Podcasts about sales acceleration formula

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One of our most listened to episodes, we're bringing back Mark Roberge, Co-Founder at Stage 2 Capital, who shares his sales acceleration formula 2.0 with our SaaStock Founder Members. Mark dives deep into the Sales Acceleration formula followed by his previous company Hubspot. He also answers the questions posted by our SaaStock Founder Membership community. Interested in becoming a member? Apply to SaaStock Founder Membership to supercharge your growth: https://www.saastock.com/founder-membership/Check out the other ways SaaStock is serving SaaS founders

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Mark Roberge is the Co-Founder of Stage 2 Capital and author of The Sales Acceleration Formula. Mark joins the show to discuss the challenges and opportunities for businesses embracing AI. The group dives into the key GTM applications for AI, challenges larger companies have with adopting this technology, and how future regulation may impact development in the field moving forward. Want more Topline? Join the Topline Slack channel to engage with hosts, guests, and other listeners. Don't forget to read the recaps from previous episodes. Are you a sales executive? Get 20% off your CRO Summit ticket with the code TOPLINE. It's happening June 6, 2024 in Boston. Save your spot.

Inscrivez-vous au webinaire du lancement de la formation Yaniro pour un max de cadeaux exclusifs : Ici (places limitées ! )Bienvenue dans le podcast du HUMAN FACTOR by YANIRO, je m'appelle Alexis Eve et tous les mercredis je vais à la rencontre des Startups les plus véloces pour rentrer en détails dans les bonnes pratiques RH qui leur permet de faire du Facteur Humain un levier de croissance plutôt qu'un risque ! Le Human Factor ce n'est pas qu'un Buzzword, c'est aussi le nom de notre premier livre !Les clés de l'alignement entre associé.e.s, d'une organisation adaptée ou encore de la bonne relation à son travail, The Human Factor c'est 100 pages de retours terrain des plus belles startups et de bonnes pratiques actionnables.Vous pouvez retrouver Laetitia sur Linkedin ou la contacter directement par mail : laetitia@greenly.earthSite web de Greenly : https://greenly.earth/fr-frRessources recommandées par Laetitia : Le livre The Sales Acceleration Formula de Mark Roberge Le livre From Impossible to Inevitable de Aaron Ross et Jason Lemkin Le podcast SaaStr de Jason Lemkin Outils recommandés par Laetitia : Mojo pour réaliser ses animationsLe CRM HubSpot

On today's episode we are talking about how to drive growth in your organization. Bocar Dia resides at the crossroads of investing and hands-on guidance for portfolio founders during the initial stages of development, encompassing go-to-market strategies, founder-driven sales, and fundraising. As a founding member of Hootsuite's Enterprise product team, he was instrumental in propelling the business to surpass $150M+ in revenue and establish a workforce of 2,000+ within a swift seven years.Episode Highlights:Gradual Market Penetration: Hootsuite's growth journey from unique verticals to broader markets. Started by targeting sectors with social media needs, like media, building a core foundation.Core Vertical Strategy: Develop a focused playbook for growth. Predictably build pipeline, convert prospects, ensure customer success. Clear ICP, persona, value prop for consistent growth.Scaling New Verticals: Meticulous approach to new markets. Form "target team" to validate pain points, build solutions. Focus solely on understanding challenges.Market Validation: Validate demand before scaling. Refine product for vertical needs. Expand after $1M in sales, integrate into core sales.Iterative Customer Development: Understand new markets through customer development. Validate pain points, gather feedback, partner with lighthouse accounts for solution refinement. Ask for feedback, not sell.Partnership Approach: Form early partnerships with potential clients. Engage lighthouse accounts for product development, validation. Build early customer relationships.Balancing Launch: Controlled launch post refining. Avoid wide launch until sales optimized, predictable process established. Use waitlists for sales strategy tuning.Metrics and Unit Economics: Product viability via unit economics. LTV to CAC ratio for venture-scale. Analyze feedback, demand, economics for pivot, refine, or scale decisions.Strategic Differentiation: Unique entry in saturated markets. Technical or distribution edge. Clear, tangible advantage, backed by data.Quantifiable Value Proposition: Stand out with quantifiable value. Show clear ROI (2X, 3X, 10X) in crowded markets. Compelling ROI sought by executives before product commitment. Top 3 Takeaways:Check out the book series from Winning by Design. Lots of good topics related to different roles. If you're building a company, look at the work of Mark Roberge who teaches at the Harvard Business School. His book, The Sales Acceleration Formula is a good place to start. If you're leading an organization that is more self-serve motion on the customer side, check out the guides from OpenView Ventures.How to get in touch with Bocar:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bocardia/ To find out more about Forum Ventures: https://www.forumvc.com

What is the Science of Scaling Podcast with Mark Roberge #484 In today's episode, we're doing something a bit different and featuring an episode from another podcast. It's called The Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark Roberge. He's the bestselling author of The Sales Acceleration Formula. He's also a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and the Founding CRO of HubSpot. Subscribe to the podcast here https://link.chtbl.com/tsos?sid=podcast.salesbabble Sales Babble shares selling secrets for non-sellers.  Masterful selling is deeply understanding what buyers need, discerning if you can help,  showing what you have, and helping them to make a decision that is both good for their business and yours. See https://salesbabble.com This is a production of Habanero Media https://habaneromedia.net

Hello everyone, and welcome to this podcast episode! I'm Robin Choy, CEO of HireSweet. Each week, I address various recruiting issues such as recruiting outreach, interviewing, employer branding, and career management. My goal is to provide helpful insights to anyone interested in recruitment, whether you're an in-house recruiter, agency recruiter, freelancer, hiring manager. Whether you're just starting out in your recruiting career or looking to enhance your skills, I hope you'll find these discussions valuable!Thanks for listening to A-Players! Subscribe now for freeHow to recruit a top performing Go-To-Market team.

Mark Roberge is the founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital and previously was the Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot from 2007 to 2016.  Mark is also the author of the best-selling book "The Sales Acceleration Formula".The lessons learned over his nine years leading revenue at HubSpot have led to several new endeavors including creating a Sales curriculum being taught at Harvard Business School and founding Stage 2 Capital. We started the podcast by discussing "The Sales Acceleration Formula" which was first published in 2015. The bool was stimulated by a breakfast between Mark and enterprise sales influencer and author, Jill Konrath. It evolved from a concept called "The Art and Science of Sales" to become the basis for the book. The Sales Acceleration Formula is essentially an autobiography of how Mark built and scaled the revenue organization at HubSpot.The presence of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems enabled Sales to become more data-driven, and changed how Mark leveraged that data to inform how he built and managed the sales organization. One of the most interesting perspectives Mark shared was how he and his management team used the data being generated from the CRM. Using the insights from the CRM data changed how HubSpot Sales Managers were able to better coach sales reps based on the "signals" being generated. Foundational to capturing those insights was the need to develop a very well-defined and structured sales process that generated performance metrics at each stage of the sales process.We quickly pivoted to a leading sales technology of the day, Conversational Intelligence. I asked Mark why with the ability to capture and listen to every Sales conversation has not made full sales funnel performance a more data-driven, sale management and coaching process.Mark highlighted one reason is that Sales organizations are often so focused on "chasing the number", that they do not carve out the time to step back, take a strategic planning approach to the future based on historical performance metrics and incorporate that into the planning process. This "reactive mode" cascades and impacts the organizational culture to one of high urgency - low value reactions versus one of high value - low urgency strategic activities leading to increased performance.Another topic we discussed was the 360 lead review process at HubSpot, which lead to the concept of the SMarketing SLA (Service Level Agreement). Marketing and Sales co-owned the pipeline generation and lead development process, and as a result consistently led to analysis of  pipeline generation performance. Far too often, there is significant friction between Sales and Marketing, which can be addressed by leading into the data. This starts with defining what a "lead" really is and starting to measure lead performance and conversion across the entire lead-to-customer process.Finally, we discussed the catalyst for founding Stage 2 Capital. Stage 2 Capital is unique in that the Limited Partners (investors) are primarily successful B2B SaaS Go-to-Market executives who can provide both capital and applied operating experience across each stage of a B2B SaaS company's growth. One of the important findings was the failure rate to scale across different stages of growth is much too high. The Science of Scaling was based on research that Mark conducted across several early-stage companies, and then he applied the "challenges of scale" to the formation of Stage 2 Capital.If you are considering raising funding for your SaaS company, or are just looking at how to more efficiently scale your revenue generation engine at the next phase of growth, the conversation with Mark Roberge is extremely instructive based upon the experience and success of Mark and hundreds of other GTM executives involved in Stage 2 Capital.

Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I'm Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Creating predictable and scalable revenue is any business leader’s dream, but how can that dream actually become reality? Well, as it turns out, there’s a formula for building and sustaining a winning sales team and I’m so excited to have Mark Roberge, who is the author of the Sales Acceleration Formula here to walk us through what that looks like. With that, Mark, I’d love it if you could take a second and introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your background and your book. Mark Roberge: Thanks for having me. I am an engineer by training, I started my career coding and I did an MBA at MIT. I have close to a decade to start my career in more of a data science-like quant background. At MIT I was classmates with the two co-founders at Hubspot and was recruited to be the fourth employee and first salesperson with the aspiration to build a unicorn. This is in the early part of the century, like 15 years ago, and looking back I’m pretty lucky that I had the background that I had and ended up in that company at that time because little did I know that sales were going through a pretty substantial revolution. We were moving out of this sort of pre-internet age where everything was sold via an outside team and no one used their CRM, sales enablement barely existed and we were moving into an era where CRM adoption was necessary for salespeople to do their job. These tech stacks were becoming pretty advanced, we had a lot of data, and we had internet-empowered buyers who just changed the way that sales had to interact with them. It was sort of like the perfect time for a quant with no sales background to build a sales team from scratch. I was blessed to fall into that role and blessed to be surrounded by the right executive sponsorship and mentorship and investor advice to be successful in it. That’s my background and I did that for like 10 years. We took an IPO In 2015 or 16. I then rested and joined the faculty at Harvard Business School where I still teach. I joined full-time and helped build out the sales curriculum. I do teach a couple of classes in sales and growth. More recently, after a couple of years of investing and advising and sitting on boards and that kind of stuff, I was approached by a former Bessemer investor to start a venture capital firm called Stage 2 Capital, which I’m happy to speak about at the end. It’s the first VC firm that’s run and backed exclusively by CRO, CMO, and CCOs from a lot of the software unicorns that are out there. We’re back about 400 CROs and CMOs from Snowflake, Salesforce, Zoom, and those types of companies. OF: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited to have a chance to learn a little bit more about your book. You mentioned that your background is really unique in the sense that you do have such a quantitative lens that you take and your book really walks through that framework of driving predictable and scalable revenue growth from that lens of being really data-driven. You also talked about how sales have evolved a lot since you started that journey of creating that framework and even since you did write the book. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen emerge in the last few years that can make that mission of achieving predictable and scalable revenue a little bit more difficult to achieve in today’s landscape. MR: When I wrote the book at the end of my Hubspot journey, it was really triggered by the fact that I started to get pretty well known and I would get calls from different sales leaders and entrepreneurs starting out with the same questions like ‘What do you look for in your first sales hire? How do you set up your first sales com plan? How do you enable your sales team?' I just told them how we’re doing a Hubspot and they wrote back like a month later, saying wow, we did that and it worked really well, thank you so much. I just thought this is working, let me just put it down on paper for people. I give all the proceeds to a nonprofit, so I was just helping out the ecosystem and even to this day it sells almost just as much every year as it did the first year. I’m very humbled that people still pick it up and still find amazing implementation from it. My own models of it have not changed but evolved a bit because at that time I was like 80 hours a week deep on just Hubspot and wrote about that. Now I’ve applied it to 1000 different data points between my teaching, investing, and consulting. A lot of the principles still apply. As far as the challenges of implementing, I guess I’ll answer it this way and this is something that the book itself didn’t address, but you can read the book, and then you can read some of my more recent work. The book just talks about the model as it was at that point. It doesn’t talk about the order in which you should implement things. That’s been my most recent work. While the book gives you an aspiration of where you want to go, how you hire, how you enable, and how you coach your sales team, there’s a pretty precise order in which you build that system and in fact the optimal answers for each of the system components. Let’s take hiring for example. That changes as you progress from a five-person company that is mostly a product team, to a 20-person company that is really in sales mode, to a 2000-person company that is a very complex organization with alignment requirements. Your hires obviously change even on just the same frontline account executive role. That’s probably the difficulty in understanding the order in which you build the components of the system and how the individual component’s optimal design changes as you evolve. OF: That’s very interesting and I think definitely something that goes beyond the scope of the book too, which is fantastic. I would love to dig into the data component of the framework. Tell me a little bit about just the role that you see data really playing today in helping business leaders be able to gather the insights that they need to overcome some of these challenges that they’re facing today. MR: It’s kind of funny and this is right in the heart of things like sales enablement, rev ops, and just sales leaders in general, which is hopefully a lot of the folks that are out there listening. I always kind of joke and observe that sales are a function, something extraordinarily unique relative to things like product engineering, HR, finance, and marketing, is that success and failure in the role are so quantifiable. It’s really hard to walk into a company and here are our engineers and this is Olivia our number one engineer by 7%. Like it’s really hard to claim that right? But I can definitely walk into a sales floor and say here are our salespeople and this is Olivia and she’s our number one salesperson by 7%. That’s like a feasible statement. You’ve got this function where success and mediocrity and failure are quantifiable and that opens up tremendous opportunities in the way we run the team. It opens up tremendous opportunities to draw correlations between hiring attributes that we’re looking for and how strongly they correlate to success in the role. It presents opportunities for us to use data in our sales playbooks to understand which approaches to the market lead to the most successful and best outcomes. It presents opportunities for us to measure the effectiveness of our frontline managers and how effective they are in coaching and developing our people. To be able to literally say like Olivia is a rock star, but I really think that she can develop in the area of a sense of urgency development with her prospects. In fact, I can quantify it, like I know what she looks like relative to our best-in-class people where her stage 4 demo stage opportunities are converting to customers at a rate of 27% and I know with the right amount of coaching she should be able to get that the 35% and that’s going to translate into an additional $120,000 of quota attainment on her part and a rise in our productivity. That’s the level of discussion we can be at and that’s difficult to enable in other functions. That gives you a little bit of an overview of the application and usage of data in our world. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to that first tactic that you talked about and you mentioned it and a couple of examples here around sales hiring and really the importance of standardizing what those characteristics are that you’re looking for in your company and making sure that you have a consistent approach to hiring for those criteria. I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of your best practices for really getting buy-in on those characteristics as being the right characteristics to look at and really reinforcing that consistency in the hiring process in particular how can data really help in that aspect? MR: What I’m going to talk about is not necessarily like the absolute world-class, but I think it's a step up that’s easy to conceptualize and rarely followed. When it is followed, it translates into a dramatic acceleration in the performance of the team. World-class hiring is studying at the psychological level, psycho graphics and there are some great tools out there like predictive index etcetera. I’ve spoken to world experts on it and sometimes some of them will admit that it might not be worth it to like take, take it to that level, but what we see in the industry is not a very good approach and it comes out in the aggregate numbers. Depending on which study you read, a lot of them tend to center around an average turnover rate and sales annually of 40%. That’s really bad. Every year 40% of salespeople change jobs either because they fail, they’re fired or they fail and they quit or they’re just not happy with their company. It’s really hard to build a business when you’re turning over 40% of your team every year. We’ve got tremendous quantifiable ROI. There are some trainers out there that claim that the cost of a miss hiring sales is over a million dollars and it’s not that hard to justify that calculation. What I hope we can do is try to move away from the like I’m busy in my day and I’m running all over the place and I have this interview with Olivia and two minutes before I walk in the room I read your resume, I sit down and I’m like hey Olivia, tell me about your career, and then after thinking I liked Olivia let’s hire or I didn’t really like her, let’s not hire. That’s where we’re at. That’s where most people are hiring and all I work on people with and it changes their game is actually just sitting back and thinking about the attributes that we see in our best people and the attributes that we see in the people that don’t work out. At least, can we translate that into just a quantifiable scorecard, can we identify the 7, 8, 9, or 10 attributes that we’ve seen, correlate with success and failure? Can we take the time to define in two or three sentences what each one means so that we’re very clear about what consultative selling means, what work ethic means, what intelligence means, and what coach ability means? Can we take the time to quantify what a high score of 8 to 10 would be like, what a medium score of 4 to 7 would be like, and what a low score of one of three would be like so that a new sales manager going into their first interview can actually know what the heck they’re doing, like what they’re asking and how they’re scoring this person? Over time we can actually see correlations between our scorecard and success and failure. That’s where we need to get to. It’s not a hard leap. It takes an hour to put together and a little bit of discipline to execute, but that allows you to get closer to a 10-20% annual turnover as opposed to the average of 40%. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I love that approach and I think you’re so right, it’s about just really defining what success and failure do look like in particular companies and I think a lot of that also nurtures that success a little bit longer terms after a salesperson is hired and is in their career with a company. A lot of that comes down to sales training and that’s an area where enablement can really help. I’d love to hear your thoughts on maybe what some of the common pitfalls are that you’ve seen and how programs are designed and delivered, that may actually prevent that scalability and predictability, and then what are some of the ways that enablement can help to overcome some of those pitfalls? MR: Yeah, I would say the number 1 thing is we know today something that we’ve talked about anecdotally through the work of Gong.IO and some of these new ai tools that the salespeople that listen more than they talk in the first call or the top performers in the industry and the sales people that talk more than they listen in the first call are performing in the least way. Part of the driver of why certain salespeople decide to speak more than and then lesson on the first call is due to the approach by enablement to training. Some enablement teams look at a new feature product that’s being released, whatever, and take what I’d call an inside-out approach of like, okay, what does this product do, what are its features and benefits, let’s put together a sales deck and then let’s show the sales deck to the sales team. Sounds pretty logical. That’s teaching the sales team to pitch, that’s teaching the sales team to talk a lot, that’s teaching the sales team just like go find 50 prospects in a month and just show the sales presentation and that’s my job and that’s completely wrong. The job is to start off and build trust and develop open-ended questions with the buyer to understand their perspective, and to see what they perceive as their problems. To see if their problems are something we can help with and if they are to tailor our pitch to those problems so they really resonate with their context. That’s what true selling is and that’s what our job and enablement are. It's like helping a 25-year-old figure out how to do that. It starts not with what is our product and what are the features and benefits, and let’s build a pitch deck, but it’s more like who is the buyer and what’s the narrative going through their head before they even know what our product is. What are the common problems they have? What are the ones that were good at solving? How do I ask the questions to uncover that? Once I understand their perspective, how do I customize and tailor the description of our product so it resonates with that buyer so they understand how we solve those problems? A couple of tactics that I’ll throw out there are number one, how much of your enablement and training for new hires is about your product versus your buyer. Most people I talk to are like shoot, you know what now I think about it 90% of our training is how our product works. You are teaching your salespeople how to be bad salespeople. Can you spend more time in your training getting your salespeople to walk in the day in the life of the people they sell to? At Hubspot, for example, most of our sales training was just having our salespeople write blogs and do social media and create landing pages and create automation sequences. Like we turned them into markers so that when they got on the phone with their first marketer or business owner that was trying to do this new-age way of marketing, they could empathize with what that scariness was like and talk them through as a peer. So like can we do that, whether we’re doing network infrastructure or selling lab equipment there are always ways for us to like get our salespeople to understand our buyers. The second tactic I’ll say is, instead of making the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook the pitch deck, make the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook, the buyer’s journey. Like, what’s going through their head at the awareness stage when they’re trying to define the problem. Once they’ve defined their problem, what are the different options they’re looking at to solve it, once they know