise in prominence has caused a shift in power from the salesperson to the buyer. My findings were a statistical representation of that phenomenon. With this shift in power, buyers will no longer tolerate being strong-armed into a purchase. They will respond to salespeople who are helpful, smart, and respectful of their needs”

“Great salespeople never have to apply for a job. Great salespeople never need to pull together a resume. Truly great salespeople have multiple job offers at all times, even if they are not in the job market. Their old bosses are calling them, probably quarterly.”

“My best salespeople are individually great for very different reasons. They each have what I refer to as “superpowers” in a particular aspect of the selling process. These superpowers often differ across top performers.”

“A common sales management mistake is to overwhelm the salesperson with coaching too many skills simultaneously. Pick one skill and focus.”