10 Reasons Why You Want to Come Talk to Mark Roberge, CRO of Hubspot

For our Oct 1st Building the Sales Machine (BTSM) event, we have Mark Roberge from Hubspot coming to NYC to speak to us about his experiences building a sales machine.

If you haven’t read the book, we’d highly recommend it.

Preparing with Mark for the event, we decided to go deep on lots of great topics. We’ll be asking Mark to get super tactical about the following major topics:

Hiring
Training
Managing
Lead Gen

To join Mark in person, click here to sign up.

In the meantime, check out 10 awesome quotes from the Sales Acceleration Formula that made us want to get him in here to chat with the BTSM community. Mark’s quotes and our 2 cents below:

Hiring

• Building a hiring profile and process
  • Mark says: “Sadly, when it comes to recruiting and interviewing for their own sales team, they simply wing it.”
  • BTSM says: Time and time again we’ve seen sales teams wing their hiring profile and hiring process. Winging it might work for some sales people, but it never works for hiring!
• Sticking to your hiring profile and process
  • Mark says “The key to the process was discipline, not sophisticated technology.”
  • BTSM says: Nothing replaces discipline, and we’d add that having your team understand the why behind all of the steps in the recruiting process will help them buy-in more!

Training

• Your top performers are not always your best examples
  • Mark says: “They each have what I refer to as “superpowers” in a particular aspect of the selling process. These superpowers often differ across top performers. Having a new hire learn exclusively from one of our top performing salespeople would provide a limited view of the ideal sales process.”
  • BTSM says: Top performers may not succeed by the same skills that everyone else must use. Evaluate which of your performers are using scalable techniques that are skill-level appropriate for the rest of the team.
• Train your sales people to understand your client
  • Mark says: “Salespeople need a high degree of business acumen in order to fully understand their buyers’ goals.”
  • BTSM says: You can’t sell passionately unless you’ve experienced the pain.

Managing

• It’s all about coaching
  • Mark says: “Effective sales coaching by sales managers is the most important lever to drive sales productivity.”
  • BTSM says: Coaching is the number one job of a manager, and its what makes the front line manager so important to the company. They have the most influence over the sales team and can scale or fail with your strategy.
• JUST ONE THING
  • Mark says: “A common sales management mistake is to overwhelm the salesperson with coaching too many skills simultaneously. Pick one skill and focus.”
  • BTSM says: Focus on Just One Thing.
• Let the metrics point you in the right direction
  • Mark says: “Use metrics to diagnose which skill development area will have the biggest impact on a salesperson’s performance. Customize the coaching plan to that skill area”
  • BTSM says: Plain old observation and shadowing only let you see a small portion of what’s really going on with a sales person (call it 20%). Top open up a view into some portion of what that sales person is doing with the rest of their time, you have to use metrics to help with the diagnosis.

Lead Generation

• Cold calling can’t be the only answer
  • Mark says: “Flip the Demand Generation Formula – Get Buyers to find you”
  • BTSM says: Sales people like to act tough, but no one likes cold calling, it doesn’t work for every business, and it won’t work at every stage of your business. At some point you need a lift from inbound, it’s hugely motivating.
• Inbound marketing isn’t a one time thing
  • Mark says: “This does not happen over night. One major mistake companies make when embarking on this journey is a lack of commitment.”
  • BTSM says: We could write a book on this topic. THERE ARE NO SILVER BULLETS! Nothing is easy, and no single sales strategy will ever work quickly.
• You have this talent in your company
  • Mark says: “Your job as an executive is to develop this journalistic capability within your company to drive the modern demand generation process.”
  • BTSM says: The right amount of extra curricular activities can be super motivating in the office. You never one know when you’ll find a blogger on the sales floor, or in sales opps!

 Join us on October 1st, at Foursquare HQ for Building The Sales Machine featuring special guest speaker Mark Roberge. This event is focused on enabling sales leaders in the tech community help each other to solve problems. If you’re working on building the machine come with questions and some tactical advice to share. Early signups still eligible here.