which option they want to choose, how will they make that decision? Let’s teach our salespeople about that and define it and after every single first call, our managers can ask one question which is like where are they in the buying journey? That will force your salespeople to be top performers be discovery, consultative-oriented sellers that first and foremost, understand the context of the buyer. OF: That’s fantastic. It goes right into what my next question was going to be, which was about creating that culture of coaching. You mentioned a little bit of the role that sales management can play in helping to reinforce some of those behaviors with reps, but I’d love to dig into that aspect a little bit more and really hear how sales managers can leverage data to really have more effective coaching conversations. MR: Like most managers, I think do fall into a pitfall, which is the month or quarter is going along, we’re not quite at our goal, we’ve got a couple of reps that are struggling and they’ll say, here’s what we’re going to do Olivia. Invite me to your next five meetings and I’ll do the demos for you. I’ll run the meetings and they become super reps. A lot of things are wrong with that. Number one, you’re not holding your reps accountable for their job. Number two, they get lazy. Number three, they lose confidence because you can do it better than them. A lot of bad things happen and really that’s not our job as a manager. I understand why they do it because that’s how they got successful as a rep, but as a manager, our job is to hire and coach, that’s what it is and it’s up to the rep to succeed. The thing with coaching is that you can’t coach a rep on like 20 things at the time, it’s just not humanly possible to like absorb that coaching. You can do one, maybe two things at a time, and that’s really what the best coaches do. They get a new rep out of training, and usually, there’s like a pretty sizable list of like improvement areas and a good coach will say, I can’t work on all that at once, but here’s the one thing I’m going to work on and they’ll use the data to diagnose that. Usually, if we have basic data of like how many leads are we creating every month, how many become an opportunity, how many become stage three opportunities, and how many become close, we can get some visibility of what the blueprint is for our top performers in the average and where we’re off and that will help understand where we can at least look to diagnose things and figure out what the issue is. What I like to do as a leader is I like to review on the first day of the month all of my manager’s coaching plans with the reps. When I do that review, it forces the managers to have one on ones before our meeting, like in the morning or the day of the first day of the month to have that one-on-one coaching plan creation and schedule the coaching into the upcoming month. So Olivia, if you and I were talking and after reviewing your data together and talking qualitatively about your past month, we do determine that sense of urgency development is the thing we want to work on. Then I’d say great, like why don’t we get together on Friday at three, next Tuesday at nine, and the following Wednesday at noon and you show up to that meeting with a recorded first meeting, and we’ll listen to it together and look at it through the lens of sense of urgency development. That’s a beautiful start to the month, where I’m like, I have confidence that my managers have had that discussion with their reps and we have an entire set of coaching calls set based on data that are attacking the skills that represent the biggest improvement for our team. OF: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic approach as well. I have just one last question for you and it’s really about the last tactic in the formula, which is demand generation. I think a key piece that stood out to me in the formula here was really around the importance of accountability between sales and marketing teams. I’m curious about this in particular because sales enablement can often really be a function that’s kind of in the middle of those two teams, liaison between them, or helping to kind of bridge that gap. I’d love to hear your advice on how enablement leaders can really be that bridge and help sales and marketing teams develop and have that mutual accountability. MR: There needs to be a service level agreement between the two groups and it’s going take a combination of the CEO plus enablement to create that. We just really need the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to agree on their deliverables to each other. We need them to both agree on what is an MQL and how many we need from marketing and we need the sales team to agree to, like if we do get an MQL, how will we act on it, how quickly we call it, how frequently call it, and what kind of conversion rate do we expect out of that. That’s our goal. All of that leads to revenue, so that’s really the role of sales enablement is to work with the CEO and the sales and marketing leader to create that quantitative agreement. One area that you can start with, there’s a lot of different pieces to this, but usually when we’re putting together annual plans, and this is pretty relevant to today here in Q4, we’re pretty good at like saying all right, we want to go from 20 million to 30 million, which means we need to add 10 million top lines and last year our reps averaged half a million in productivity each. So I do the math and I have 10 of them, well that adds up to $5 million. I need to hire another 10 more and that will give me my 10 million. We’re pretty good at that like bottoms-up analysis from the rep capacity standpoint. Rarely do we do the marketing piece. So it’s like, yeah I get that my reps are producing 500,000, but how are they getting there? Well, if you look back on the year you can be like, oh my gosh, well half of our revenue came from marketing, and marketing had a budget of $1 million. They generated 1000 leads and the cost per lead was $1,000. If I had my math right, 20% of those leads became SQLs and 40% became opportunities, and 40% closed, so just using those numbers, I can figure out if we’re going to have another year where half of our new revenue comes from marketing, I can calculate precisely how many MQLs I need. Then, similarly, if half of our leads came from our cold calling team, the SDRs, then on average each one set 210 appointments last year the conversion to opportunity was 30% while the conversion of clothes was 20%, so immediately I can figure out like how many SDRs I need each quarter and what those conversion rates need to be. We don’t do that math, it’s simple math and that’s where sales enablement can play a big role. It’s just like let’s go back to the leadership team, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and just say here’s the plan, this is the blueprint to get there from the demand gen side and that helps both sales and marketing to have a quantitative route in what that service level agreement between the two groups can be. OF: Absolutely. In addition to that, it also helps enablement prove their impact to those executive leaders and be able to get a seat at the table in those conversations as really that strategic liaison between those leaders. So that’s fantastic advice. MR: It’s such an important seat because everybody else naturally has a little bit of political bias in the equation and sales enablement can be that sort of like an unbiased judge and jury that’s just trying to educate everybody on the truth. They just know that these are semi-scientists that are like helping us understand our business and hit our goals for next year. OF: Mark, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. I certainly learned a lot from this conversation so thanks again and I can’t wait for our listeners to hear this. MR: You bet Olivia. Thanks for having me. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro and if there's something you'd like to share or a topic that you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I'm Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Creating predictable and scalable revenue is any business leader’s dream, but how can that dream actually become reality? Well, as it turns out, there’s a formula for building and sustaining a winning sales team and I’m so excited to have Mark Roberge, who is the author of the Sales Acceleration Formula here to walk us through what that looks like. With that, Mark, I’d love it if you could take a second and introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your background and your book. Mark Roberge: Thanks for having me. I am an engineer by training, I started my career coding and I did an MBA at MIT. I have close to a decade to start my career in more of a data science-like quant background. At MIT I was classmates with the two co-founders at Hubspot and was recruited to be the fourth employee and first salesperson with the aspiration to build a unicorn. This is in the early part of the century, like 15 years ago, and looking back I’m pretty lucky that I had the background that I had and ended up in that company at that time because little did I know that sales were going through a pretty substantial revolution. We were moving out of this sort of pre-internet age where everything was sold via an outside team and no one used their CRM, sales enablement barely existed and we were moving into an era where CRM adoption was necessary for salespeople to do their job. These tech stacks were becoming pretty advanced, we had a lot of data, and we had internet-empowered buyers who just changed the way that sales had to interact with them. It was sort of like the perfect time for a quant with no sales background to build a sales team from scratch. I was blessed to fall into that role and blessed to be surrounded by the right executive sponsorship and mentorship and investor advice to be successful in it. That’s my background and I did that for like 10 years. We took an IPO In 2015 or 16. I then rested and joined the faculty at Harvard Business School where I still teach. I joined full-time and helped build out the sales curriculum. I do teach a couple of classes in sales and growth. More recently, after a couple of years of investing and advising and sitting on boards and that kind of stuff, I was approached by a former Bessemer investor to start a venture capital firm called Stage 2 Capital, which I’m happy to speak about at the end. It’s the first VC firm that’s run and backed exclusively by CRO, CMO, and CCOs from a lot of the software unicorns that are out there. We’re back about 400 CROs and CMOs from Snowflake, Salesforce, Zoom, and those types of companies. OF: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited to have a chance to learn a little bit more about your book. You mentioned that your background is really unique in the sense that you do have such a quantitative lens that you take and your book really walks through that framework of driving predictable and scalable revenue growth from that lens of being really data-driven. You also talked about how sales have evolved a lot since you started that journey of creating that framework and even since you did write the book. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen emerge in the last few years that can make that mission of achieving predictable and scalable revenue a little bit more difficult to achieve in today’s landscape. MR: When I wrote the book at the end of my Hubspot journey, it was really triggered by the fact that I started to get pretty well known and I would get calls from different sales leaders and entrepreneurs starting out with the same questions like ‘What do you look for in your first sales hire? How do you set up your first sales com plan? How do you enable your sales team?' I just told them how we’re doing a Hubspot and they wrote back like a month later, saying wow, we did that and it worked really well, thank you so much. I just thought this is working, let me just put it down on paper for people. I give all the proceeds to a nonprofit, so I was just helping out the ecosystem and even to this day it sells almost just as much every year as it did the first year. I’m very humbled that people still pick it up and still find amazing implementation from it. My own models of it have not changed but evolved a bit because at that time I was like 80 hours a week deep on just Hubspot and wrote about that. Now I’ve applied it to 1000 different data points between my teaching, investing, and consulting. A lot of the principles still apply. As far as the challenges of implementing, I guess I’ll answer it this way and this is something that the book itself didn’t address, but you can read the book, and then you can read some of my more recent work. The book just talks about the model as it was at that point. It doesn’t talk about the order in which you should implement things. That’s been my most recent work. While the book gives you an aspiration of where you want to go, how you hire, how you enable, and how you coach your sales team, there’s a pretty precise order in which you build that system and in fact the optimal answers for each of the system components. Let’s take hiring for example. That changes as you progress from a five-person company that is mostly a product team, to a 20-person company that is really in sales mode, to a 2000-person company that is a very complex organization with alignment requirements. Your hires obviously change even on just the same frontline account executive role. That’s probably the difficulty in understanding the order in which you build the components of the system and how the individual component’s optimal design changes as you evolve. OF: That’s very interesting and I think definitely something that goes beyond the scope of the book too, which is fantastic. I would love to dig into the data component of the framework. Tell me a little bit about just the role that you see data really playing today in helping business leaders be able to gather the insights that they need to overcome some of these challenges that they’re facing today. MR: It’s kind of funny and this is right in the heart of things like sales enablement, rev ops, and just sales leaders in general, which is hopefully a lot of the folks that are out there listening. I always kind of joke and observe that sales are a function, something extraordinarily unique relative to things like product engineering, HR, finance, and marketing, is that success and failure in the role are so quantifiable. It’s really hard to walk into a company and here are our engineers and this is Olivia our number one engineer by 7%. Like it’s really hard to claim that right? But I can definitely walk into a sales floor and say here are our salespeople and this is Olivia and she’s our number one salesperson by 7%. That’s like a feasible statement. You’ve got this function where success and mediocrity and failure are quantifiable and that opens up tremendous opportunities in the way we run the team. It opens up tremendous opportunities to draw correlations between hiring attributes that we’re looking for and how strongly they correlate to success in the role. It presents opportunities for us to use data in our sales playbooks to understand which approaches to the market lead to the most successful and best outcomes. It presents opportunities for us to measure the effectiveness of our frontline managers and how effective they are in coaching and developing our people. To be able to literally say like Olivia is a rock star, but I really think that she can develop in the area of a sense of urgency development with her prospects. In fact, I can quantify it, like I know what she looks like relative to our best-in-class people where her stage 4 demo stage opportunities are converting to customers at a rate of 27% and I know with the right amount of coaching she should be able to get that the 35% and that’s going to translate into an additional $120,000 of quota attainment on her part and a rise in our productivity. That’s the level of discussion we can be at and that’s difficult to enable in other functions. That gives you a little bit of an overview of the application and usage of data in our world. