The Sales Acceleration Formula. Roberge Mark

suit. Unfortunately, that was not HubSpot's sales context in 2007. Here is what a typical HubSpot sales call sounded like in our first year:

      [Sam Salesperson] “Hi, Pete, this is Sam from HubSpot. I noticed you requested more information on our website. What questions did you have?”

      [Prospect Pete] “I did? Sorry, I do not remember that. What is HubSpot?”

      [Sam Salesperson] “We are an inbound marketing software company.”

      [Prospect Pete] “What is inbound marketing?”

      [Sam Salesperson] “Inbound marketing allows you to attract visitors to your website and turn those visitors into qualified sales leads for your company.”

      [Prospect Pete] “Hmmm. How does that work?”

      And so on…

      This was an evangelistic sale with a not-yet-obvious value proposition and a not-yet-established company brand. It required tremendous education in the market. Unfortunately, high-activity salespeople coming from an established company with a no-brainer value proposition were not equipped with the skills to succeed in our context, even if they had been the top dog in their last role.

      I realized that the characteristics of a top-performing salesperson would be unique to our business. I needed to figure out what kind of salesperson would be ideal for our company. I needed to engineer the ideal sales hiring formula. Fortunately, this engineering process is applicable to any company.

      The ideal sales hiring formula is different for every company…but the process to engineer the formula is the same.

      Here is the process I used.

      Step 1: Establish a Theory of the Ideal Sales Characteristics

      First, I listed the characteristics I thought would correlate with sales success. For each characteristic, I documented a clear definition. What did I mean by “intelligence”? What did it mean to be “aggressive”? My intention was to score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10 for each characteristic. Therefore I needed to define what a score of “1” versus a score of “5” versus a score of “10” represented for each characteristic. For each candidate, I summarized the results on an Interview Scorecard.

      Step 2: Define an Evaluation Strategy for Each Characteristic

      Once I defined the characteristics I was looking for, I needed a plan to evaluate candidates on each characteristic. What behavioral questions could I ask? Would I use role plays? Should there be an exercise for the candidate prior to the interview? How could I leverage reference checks?

      “The ideal sales hiring formula is different for every company…but the process to engineer the formula is the same.”

      Step 3: Score Candidates against the Ideal Sales Characteristics

      Back in the early days of HubSpot, I simply filled out the Interview Scorecard after each interview. The process was not overly sophisticated. I used Microsoft Excel. (We were a start-up – I needed to be “hacky.”) The key to the process was discipline, not sophisticated technology. I documented my findings and learnings as I went, and used them to constantly tweak my approach.

      Step 4: Learn and Iterate on the Model while Engineering the Sales Hiring Formula

      A few months in, I had a handful of salespeople on board. Many were doing great. A few were progressing more slowly than others. By remaining disciplined to the process described in Step 3, I was in an optimal position to learn from these first hires and begin to understand our ideal hiring criteria. I was ready to engineer my company's sales hiring formula. I simply went back to the Interview Scorecards for the top performers and asked myself the following questions:

      ■ Which characteristics do these top performers have in common? Are these characteristics predictors of success here at HubSpot? Once I identified them, I increased the weight of these characteristics.

      ■ Which characteristics do not seem to matter? Which characteristics do not predict success? I needed to decrease the weight of these characteristics or eliminate them altogether.

      ■ What am I missing? I had to think beyond the scorecard and reflect on these top performers. Was there another consistent, meaningful characteristic to be found among them? If so, I had to add the characteristic to the Interview Scorecard and start rating candidates on it.

      I repeated the same process for the salespeople who were progressing more slowly. I adjusted the Interview Scorecard. The sales hiring formula was taking shape.

      As you can see, you do not need to be hiring dozens and dozens of salespeople for this process to be valuable. Reflecting on as few as two or three sales hires can be compelling. That said, if you are truly committed to the $100 million journey, it will take more than two or three great sales hires to get there. Investing in efforts to engineer the sales hiring formula early in the journey will reap significant returns as scale accelerates.

      Once you start hiring lots of salespeople quickly, things get interesting. This was my favorite part.

      After about a year of hiring, I had accumulated enough data points to run a formal regression analysis, correlating the hiring characteristics with post-hire sales success. As a result, much of the subjectivity could be eliminated from the sales hiring formula. Data is your friend, and statistics do not lie.

Figure 1.1 shows the results of the first model.

Figure 1.1 Correlation of Sales Characteristics to HubSpot Sales Success (Results of the First Regression Analysis).

      Upon first seeing these results, I made an interesting observation: the characteristics that are traditionally associated with salespeople, such as aggression and strong objection handling ability, had the worst correlation with success.

      “Statistics suggest salespeople who are intelligent and helpful, rather than aggressive and high-pressure, are most successful with today's empowered buyer.”

      What was happening here?

      In my opinion, the Internet's rise in prominence has caused a shift in power from the salesperson to the buyer. My findings were a statistical representation of that phenomenon. With this shift in power, buyers will no longer tolerate being strong-armed into a purchase. They will respond to salespeople who are helpful, smart, and respectful of their needs.