A data driven approach to Sales
I came to pick this book as I wanted to find out more about running a sales team and my boss recommended this. “The sales acceleration formula” was written by Mark Roberge who was Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot’s Sales Division. He was the first sales guy and helped set up the sales team from scratch.
In my current company, I work closely with Sales but we can’t seem to have a breakthrough. This book really gives me a fresh perspective on how to run sales with structure and data mindset.
Getting the right person in your company is crucial to set up a sales team. Mark explained as a sales leader, you have to hire based on the nature of the job, customer types that we are dealing with and the industry. For Hubspot, it’s the following:
For each criteria, there are weightage and score to calculate final weighted score. This is a pretty rigid way of evaluating a candidate for sales position. Most companies evaluate a candidate based on gut feeling, and they minimise that by having other interviewers join the process.
Mark shared some interview questions to test for these criteria. For example, the candidate is required to read about SEO or blogging prior to interview. The interviewer then runs some scenarios and sees how the candidate is able to apply the new knowledge.
About first sales hire, the most critical value from your first sales hire comes not from the first customers or revenue she generates, but from her ability to accelerate the company toward product/market fit.
He believes in having a proper sales training programme, instead of shadowing the best sales rep. A good sales training programme can be evaluated and scaled in the future. Shadowing the best sales rep might give a wrong idea of “how to best sell the product” because the best rep might embed her own flavour into this process. Also, shadowing is not scalable.
As an internet company, Hubspot’s potential consultants search online for options and dislike cold calling. Hence, sales should act as customers’ consultants instead of hard selling the product to them. As part of the sales training, sales person is trained to feel the pain/skills of the customer. And it’s not just knowing, it’s really getting your hands dirty: setting up blog, optimising for SEO or paid marketing.
2 main points I remember
Another point that I like is how he looks at sales promotion. People say when you promote the best sales rep, you get a bad manager and lose a good sales rep. In order to get promotion, Hubspot’s sales rep need to go through training (again). The training programme sets out some criteria with coaching is the most important criteria. The candidate is then tasked to coach 1 new rep and monitors the performance. Only when the candidate passes the training, they will get promoted.
Usually in internet company, marketing is the one that gives leads while sales would try to convert the leads. Mark suggested to have a SLA between two teams to clearly define responsibility of each team. A lot of time (in my company for example), we just look at lead quantity and very subjective lead quality definition. Mark shifts the concept to revenue. Revenue breakdown to customer types and each user behaviour indicates certain quality/interest in the product (like pdf download, sending enquiry). Every quarter, each team agrees to the marketing amount in terms of revenue.
Marketing shouldn’t focus about the mix of how many/customer types. Mark argues this would ensure Marketing do its job but less excuse for Sales to say because they don’t hit the number of leads. Everyone should be aligned on revenue — the lag metrics. Performance tracking has to be done on a daily basis.