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to that first tactic that you talked about and you mentioned it and a couple of examples here around sales hiring and really the importance of standardizing what those characteristics are that you’re looking for in your company and making sure that you have a consistent approach to hiring for those criteria. I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of your best practices for really getting buy-in on those characteristics as being the right characteristics to look at and really reinforcing that consistency in the hiring process in particular how can data really help in that aspect? MR: What I’m going to talk about is not necessarily like the absolute world-class, but I think it's a step up that’s easy to conceptualize and rarely followed. When it is followed, it translates into a dramatic acceleration in the performance of the team. World-class hiring is studying at the psychological level, psycho graphics and there are some great tools out there like predictive index etcetera. I’ve spoken to world experts on it and sometimes some of them will admit that it might not be worth it to like take, take it to that level, but what we see in the industry is not a very good approach and it comes out in the aggregate numbers. Depending on which study you read, a lot of them tend to center around an average turnover rate and sales annually of 40%. That’s really bad. Every year 40% of salespeople change jobs either because they fail, they’re fired or they fail and they quit or they’re just not happy with their company. It’s really hard to build a business when you’re turning over 40% of your team every year. We’ve got tremendous quantifiable ROI. There are some trainers out there that claim that the cost of a miss hiring sales is over a million dollars and it’s not that hard to justify that calculation. What I hope we can do is try to move away from the like I’m busy in my day and I’m running all over the place and I have this interview with Olivia and two minutes before I walk in the room I read your resume, I sit down and I’m like hey Olivia, tell me about your career, and then after thinking I liked Olivia let’s hire or I didn’t really like her, let’s not hire. That’s where we’re at. That’s where most people are hiring and all I work on people with and it changes their game is actually just sitting back and thinking about the attributes that we see in our best people and the attributes that we see in the people that don’t work out. At least, can we translate that into just a quantifiable scorecard, can we identify the 7, 8, 9, or 10 attributes that we’ve seen, correlate with success and failure? Can we take the time to define in two or three sentences what each one means so that we’re very clear about what consultative selling means, what work ethic means, what intelligence means, and what coach ability means? Can we take the time to quantify what a high score of 8 to 10 would be like, what a medium score of 4 to 7 would be like, and what a low score of one of three would be like so that a new sales manager going into their first interview can actually know what the heck they’re doing, like what they’re asking and how they’re scoring this person? Over time we can actually see correlations between our scorecard and success and failure. That’s where we need to get to. It’s not a hard leap. It takes an hour to put together and a little bit of discipline to execute, but that allows you to get closer to a 10-20% annual turnover as opposed to the average of 40%. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I love that approach and I think you’re so right, it’s about just really defining what success and failure do look like in particular companies and I think a lot of that also nurtures that success a little bit longer terms after a salesperson is hired and is in their career with a company. A lot of that comes down to sales training and that’s an area where enablement can really help. I’d love to hear your thoughts on maybe what some of the common pitfalls are that you’ve seen and how programs are designed and delivered, that may actually prevent that scalability and predictability, and then what are some of the ways that enablement can help to overcome some of those pitfalls? MR: Yeah, I would say the number 1 thing is we know today something that we’ve talked about anecdotally through the work of Gong.IO and some of these new ai tools that the salespeople that listen more than they talk in the first call or the top performers in the industry and the sales people that talk more than they listen in the first call are performing in the least way. Part of the driver of why certain salespeople decide to speak more than and then lesson on the first call is due to the approach by enablement to training. Some enablement teams look at a new feature product that’s being released, whatever, and take what I’d call an inside-out approach of like, okay, what does this product do, what are its features and benefits, let’s put together a sales deck and then let’s show the sales deck to the sales team. Sounds pretty logical. That’s teaching the sales team to pitch, that’s teaching the sales team to talk a lot, that’s teaching the sales team just like go find 50 prospects in a month and just show the sales presentation and that’s my job and that’s completely wrong. The job is to start off and build trust and develop open-ended questions with the buyer to understand their perspective, and to see what they perceive as their problems. To see if their problems are something we can help with and if they are to tailor our pitch to those problems so they really resonate with their context. That’s what true selling is and that’s what our job and enablement are. It's like helping a 25-year-old figure out how to do that. It starts not with what is our product and what are the features and benefits, and let’s build a pitch deck, but it’s more like who is the buyer and what’s the narrative going through their head before they even know what our product is. What are the common problems they have? What are the ones that were good at solving? How do I ask the questions to uncover that? Once I understand their perspective, how do I customize and tailor the description of our product so it resonates with that buyer so they understand how we solve those problems? A couple of tactics that I’ll throw out there are number one, how much of your enablement and training for new hires is about your product versus your buyer. Most people I talk to are like shoot, you know what now I think about it 90% of our training is how our product works. You are teaching your salespeople how to be bad salespeople. Can you spend more time in your training getting your salespeople to walk in the day in the life of the people they sell to? At Hubspot, for example, most of our sales training was just having our salespeople write blogs and do social media and create landing pages and create automation sequences. Like we turned them into markers so that when they got on the phone with their first marketer or business owner that was trying to do this new-age way of marketing, they could empathize with what that scariness was like and talk them through as a peer. So like can we do that, whether we’re doing network infrastructure or selling lab equipment there are always ways for us to like get our salespeople to understand our buyers. The second tactic I’ll say is, instead of making the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook the pitch deck, make the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook, the buyer’s journey. Like, what’s going through their head at the awareness stage when they’re trying to define the problem. Once they’ve defined their problem, what are the different options they’re looking at to solve it, once they know which option they want to choose, how will they make that decision? Let’s teach our salespeople about that and define it and after every single first call, our managers can ask one question which is like where are they in the buying journey? That will force your salespeople to be top performers be discovery, consultative-oriented sellers that first and foremost, understand the context of the buyer. OF: That’s fantastic. It goes right into what my next question was going to be, which was about creating that culture of coaching. You mentioned a little bit of the role that sales management can play in helping to reinforce some of those behaviors with reps, but I’d love to dig into that aspect a little bit more and really hear how sales managers can leverage data to really have more effective coaching conversations. MR: Like most managers, I think do fall into a pitfall, which is the month or quarter is going along, we’re not quite at our goal, we’ve got a couple of reps that are struggling and they’ll say, here’s what we’re going to do Olivia. Invite me to your next five meetings and I’ll do the demos for you. I’ll run the meetings and they become super reps. A lot of things are wrong with that. Number one, you’re not holding your reps accountable for their job. Number two, they get lazy. Number three, they lose confidence because you can do it better than them. A lot of bad things happen and really that’s not our job as a manager. I understand why they do it because that’s how they got successful as a rep, but as a manager, our job is to hire and coach, that’s what it is and it’s up to the rep to succeed. The thing with coaching is that you can’t coach a rep on like 20 things at the time, it’s just not humanly possible to like absorb that coaching. You can do one, maybe two things at a time, and that’s really what the best coaches do. They get a new rep out of training, and usually, there’s like a pretty sizable list of like improvement areas and a good coach will say, I can’t work on all that at once, but here’s the one thing I’m going to work on and they’ll use the data to diagnose that. Usually, if we have basic data of like how many leads are we creating every month, how many become an opportunity, how many become stage three opportunities, and how many become close, we can get some visibility of what the blueprint is for our top performers in the average and where we’re off and that will help understand where we can at least look to diagnose things and figure out what the issue is. What I like to do as a leader is I like to review on the first day of the month all of my manager’s coaching plans with the reps. When I do that review, it forces the managers to have one on ones before our meeting, like in the morning or the day of the first day of the month to have that one-on-one coaching plan creation and schedule the coaching into the upcoming month. So Olivia, if you and I were talking and after reviewing your data together and talking qualitatively about your past month, we do determine that sense of urgency development is the thing we want to work on. Then I’d say great, like why don’t we get together on Friday at three, next Tuesday at nine, and the following Wednesday at noon and you show up to that meeting with a recorded first meeting, and we’ll listen to it together and look at it through the lens of sense of urgency development. That’s a beautiful start to the month, where I’m like, I have confidence that my managers have had that discussion with their reps and we have an entire set of coaching calls set based on data that are attacking the skills that represent the biggest improvement for our team. OF: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic approach as well. I have just one last question for you and it’s really about the last tactic in the formula, which is demand generation. I think a key piece that stood out to me in the formula here was really around the importance of accountability between sales and marketing teams. I’m curious about this in particular because sales enablement can often really be a function that’s kind of in the middle of those two teams, liaison between them, or helping to kind of bridge that gap. I’d love to hear your advice on how enablement leaders can really be that bridge and help sales and marketing teams develop and have that mutual accountability. MR: There needs to be a service level agreement between the two groups and it’s going take a combination of the CEO plus enablement to create that. We just really need the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to agree on their deliverables to each other. We need them to both agree on what is an MQL and how many we need from marketing and we need the sales team to agree to, like if we do get an MQL, how will we act on it, how quickly we call it, how frequently call it, and what kind of conversion rate do we expect out of that. That’s our goal. All of that leads to revenue, so that’s really the role of sales enablement is to work with the CEO and the sales and marketing leader to create that quantitative agreement. One area that you can start with, there’s a lot of different pieces to this, but usually when we’re putting together annual plans, and this is pretty relevant to today here in Q4, we’re pretty good at like saying all right, we want to go from 20 million to 30 million, which means we need to add 10 million top lines and last year our reps averaged half a million in productivity each. So I do the math and I have 10 of them, well that adds up to $5 million. I need to hire another 10 more and that will give me my 10 million. We’re pretty good at that like bottoms-up analysis from the rep capacity standpoint. Rarely do we do the marketing piece. So it’s like, yeah I get that my reps are producing 500,000, but how are they getting there? Well, if you look back on the year you can be like, oh my gosh, well half of our revenue came from marketing, and marketing had a budget of $1 million. They generated 1000 leads and the cost per lead was $1,000. If I had my math right, 20% of those leads became SQLs and 40% became opportunities, and 40% closed, so just using those numbers, I can figure out if we’re going to have another year where half of our new revenue comes from marketing, I can calculate precisely how many MQLs I need. Then, similarly, if half of our leads came from our cold calling team, the SDRs, then on average each one set 210 appointments last year the conversion to opportunity was 30% while the conversion of clothes was 20%, so immediately I can figure out like how many SDRs I need each quarter and what those conversion rates need to be. We don’t do that math, it’s simple math and that’s where sales enablement can play a big role. It’s just like let’s go back to the leadership team, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and just say here’s the plan, this is the blueprint to get there from the demand gen side and that helps both sales and marketing to have a quantitative route in what that service level agreement between the two groups can be. OF: Absolutely. In addition to that, it also helps enablement prove their impact to those executive leaders and be able to get a seat at the table in those conversations as really that strategic liaison between those leaders. So that’s fantastic advice. MR: It’s such an important seat because everybody else naturally has a little bit of political bias in the equation and sales enablement can be that sort of like an unbiased judge and jury that’s just trying to educate everybody on the truth. They just know that these are semi-scientists that are like helping us understand our business and hit our goals for next year. OF: Mark, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. I certainly learned a lot from this conversation so thanks again and I can’t wait for our listeners to hear this. MR: You bet Olivia. Thanks for having me. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro and if there's something you'd like to share or a topic that you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

