The Sales Acceleration Formula (Book Summary)

The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million By Mark Roberge

Part I: The Sales Hiring Formula

• The ideal sales hiring formula is different for every company. The characteristics that are traditionally associated with salespeople, such as aggression and strong objection handling ability, had the worst correlation with success. There were five traits that correlated most significantly with sales success:
  • Coachability
  • Curiosity
  • Prior success
  • Intelligence
  • Work ethic
• Role play:
  • We will role-play your opening call with me. Your goal is to do some light discovery and set an appointment to discuss my needs further.
  • Once the role-play was complete, I would ask the candidate to self-assess. A candidate with a high degree of coachability is able to reflect, self-diagnose, and propose improvements to her weak areas.
  • After a few minutes, I would ask if the process made sense. I would request that she redo the role-play, this time attempting to apply some of the coaching I had just provided her.
• Does the candidate lead with great questions? Or does the candidate “show up and throw up,” as we say in the industry?
• I tested intelligence by effectively commencing HubSpot sales training during the interview process. I exposed candidates to new information early in the interview process and observed their ability to absorb the information and communicate it back to me at a later stage in the process.
• I am trying to understand two things here: first, how well did she understand the concepts to which I had I exposed her? Second, how well did she communicate those concepts back to me in a simple manner? I would always ask follow-up questions until I eventually stumped the candidate. The deeper I was able get on a topic before her responses suffered, the better it meant she was performing.
• 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.
• Don’t hire a recruiting agency. Don’t build a corporate recruiting team. Build a recruiting agency within your corporation.
• When I spotted folks that had made it three, four, five, or more years in a high-performing environment, I knew they were likely to be high-value candidates.
• How much does the company pay their salespeople? How are the compensation plans structured? What is the buyer context like? Is it transactional or complex? Is it enterprise or SMB? Do they mostly have outbound leads or inbound leads? How many reps are at the company? What are the different sales roles? How is the sales team structured? What is the company’s sales training like? Do they use a formal sales methodology? Do they invest in outside training or have a full-time staff?
• After running these calls, she needs the innovative ability to see the patterns, iterate on the target customer, iterate on the value proposition, and accelerate the company toward product/ market fit.

Part II: The Sales Training Formula

• 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.
• I needed a way to expose new hires to the blueprint of best practices for our entire sales cycle. This “best practices blueprint” is often referred to as a “sales methodology.” There are three aspects of a well-designed sales methodology: the buyer journey, the sales process, and the qualifying matrix.
• It is also advantageous if the sales process stages are inspect-able.
• “Discovery verified” is a much better option. Reaching this stage would mean that the salesperson has emailed the prospective customer a summary of the discovery call and the customer has responded affirmatively.
• The qualifying matrix defines the information needed from a potential buyer in order to understand whether we can help the prospective buyer and whether the buyer wants help. The information is gathered at various stages of the sales process. It is rarely gathered in the same order across different deals.
• Have one session on prospecting, another on the connect call, another on the discovery call, and so forth.
• I added an exam and several certifications to the training process. The exam was focused on factual information, such as product knowledge.
• In order to graduate from training, new hires would need to be certified on the “discovery” stage. They would be provided with a scenario in which a prospective customer had made it to the discovery stage of the sales process, and the trainee would be asked to conduct the discovery call.
• The sales trainer wouldn’t just say, “Good job here, bad job here.” There was a quantifiable result that came from the certification process.
• It was critical that the evaluator of the role-play, in this case the sales trainer, was not the trainee’s hiring manager.
• As expected, we found sales training scores to be an even better predictor of success than the sales hiring scores were.
• The salesperson should understand the buyers’ goals and how his own solution can help achieve those goals.”
• Providing our salespeople with an in-depth understanding of our buyers’ day-to-day existence became a key goal of my sales training formula.
• We targeted marketing professionals. Therefore, my sales training goal was to teach our new sales hires what it was like to be a marketer. New sales hires did not spend their first few weeks in sales training, memorizing scripts and discussing objections. Instead, our new sales hires spent their first few weeks at HubSpot developing their own website, writing their own blog, and creating their own social media presence.
• Find the blogs that your prospects read. Read the blogs for 15 minutes every day. Retweet one or two and promote them in your LinkedIn status. Comment on the blog.

Part III: The Sales Management Formula

• “A common sales management mistake is to overwhelm the salesperson with coaching too many skills simultaneously. Pick one skill and focus.”
• The sales compensation plan depends highly on the type of business you’re in, and the stage of business you’re at.
• One factor in the success of our evolving compensation plan was my decision to involve the sales team in the design process. I was very explicit that the commission plan design was not a democratic process. For example, the plan would not be put to a vote. It was critical for the sales team to not confuse transparency and involvement with an invitation to selfishly design the plan around their individual needs.
• Sales is such a measurable, meritocratic function that I simply left tenure out.
• Sales contests:
  • “Sales contests are an effective tool to drive short-term behaviors and build team culture within the sales organization.”
  • I ran a sales contest almost every month, especially in the early years of team development.
  • Make the prize team-based. In addition to making the contest team-based, choose a reward that the team experiences together.
  • Send out updated contest standings every night. At least once per day, the contest standings should be published to the entire sales team, if not to the entire company!
  • Run one contest at a time for a given group of salespeople.
• In order to develop my frontline salespeople into managers, I set out to establish a sales management course.
• I took a moment to reflect on the key management skills I wanted these managers to possess as they embarked on the role at HubSpot. Coaching. Negative feedback delivery. Team motivation. Conflict management.
• “Before formal promotion, let qualified leadership candidates hire, train, and manage one new salesperson while still carrying their individual quota responsibilities.”
• New managers have an unrealistic perception of how much coaching they can actually do with each of their team members.

