BTM Event Video: Hubspot CRO Mark Roberge – What should a sales leader focus on?

Building the Sales Machine (BTM) Event Series: we post clips of the best questions that where answered during our live events, so you can take the best ideas back to your teams and companies for further discussion.

BTM: What should a sales leader focus on from your framework?

Mark Roberge:

A lot of people where surprised when I joined Hubspot as the 4th employee 8 years ago.  I’d never been in sales before, this was my first sales job.  I was working on the side, with the two co-founders, helping them close deals.

Life was crazy, I had two little babies, I had just graduated school and was trying to take any job I could get.  My under grad was in mechanical engineering, I started my career writing code.  I went to school at MIT, so I have this quant oriented lens through which I view the professional world.  So when I took the job building out the hubspot sales team, I wrote down a mission:

 “Predictable, Scalable revenue growth”.

There were 4 tactics that I wanted to use to achieve that mission.  The first was that I wanted to hire the same successful sales person every single time. The second was that I wanted to train them in the exact same way.  The third was that I wanted to provide them with the same quality and quantity of leads every month. And the fourth was I wanted to hold them accountable to working those leads using the same sales process.

I figured that was the machine I was trying to engineer. And if I could nail those 4 items, I would probably achieve scalable, predictable revenue.

Mark is Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot Sales Products. Prior to this role, Mark served as HubSpot’s SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services from 2007 to 2013, during which time he increased revenue over 6,000% and expanded the team from 1 to 450 employees. These results placed HubSpot #33 on the 2011 INC 500 Fastest Growing Companies list. Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. He was also awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year at the MIT Sales Conference.  Prior to HubSpot, Mark founded and/or held executive positions at start-ups in the social media and mobile sector.  Mark started his career as a Technology Consultant with Accenture.