If you're struggling to accelerate your sales, don't worry, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, it's hard. It takes time and effort. But what if you learn a tool that will speed up the process of accelerating your sales and sustaining a year-on-year growth environment? In today's podcast episode, I will introduce you to the sales acceleration formula and share a case study that will show you how I used the tool to deliver double-digit growth in a healthcare company within a year.

Mark Roberge is a leader in the sales world. He is currently co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, the first venture capital firm run and backed by over 300 GTM executives. He is also a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark served as founding CRO at HubSpot from $0 to IPO. He is author of best seller “The Sales Acceleration Formula” which became a guideline for start-up companies in growing their revenue and building a winning sales team.  He's in the show to introduce to us his playbook which revolves around Product Led Growth for B2B startups. Get ready to learn some insightful lessons from this renowned industry expert.  Show Notes [0:44] On creating a playbook for his PLG startup  [3:32] The best of class teams have to set up a cross-functional team of marketing plus product and put it under the product [8:44] How category creation has become such an important part of entrepreneurship  [12:27] PLG tends to focus the organization on usage first as opposed to revenues [14:03] The reason why free user attention is the hardest metric  [14:49] Pro tip: Find a scalable, cost-effective way to generate users [16:35] Mark talks about the last part of the value metric, monetization  [18:42] You don't start there as a seek funding business doing growth.  [19:42] What the best class engineerings do is specialize their engineering teams and product teams by roadmap to improve growth [21:22] Create your growth team to be cross-functional with both product engineering plus marketing capabilities [21:36] Set your company up to be data-driven rapid experimentation, an organization that focuses on the Northstar  About Mark Roberge As the SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for HubSpot, he has led hundreds of his employees on how to apply data technology and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand. Mark understands the ins and outs of marketing which is also a skill that he loves to share with others.  Links Hubspot The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge Profile Mark's LinkedIn

