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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.

Now I don't want to knock innovation. It's a fine strategy if you can pull it off, and every company is forced to continuously innovate or risk going out of business. It's just that the knee-jerk response to competition has been to innovate, and, as many organizations have found, innovation has its downside. For one thing, it's a very hard strategy to sustain. Even Apple, the poster child of strategic innovation, may not be able to pull it off for much longer. But there's another less recognized downside, and that's the diminishing window of opportunity. The whole idea of innovation is that it gives you a competitive breathing space – a period when you have something unique and special that puts you ahead of competitors. In the good old days, a decent innovation could look forward to a year or two of advantage in the marketplace before the competition could catch up. Not so today: you're lucky if you have a couple of months at the most. As a result, many companies are questioning their reliance on innovation as a growth strategy.

It's for this reason that an increasing number of leading companies have a new mantra – organic growth. As Jeffrey Immelt of GE describes it, organic growth is “using our sales and marketing assets to take the best business from competitors.” There's little doubt that organic growth is a sound strategy. The trick is how to pull it off. The prerequisite is having an excellent sales force that is capable of outselling the competition. Few companies have any understanding of how to create, train, manage, and grow such a sales force.

Fortunately, there's now no shortage of good advice. The last few years have seen a blossoming of really excellent sales books on subjects ranging from recruiting and training to compensation and sales management. The pieces of the jigsaw are becoming better defined all the time. Yet, to my mind, there's still something missing. However well we might understand each individual piece of the puzzle, we get nowhere unless we can assemble them into a coherent whole.

It's here that Mark Roberge and The Sales Acceleration Formula come in. Mark is an MIT-trained engineer who joined a three-person start-up called HubSpot. Let me spend a moment relishing Mark's lack of qualification for the job, which was to build “scalable, predictable revenue growth” or, in other words, sales. First, he knew absolutely nothing about sales and selling. Perhaps that's not such a crippling disadvantage, as it freed him from many of the superstitions, malpractices, and bad habits that weigh down many long-time sales leaders. But, for sure, if HubSpot had been a larger company, it would have thought twice before offering him a sales job, let alone putting him in charge of sales.

Mark's second disadvantage was his engineering background. There are not many people who can go from writing code one day to growing a sales organization the next. There's a deep mutual prejudice between engineering and sales. The engineer's stereotype of sales is that selling is the irrational art of manipulating people into buying things they don't need using unethical techniques that border on lying, cheating, and stealing. It's for this reason that some engineers, who I think would make outstanding salespeople, would rather starve than take up a sales career. Equally, sales has its prejudices about engineers. Too often, they view engineers as unimaginative, insensitive creatures from another planet. According to this stereotype, engineers are oblivious to people and they take a perverse delight in sabotaging the sales effort. I remember, years ago in Motorola, how salespeople called engineers “the truth-blurters” and did everything possible to keep them away from their customers.

These are 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.

Neil Rackham