MAIN IDEA
The prevailing paradigm is that sales management is more of an art form than a science.
Don't tell that to Mark Roberge. While still a student at MIT, he was asked by some fellow students who were in the process of starting a new company to head up their sales team – or perhaps more correctly to be their entire sales team.
With no experience whatsoever in sales, Roberge approached the challenge like any good engineer would. He used a metrics-driven, process-oriented approach to building sales based around five components which seemed logical to him:
That startup ended up being HubSpot and using these five components, Mark Roberge ended up growing HubSpot's revenues from $0 to $100 million in sales and from 1 to 450 employees.
"In today's digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form. There is a process. Sales can be predictable. A formula does exist."
– Mark Roberge
MARK ROBERGE is Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot. From 2007 to 2013, he served as HubSpot's SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services during which time he increased revenue by 6,000% and expanded the sales team from 1 to 450 employees. Prior to joining HubSpot, he was a Technology Consultant with Accenture and held several executive positions with startups in the social media and mobile industries. He is a graduate of the MIT School of Management and Lehigh University where he majored in engineering.
This is a summary and not a critique or a review of the book. It does not offer judgment or opinion on the content of the book. This summary may not be organized chapter-wise but is an overview of the main ideas, view points and arguments from the book as a whole. This means that the organization of this summary is not a representation of the book.
The process for hiring future top performers is easy to engineer. All you need do is develop a profile of the traits of your best performers and then evaluate potential hires to that profile. These metrics aren't that hard to figure out but relatively few businesses ever get around to doing this. Make hiring a scientific process, not a stab in the dark.
"World-class hiring is the most important driver of sales success. A team of top performers will find a way to win under any circumstances."
– Mark Roberge
What's challenging about hiring is the ideal salesperson profile is different for every company. Someone who is a top performer in one company will underperform when hired by another company in another industry. You have to figure out what characteristics will be a good match for your business and hire to that profile rather than solely relying on track records.
The process for figuring out what kind of salespeople will become top performers for you is however always the same:
You figure out what characteristics will equate with sales success for your enterprise. Articulate a clear definition of each characteristic
Identify how to evaluate candidates on each characteristic. This might involve roleplays, exercises, references, interview questions, etc.
Have an interview scorecard where you score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10 for each characteristic. Write this down after the interview.
Once you get a few salespeople on board, go back and figure out how their performance matched your job interview process. Then adjust and improve your interview process based on the data you gather.