Qu'allez-vous apprendre : 13.20 : La recette miracle pour atteindre 80% de closing

In this interview with Jane, originally recorded for the Hands On Business with Podcast with Hakeem Adebiyi, Jane talks about how the pandemic accelerated the rate of change in consumer behaviour, and caused saturation across the expert space. As a flood of new people enter the market, succeeding online has become more challenging than before. Today, standing out for your difference is the only way to thrive.  The appetite for learning and development is strong as businesses and individuals try to stay on the front foot of new trends, developments and informations.  Veteran marketers like Jane know that the only way to survive in this increasingly saturated market place is to separate from ‘the market' to create your own market.  Jane also shares her story of growing and selling a brand identify agency to a US communications group, and how she strategically led that business to get chosen first by the premium clients in their market.  Hakeem Adebiyi is the founder of Sales Acceleration Formula - a software that helps companies who struggle to get sales people to follow a systematic process which impacts significantly the time it takes to move from opportunity to sale.  Has your business changed because of the pandemic? And what did you put in place to meet those challenges?  ABOUT THE HOST: Jane Bayler is a serial entrepreneur, investor, speaker, event host and business scale up expert. She had a 20 year history in global media and advertising, before becoming a serial entrepreneur herself, with multiple businesses in real estate, marketing and education. Having grown and sold a £6M brand identity business to US communications group Interpublic, today she is most passionate about and committed to serving other entrepreneurs – helping them grow their businesses and achieve their best lives.  Enquire about working 1:1 with Jane, book a call here: https://bit.ly/2Z07DML Join Jane's free Masterclass to discover her Triple C HyperGrowth system - to scale up your business and attract your ideal clients, here: https://idealclientsuccess.com/masterclass

Welcome back to From Vendorship → Partnership, Season 2: Seller's Journey! Our guest this week is the one and only Mark Roberge: co-founder at Stage 2 Capital, author of the best-selling The Sales Acceleration Formula, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and former CRO at HubSpot Sales. To say the least, Mark has a ton of incredible sales insights to share (way more than we could cover in 20 minutes!) Subscribe for more content like this, and check out the Stage 2 Capital Accelerator that Mark mentions in the episode. About Mark: Mark Roberge is Co-Founder at Stage 2 Capital, the first VC fund run and backed by go-to-market executives. He is also Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark served as Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot where he scaled annualized revenue from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark is the author of the bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula, and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Boston Globe, TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review, and other major publications for his entrepreneurial ventures.

Putting together the right sales team is no easy task, especially in the government space. Rick Wimberly, a government sales consultant, takes 9 Mistakes of Building a Sales Team created by Mark Roberge, former Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot and author of The Sales Acceleration Formula, and relates them to building sales teams to win government contracts. Mistakes include: hiring salespeople with your gut, under-utilizing the sales comp plan, mis-aligning sales and marketing and making forecasting rather than coaching a sales manager's priority.  Rick says he's seen all of these mistakes, as well as others from Roberge list, as he's consulted companies that sell to government. 

Mark Roberge is the Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital, Sr. Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and author of the bestselling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. In this podcast, he'll outline some of the most common SaaS sales potholes when scaling from $0 to $100 million and how to avoid them. Sponsors: https://shortcut.com/saastr https://www.litmus.com/saastr https://flatfile.com/saastr/  

Sam is a LinkedIn influencer. She's one of the most sought after trainers & consultants in the world of sales and marketing. Sam started helping people with their sales challenges not too long ago and quickly built it into a leading organization. She's since then worked with lawyers at 95 of the AmLaw 100 firms. She's here on our show today to share us how lawyers can do LinkedIn right. This isn't just about LinkedIn of course. It's about the psychology of your clients, the LinkedIn algorithm, and what sets you apart as a lawyer. It's about what to write about and how to connect with others to get business coming your way. There are some great insights in this episode if you're looking to up your LinkedIn game. Resources from this Episode: Find Sam on LinkedIn here. Get the LinkedIn for Lawyers Course. Learn more about Samantha at her website. Book recommendation: The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge. Help Us Out! If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen to your podcast)? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. We also love reading your reviews! Click here for the guide on how to do the reviews if you're lost. Thank you – we really appreciate it! Resources: Get the LinkedIn for Lawyers Course. We're launching applications for the January 2021 Build Your Book Academy. Consider signing up to get updates. The Authentic Lawyer Blog is filled with short emails sent bi-weekly with great ideas and voices to help you build your law practice your way. Read it, and subscribe to get new posts your way at blog.buildyourbook.org. If you have any comments or would to join as a guest on our podcast or nominate someone, send us a note at buildyourbook.org/nominate. ----- Other Links to Listen to this Podcast: Anchor Spotify Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Amazon Music Pocket Cast Breaker

This episode's guest on the SaaS Revolution Show is Mark Roberge, Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital. Mark discusses his updated Sales Acceleration Formula with Alexander Theuma, CEO of SaaStock. This episode is sponsored by Capchase: capchase.com/saastock Become a SaaStock Founder Member - join a private community of ambitious SaaS founders scaling to $10M ARR. Apply now: https://cutt.ly/2ECKuDW

