The Sales Acceleration Formula

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Roberge Mark. The Sales Acceleration Formula

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. The Sales Hiring Formula

1. Uncovering the Characteristics of a Successful Salesperson

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

Coachability

Curiosity

Prior Success

Intelligence

Work Ethic

3. Finding Top-Performing Salespeople

Build a Recruiting Agency within Your Company

Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates on LinkedIn

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

Understand the Sales Talent Pool in Your Area

4. The Ideal First Sales Hire

Part II. The Sales Training Formula

5. Setting Up a Predictable Sales Training Program

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

Create a Training Curriculum around the Sales Methodology

Adding Predictability to the Sales Training Formula

Constant Iteration on the Sales Process

6. Manufacturing Helpful Salespeople Your Buyers Trust

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

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

Part III. The Sales Management Formula

7. Metrics-Driven Sales Coaching

Implementing a Coaching Culture throughout the Organization

Creating the Coaching Plan Together with the Salesperson

Examples of Metrics-Driven Skill Diagnosis and Coaching Plans

“Peeling Back the Onion”

Measure the Coaching Success

8. Motivation through Sales Compensation Plans and Contests

Criteria to Evaluate a New Commission Plan

Involve the Sales Team in Compensation Plan Design

Promotion Tiers: Removing the Subjectivity from Promotions and Compensation Adjustments

Using Sales Contests to Motivate the Team

The Best Contest I Ever Ran

9. Developing Sales Leaders – Advantages of a “Promote from Within” Culture

Prerequisites for Leadership Consideration

From the Classroom to the Real World

Common Potholes from New Sales Managers

Part IV. The Demand Generation Formula

10. Flip the Demand Generation Formula – Get Buyers to Find You

How Can Your Business Rank at the Top of Google?

This Does Not Happen Overnight

Create a Content Production Process

Complement Content Production with Social Media Participation

Long-Tail Theory

11. Converting Inbound Interest into Revenue

Marketing's Role in Converting Interest into Revenue

Sales' Role in Converting Interest into Revenue

12. Aligning Sales and Marketing – The SMarketing SLA

The Marketing Service Level Agreement (SLA)

The Sales Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Part V. Technology and Experimentation

13. Technology to Sell Better, Faster

Accelerate Lead Sourcing with Technology

Accelerate Sales Prospecting with Technology

Accelerate Lead Engagement with Technology

Automated Reporting with Technology

14. Running Successful Sales Experiments

Generating Ideas for Experiments

Best Practices of Experiment Execution

15. HubSpot's Most Successful Sales Experiments

The HubSpot Value Added Reseller (VAR) Program

GPCT

16. Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here?

All of the Proceeds of This Book Will Be Donated to BUILD-Boston

Index

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Sales doesn't get any exemption from the curse of living in interesting times. Everyone recognizes that today we face unprecedented challenges: the consequences of the Internet and e-commerce, the increasing power and sophistication of purchasing, the effects of globalization. There's no shortage of “interesting” challenges confronting sales organizations, sales managers, and their salespeople.

Now stir another nasty difficulty into the mix. Sales is suddenly in the strategic spotlight. Boardrooms across the world are looking more closely at sales strategy than ever before. What's driving this new interest? There are several reasons, but two factors stand out above the others. The first is the huge increase in competition. Today no niche is safe. There's an oft-quoted figure that the average company today has twice as many competitors as it had five years ago. Nobody knows how true this is, but many experts – myself included – believe it to be so. Assuming the figure is valid, that's another way to say that, statistically, the average company's market share has been cut in half. The second factor is the precariousness of the strategy that most companies have relied on to counter the effects of hypercompetition. Ask the average company to tell you its primary strategy for success in a competitive world. I did just that recently at a meeting of corporate strategists. More than 70 percent responded that their strategy was “innovation.” And, in response to my follow-up question, “Is it working?” more than half said that it was not.

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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.

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.

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