Part IV: The Demand Generation Formula

• Here are the two simple actions you need to take in order to drive inbound links and social media following:
  • Create quality content (e.g., blogs, ebooks, webinars) on a frequent basis.
  • Participate in the social media discussions in which your target prospects are already conversing.
• As an executive, don’t think about taking on [demand generation] tasks yourself. Think instead about creating a content production process. Delegate the process to specialists.
• Once you have found the journalist, the next step is to form a thought leadership committee. The thought leadership committee provides the journalist with a continual source of domain knowledge.
• [Create content that explains] a trend in the industry [or] a question buyers have early in their buying journey,
• At the end of the blog article is a call to action to the reader that states, “Did you like this blog article on XYZ? Perhaps you will like the ebook we published on the same subject.” Many readers click the call to action and are brought to a landing page, where they find out that the ebook is free. They simply need to provide their name, email, phone number, and company URL, and they will have access to the ebook immediately.
• The Most Common Mistake: Don’t Pass All the Leads to Sales
• Issues arise when the lead scoring algorithm becomes too complicated.
• The buyer context sales approach is in perfect alignment with the experience the prospective buyer has had with the company thus far. It is educational. It is insightful. It is personalized to his context. It makes engaging with the salesperson feel like the right next step for the prospect to take.
• The final message should always be the “going negative” voicemail. For example: “I am going to assume that Facebook marketing is no longer a priority for you this year. Give me a call if it ever becomes a priority again.”
• The strategy I prefer is to call the contact from the lead first and then call the decision maker as a follow-up. I call this strategy “call low, then call high.”
• “Hi, John. This is Mark from HubSpot. I noticed you downloaded our ebook on Facebook marketing lead generation. What specific questions did you have?”
• One of our customers in your industry has had great success with generating leads through social media and actually far exceeded the 20 percent lift you are targeting. Would you have a few minutes to walk through the details of their successful strategy?”
• The engagement of the lead is the best criteria around which to prioritize prospecting calls.
• We had one team that called the inbound leads exclusively. We had another team that had to get to goal by cold calling. These folks were given business development reps, or BDRs, who made the cold calls and set appointments for the outbound closing specialists.
• The best thing to do is take your top-performing salespeople and rotate the inbound leads between them.
• The first step in establishing the Marketing SLA was to define when a lead would be qualified to be passed to the Sales team.
• In our case, active free trials closed at many times the rate of product collateral downloads.
• To account for the different qualification levels of leads, we focused less on the raw number of leads generated and more on the implied dollar value of leads generated.
• Sales must hold up their end of the bargain. “Every lead from the website should be called within one hour of converting.”
• We created a daily report distributed every evening to both the Sales and Marketing teams, holding both organizations accountable for the SLAs
• Conversely, if the Marketing team crushed the first week’s lead goal and then generated a slow trickle of leads for the rest of the month, the Sales team would be in a lot of trouble, even if Marketing successfully limped to their SLA goal.

Part V: Technology and Experimentation

• Most sales technology does not work for frontline salespeople. It creates work for salespeople.
• Our salespeople can engage immediately, referencing the specific interests of the buyer as demonstrated by their actions. Our salespeople should offer to help. This approach is useful to the buyer.
• Did the buyer confirm that the summary of the discovery call was accurate? Did the buyer open up the proposal? Did a VP- or C-level executive attend a product overview? Has someone in Finance reviewed the ROI study assembled by the salesperson? These actions are much better indicators of the status of an opportunity.
• By truly understanding both the buyer persona (e.g., Small Business, Mid-Market, Enterprise) and the buyer’s stage in their journey (e.g., Problem Definition, Solution Education, Solution Selection), technology can recommend the appropriate collateral to share with the buyer to help accelerate the process.
• A key ingredient to the sales acceleration formula is fostering a culture of experimentation. At HubSpot, we had what I would call a “bottom-up” innovation funnel.
• I also recommend you choose top performers, rather than average performers, to be part of the experiment. What I am looking for in the first experiment phase is a “true negative.” If I put two top sales performers on the experiment and the experiment fails, there is a high probability that the idea wasn’t feasible.
• We measured LTV/ CAC, payback period, salesperson productivity, customer retention, and a few other metrics.
• The “N” in BANT (“ Need”) [is] the most important component of the discovery process.
• We called this qualifying matrix GPCT (Goal, Plan, Challenges, Timeline).
• Salespeople should be thought of as helpful advisors and respected thought leaders.