On the fifth episode of The Basement Entrepreneur, Jerry (@criticaljumper) and Ismail (@ismailkhalilr_) speaks with Liam Howlett, the CEO of Safety 1st Aquatics and a serial entrepreneur, to discuss his journey out of the basement and the lessons he learned from building multiple service and gig businesses. We also dived in on EdTech and the problems with traditional education.  - - - - - - - - -  We would love to hear your feedback and if you would like to be featured on a future episode. please message us on IG at @thebasemententrepreneur.  - - - - - - - - -  Show notes:  (0:45) Guest Intro  (2:00) Liam's entrepreneurial journey  (6:45) Building and scaling Safety First Aquatics  (9:50) Why you should sacrifice revenue for cash flow at early stage  (10:30) Choosing your team  (10:58) What Liam learned from building a bond fire business  (11:20) Compete for a contractor's team when you build a gig business  (12:15) Evaluating and picking business ideas  (14:05) Fear of failure  (14:26) Running startups is way too fun (16:48) Failures that changed Liam (19:15) Build upfront processes that can scale 10x to avoid churn  (21:00) Tools that Liam recommends  (26:00) Business moats (28:00) Why traditional education does not work  (29:50) Three ways people learn  (33:33) Epiphany of needing a new way to learn  (33:15) How educators can change  (42:25) $$$ Multi-million prep book business  (43:20) Jocko Willink and Extreme Ownership (45:30) The Sales Acceleration Formula  (48:48) The problem of overchoice  (50:15) Making out of the basement  (53:03) Working and quitting Papa John's  (59:15) You can learn a ton from your day job/side hustle  (1:02:30) What Liam would have done differently  (1:10:10) B2B sales hack       

A leader in the sales world, scientist of modern selling, bestselling author, 3X varsity athlete and currently the managing partner at Stage 2 Capital, Mark Roberge started out in life by hiding his intelligence because he wanted to fit in - the seeds of an unlikely career journey being able to build skills around and relate to a broad spectrum of people and organizations. Mark's grandfather, a World War 2 Veteran, semi-pro baseball player, and janitor at a bank taught Mark not to take education for granted and make the most out of the opportunities he had in life.Running miles at just over 4 minutes in Track, along with playing Soccer and Tennis, Mark's athletic roots also had a big influence on his career. Mark got accepted to MIT for undergrad and almost went, ultimately deciding not to go because he wanted to pursue a life of balance. (He found himself back at MIT later in his educational path) He studied mechanical engineering because he was great at math and was always told he should be an engineer. Mark chose to work at Accenture right out of college, and after getting placed at a startup was hooked on startup culture and the entrepreneurial spirit because of the pace of innovation and the financial upside. Mark shares how one of the co-founders of Hubspot invested in his startup with one stipulation: that Mark would spend time helping him at Hubspot which lead to an unlikely role given his background in engineering in Sales and eventually becoming CRO. Mark also shares about being an advocate for mental health after being diagnosed with PTSD after experiencing the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Today he hopes to normalize getting treatment for mental health. About Mark Mark Roberge is an Advisor to HubSpot and former Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot's Sales Division. He is the bestselling author of the award-winning book, “The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100 Million”. Mark is one of the instructors for HubSpot Academy's Inbound Sales Certification and also a Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing in the second-year MBA program.Prior to his role as CRO, Mark served as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services at HubSpot, increasing revenue over 6,000% and expanding the team from 1 to 450 employees. As a result, HubSpot placed #33 on the INC 500 Fastest Growing Companies list in 2011.Named one of Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World, Mark has also won the Salesperson of the Year award at the MIT Sales Conference in 2010. He was a semi-finalist in the 2005 MIT $50K Business Plan competition and was awarded the Patrick McGovern award for his contributions to entrepreneurship at MIT. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.Mark's Links Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrobergeCheck out Mark's “Science of Scaling” here: https://blog.stage2.capital/science-of-scalingBuy a copy of Mark's bestselling book: “The Sales Acceleration Formula”: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Acceleration-Formula-Technology-Inbound/dp/1119047072To learn more about Jake Dunlap and Skaled, please visit the links below.Jake Dunlap Personal Site - http://jakedunlap.com/Jake Dunlap LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/Skaled - https://skaled.com/Skaled LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/skaledJake Dunlap - Twitter - https://twitter.com/JakeTDunlapJake Dunlap - Instagram - http://instagram.com/jake_dunlap_Jake Dunlap - Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/JakeTDunlap/Skaled  - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsw_03rSlbGQkeLGMGiDf4Q

