Читать книгу The Sales Acceleration Formula - Roberge Mark - Страница 5

“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 for its customer-focused qualities will outperform its more inwardly focused competitors.

In Part III, I outline the Sales Management Formula. I wish I could retitle all of my sales managers, calling them “sales coaches” instead. In my opinion, effective sales coaching is the biggest driver of sales productivity. All sales managers should maximize the time they invest in coaching. A common pitfall for new sales managers is the tendency to overwhelm their salespeople, especially new hires, with an endless list of feedback on current sales processes. My most effective sales managers avoided this trap of feedback bombardment. Instead, they perpetually identified the one skill that, if improved, would lead to the most substantial improvement in each salesperson's performance. They then customized coaching plans to hone in on the development of those particular skills. I encouraged HubSpot sales managers to use metrics to diagnose each salesperson's most deficient skill area. I call this sales management approach “Metrics-Driven Sales Coaching” and have keynoted on the topic at many events. I'll explain how to set up a culture of metrics-driven sales coaching, diagnose skill deficiencies through metrics, and motivate desired behaviors through contests and compensation structures.

In Part IV, I outline the Demand Generation Formula. The Internet has completely transformed the way buyers research products and services. Today's buyers are empowered to find the products they want, when they want them, with near-perfect information on the competitive landscape. Buyers may conduct a simple search in Google. Buyers may engage in a social media discussion. The buyer is in control. At HubSpot, we recognized this shift and completely reinvented the Demand Generation Formula to accommodate it. In Part IV, I illustrate how HubSpot built a modern Demand Generation Formula that aligns with today's buyer behavior and generated over 50,000 new inbound leads per month. You will also learn how we took a quantified approach toward aligning sales and marketing, using our Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement.

In Part V, I discuss technology and experimentation. Over the past few decades, the business world has experienced so many advancements in the way Finance manages its budget, HR manages its people, IT manages its data, and sales executives manage forecasting. However, how has technology helped the frontline salesperson? It hasn't. Salespeople have largely been ignored by decades of technological advancements. In fact, in some cases, technologies used to run sales teams actually slow salespeople down. At HubSpot, we worked hard to equip our salespeople with technology to help them sell better, faster. This technology enabled better buying experiences for our customers by providing our salespeople with a view into their buyers' context and interests. Our salespeople were able to engage buyers in the most helpful way at the most helpful time. This same technology streamlined the processes salespeople followed every day, eliminating unnecessary administrative work and maximizing selling time.

In Part V, you will also learn the importance of experimentation throughout the sales scaling journey. Through a cadence of theory development, test execution, reflection, and iteration, I used the results of these experiments to constantly evolve our sales process. I will share the best practices behind experimentation by offering specific examples of some of our most successful work.

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. Why? 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.