4 steps in the Sales Acceleration Formula

Ever wonder about what makes HubSpot’s sales process successful? Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, shares his knowledge with the world in his book The Sales Acceleration Formula. Here are some highlights of the process:

1. Hire the same successful salesperson every time

Buyers in today’s marketplace hold much more power than they once did. They search for information everywhere they can and are armed with more than ever before. Buyers are looking for a trusted advisor rather than a salesperson.

Use this knowledge to your advantage. Examine the most successful salespeople on your team; then identify and list the characteristics they have in common. Look for those same traits in your new hires — those shared characteristics are the best predictors of success in future team members.

2. Train your salespeople the exact same way

The days of shadowing and ride-along are long gone. What works best with today’s salesforce is a baseline methodology to train your salespeople from the ground up. Start with the buyer’s journey. Put your salespeople in the mindset of the buyer because this will align them with the the buyer’s journey and encourage the salesperson to be more consultative in the process. Finally, use a qualifying matrix to help them understand how to score and prioritize leads.

What about your current salespeople? You can train them, too. In the next two months, challenge your team to bank five cold-calling hours per month and develop a trusted online persona that will help them to meet the buyers where they are. Start discussions in LinkedIn Groups, comment on favorite blogs, retweet their respected people, or write a blog for the company site. At the end of three months, the salesperson will have built up a personal brand and developed trust with their potential buyers. As they continue to keep up the new habits trust and their reputation will continue to grow.

3. Provide the same quality and quantity of leads

How many times have you gotten cold-called and ended up buying the product? How many times have you received an unsolicited email or direct mail and ended up buying the product? On the other hand, how much time did you have a problem and started researching it on Google, blogs, other online resources?

The reality is that the buyer’s journey starts online and you must meet buyers where they are. Draw buyers through your online presence via streams of content. The most efficient way to do you this is through a content production process.

Each month, set aside an hour for interviews with sales leaders, marketing leaders, or engineering leaders to generate content. This interview should generate 1 ebook, 1 landing page, 4 blog posts, 8 Facebook posts and 16 tweets per month. It’s an hour well-spent.

4. Hold salespeople to work those leads using the same process

A new sales manager will see 90 things that are broken and try to fix all those things at once. A better coach will see 90 things that are broken and pick one of two that will have the biggest impact such as a unified follow up process or customizable templates or a 5-step outreach plan.

The better coach will focus on tailoring a coaching plan to those few things. The coaching plan should be set around a metrics-driven culture. Look at the data, and peel back the onion for more insight. Find out the where the breakdown is happening, coach around those gaps and track all the activities and progress in your Salesforce environment so that they can meet measurable goals.

Want to dig deeper into Mark Roberge’s book? Get it here.