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Malvina from Silverfin join us. Malvina, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Malvina EL-Sayegh: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to join you on the podcast today. My name is Malvina and I’m the Head of Sales Enablement within Silverfin. Silverfin is a SaaS, B2B company. It’s a startup scale-up disrupting the accountancy sector and the status quo that accountants are used to for the longest time. I’m heading up sales enablement at Silverfin. SS: Fantastic. Well, I’m so excited that you’re here. In fact, I heard your podcast, which is called #stayhuman, and in it, you discuss what it means to be a great salesperson and how to do so by focusing on the human side of sales. From your perspective, what does it mean to humanize sales and why is that necessary in today’s environment? ME: Yeah, that’s a really great question. I think sales has changed so much over the years. I mean, if you look at how sales was done even 10 years ago, it’s a completely different ball game today. The buyer or the prospective buyer just requires and needs so much more from the seller. Actually, in a lot of these deals in a lot of these organizations, you’re really acting more so like a consultant to them, rather than just a vendor and selling a solution. I am really passionate about being human within sales. What that really means is using the innate traits that we have within us. Those are things like empathy, communication, listening, and not focusing so much on the close. I think when salespeople focus so much on the numbers and hitting their quota for the quarter or for the year, it almost becomes a numbers game. What salespeople have to do is really remember that ultimately, we’re in a human-to-human type business. We’re dealing with individuals and it’s not that organizations buy from us, it’s usually individuals that buy from us. By really leveraging things like empathy, showing your empathy, making those good judgment calls, communicating effectively, listening, which is a huge one because salespeople have this tendency to potentially go on a rant and maybe not listen to what the other person is saying because we’re so eager to get our message across. But what salespeople really have to do is just take a step back, listen, and actively listen, which is challenging in itself, but really take a step back and remember that we’re dealing with other individuals, and for them buying is just as challenging as selling is for us. SS: It absolutely is, buying has become extremely difficult. Now, you mentioned some of the key human-centric skills like empathy, but why are those the skills that salespeople need to be successful today? ME: Yeah. I think if you look at the way that sales has changed and evolved over the years, back in the day, salespeople were just information givers in the sense that the information wasn’t available on the internet. If you wanted to research product, you had to ask around, you had to ask people who had the know-how. Nowadays, if you look at any buying process, actually by the time that the potential buyer interacts with you, they’re already more than 50% in the entire sales process, which means that they have already done their research. They know everything about your company, they have the facts, and oftentimes salespeople have to almost act as information checkers, or actually validating that the information that the prospect has found online is accurate. In order to really communicate and build that element of know, like, and trust, which is so important in sales because ultimately, we buy from people who we know, like, and trust. If you look at just those three elements, how can you effectively build on them and build that element of trust with your customer? You can do that by showing empathy, by really communicating with them, actively listening, asking the right questions and really taking a step back so that the best interest of the prospect is always in mind. I think salespeople sometimes forget that it’s not about us. It’s not about us selling a particular product or service. It’s not even about us hitting that potential number at the end of the quarter, even though that’s what we want to do. Ultimately, to really make that buying experience as enjoyable and useful for the prospect, you really need to bring out those human elements so that you can stand above and beyond other salespeople who potentially aren’t doing those things. SS: I love that. Now you mentioned that salespeople have to transition out of being information-based. You actually did an interview where you talked about the transition from being information givers to meaning makers, which I loved. In the midst of all the change that has occurred in the past year with the shift to virtual, and now we’re actually transitioning back into in-person or hybrid environments, how can salespeople help to create meaningful experiences for their customers during this time? ME: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think if we rewind the clock back to say a year, what is it a year and a half ago now when COVID really started, making that transition for a lot of salespeople from being able to meet customers in person to then having to do meetings fully remote was a huge game-changer. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of salespeople actually, struggled with that. You’re used to sitting in a room with someone, potentially walking to the conference room, grabbing a coffee, you’re able to read body language and potentially have slightly more meaningful conversation. When COVID happened and salespeople had to move to this fully remote environment, we had to be, or we still have to be a lot more in tune with what’s going on. We don’t see the full body; we don’t see the full person that we’re speaking to. I see everything basically from the waist up. We have to really look out and see what are the facial expressions? What’s the body language or even just the hands telling us? What’s the tone of voice? We have to be really in tune with what the prospect or potential customer is saying to us. I think if we look at meaning-makers, and why I think that’s so important, it goes back to what I said previously. In the past, salespeople were just giving out information. We were just talking about the features and then maybe linking them back to benefits. But everyone already today is well aware of the features of your product. I mean, they just have to go to the website, and they will have a whole list of the features and capabilities of your potential solution. I think the reason why salespeople play such a crucial role in this is because they are answering the question, which is, “so what’s in it for me?” Ultimately, that’s what the potential buyer wants to know. It’s not about the features, it's what’s in it for me, what does that mean, where is the value? You’re basically taking all this information that you have, the prospect has, and you’re really turning it into meaning for them. What does it mean in their particular situation? What does it mean for their business? How is that tying into the objectives, into the overall strategy of the organization? I think if you look at why people buy, it’s usually to align with that strategy, with that objective. What capabilities are they missing? The salesperson really comes in to add that meaning and tie in the capabilities to the overarching strategy of the organization. SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Now, I do want to for our audience pivot this a little towards the enablement lens. You wrote an article on LinkedIn where you talked about how many customers are just overwhelmed with all of the information that is out there and available. How can enablement help salespeople cut through the noise to provide value rather than just more information like you just were talking about. ME: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think what we have to realize collectively across any organization, whether you’re in a corporation, in a startup, or in a scale-up, is that our potential buyers, our potential customers, they don’t need just a whole lot of information. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do as salespeople is cut through the noise. I think if you look at the number of emails, messages, social media channels, even slack messages in the workplace, there’s a lot of noise out there. Ultimately, the role of enablement is to equip salespeople with information and content that they can share with their prospective buyers that will help cut through the noise. It really has to be tangible; it has to be aligned with the buyer’s journey; it has to be aligned with where they are within our internal sales process. If we are in a discovery phase with a potential prospect, we want to be asking the right questions, but oftentimes salespeople need guidance. They need someone to almost hold their hand and say, look, potentially this is what you should be asking, this is what you should be looking out for. Maybe at this stage, it’s great to share a case study. It’s great to share an experience that potentially another customer has had with your organization. I think where enablement really comes into play is making sure that the content that we’re sharing out with our customers, and also internally, is tailored, cuts through the noise, and is exactly what the salesperson and the customer needs. SS: Yes, I love that. Now, the other thing that you talked about, you wrote an article on LinkedIn and you talked about behaviors that salespeople can control to improve their success. One of them I loved a lot and I wanted you to talk about that to our audience, and it’s the ability to be coachable. How can enablement people, help salespeople see the value in coaching and help them buy into the whole process? ME: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of Mark Roberge's book, which is called the “Sales Acceleration Formula.” I highly recommend it to everyone, but the reason why I love it is because Mark Roberge really talks about this aspect of being coachable. When making that first sales hire or second sales hire, the key thing that he looks out for, and he almost recommends that others do the same, is this element of coachability. How quickly can a salesperson take on feedback and really put it into action? Ultimately, where enablement becomes slightly challenging is we’re dealing with salespeople, and salespeople always think one, they know it all, and two, they don’t need any help. We’re almost dealing with an audience that is slightly difficult in the change management aspect of things. I think where enablement really comes into play to help salespeople is knowing what’s in it and being able to say what’s in it for them. Your potentially providing training or you’re building out content. I think this element of what’s in it for them, how is this going to benefit them? How is it going to make them better in their sales role? How is it going to allow them to have more intelligent conversations with their customers? That has to be the key selling point and I think when you deal with an audience like salespeople, you really have to start small to get their buy-in. Then, what you’re able to see really is, are they coachable? Are they taking onboard the small pieces of information and content that you’re providing to them? I think so often where we go wrong is, a new person will come into enablement, and they will roll out an entire program that lasts for say two months. It’s a huge time commitment from the salespeople and that’s potentially when you can lose them. If you start in small increments, you’re then able to really look back and see, are they taking onboard what you have shared with them? SS: I think that’s a fantastic example. Actually, that goes to my last question a bit. We’ve talked about human-centered skills, and we’ve talked about behaviors for sales success, but how can sales enablement practitioners track the impact of those things on sales success? How do you use those metrics to inform the design of your enablement programs going forward? ME: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that’s always a tricky question when comes to enablement. The way that I look at it is that enablement really has a correlation with revenue and ultimately any kind of training or content that you’re rolling out really has to tie in very closely with the business objectives. That is the number one thing that I look at. If someone within the organization has an idea for a training, my first question is how does it tie into the business objectives? What is the outcome and how are we going to measure success? You can look at that correlation with revenue. Ultimately, if you’ve launched an enablement function and we know that there’s a correlation with revenue and you’re able to end the year on a high, that’s awesome. Then there are smaller metrics that you can use. Tying back to that element of coachability, are people really implementing and putting into practice what you’re teaching or sharing with them? If you do a knowledge check or if you do a review or some sort of certification, have they actually retained the knowledge? I think just a point to add on here, it’s not that you roll out one training and it solves the issue. That’s never the case. Training always has to be done in small sizes; it has to be done in increments. Maybe there is an idea for a training, but actually you’re probably going to have to break it down and scatter it in. Otherwise, the truth is people are just going to forget the content. Finally, it’s also that token of appreciation that comes from salespeople. I think that random thank you when they have learned something new and more importantly, when they were able to actually start using it in their conversations, on a personal level I think that puts a smile on any practitioner or people within sales enablement, that just makes them smile. You really have to look at where it ties into the business objectives. Is it aligned with revenue? Are you capturing and actually checking that people have retained the knowledge and are they putting it into practice? SS: I love that. Malvina, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I learned a lot from you on our podcast, and I think your podcast is fantastic, so thank you again for making the time. ME: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Neste episódio, batemos um papo com a Jéssica Miller, Account Manager Lead da Uber Eats Brasil sobre processos de gestão e liderança de times. Ela se aprofundou na sua experiência com vendas, tendo passado também pela Rock Content e construído uma bagagem profissional muito rica. Você encontra a Jéssica pelo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/millerjessica1/ . Para acompanhar a marca da Uber Eats Brasil, acesse: https://www.instagram.com/ubereats_br/?hl=pt-br // Referências: livro A Regra é não ter Regra - a Netflix e a Cultura da Reinvenção, de Erin Meyer e The Sales Acceleration Formula, de Mark Roberge. Gruvcast #03 apresentado por: Gabriel Lira https://www.instagram.com/gabriellira/?hl=pt-br // Edição e Design por: Taís Andrade https://www.instagram.com/taisndr/?hl=pt-br // Siga a Gruv em: https://www.instagram.com/gruv.com.br/?hl=pt-br e acompanhe https://www.linkedin.com/company/gruv/

GET A 20% OFF FOR https://projectcor.com/es/ (COR): Just Mention SaaS District to Anybody on Their Team & Start Using Your AI Management Software Solution Today Santi Biblioni is an entrepreneur based in the valley, co-founder & CEO at COR, an AI management software solution for creative professionals, agencies & consultants. Prior to COR he founded https://santibibiloni.com/balloon-group.com (Balloon Group), one of Argentina's fastest growing digital agencies, among many other businesses. Today he continues to grow COR and is a Sales and Fundraising mentor at https://santibibiloni.com/500.co (500 Startups )as well as speaker in big technology, advertising and entrepreneurial events. During this interview we cover: 00:00 Contentfy, Your On-Demand Content Team (Sponsor) 02:07 - Process from Conceiving the Idea to Building COR 04:17 -  ASEA the Argentinian Entrepreneurs Association & Why is Needed 06:18 - Getting COR to the Valley & into the 500 Acceleration Program 09:08 - Changing the SMB focus to Enterprise  12:34 -  COR right now in term of Size 13:44 - leveraging AI for Creative & Professional Teams 15:22 -  Is COR for Every Creative Business or Agency? 18:56 - How is COR Different from Other Solutions? 20:33 - Scale & Growth With COR, What has Worked? 24:52 - Metrics to Pay Attention for Product Scale 27:30 - Leveraging & Choosing the Right Sales Channel 32:00 - Biggest Challenges Santi is Facing Right Now 33:15 - Instrumental Resources for Santi's Success 29:50 - Advice Santi Would Tell his 25 Year old Self 33:52 - Instrumental Resources for Laith 36:35 - What does Success mean to Santi Today 39:10 - Get in Touch with Santi Mentions: https://projectcor.com/es/ (COR) https://www.asea.org.ar/ (ASEA) https://500.co/ (500 Startups) Books: https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwiytuG2l__vAhVCA-cKHfdaA2MYABABGgJwdg&ae=2&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESQeD2UUQg6zkZhOog_86VQvyXw5XmcSDukwq3crtq6q31Q7xLa_YJPNQcADQbivSpCI8ZR5Vlu9ja2z3jq32cb_eo&sig=AOD64_0q7fmLl3lY9XyHUuHWx67Mn6ocxg&q&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwiy19i2l__vAhVjFTQIHdljDiUQ0Qx6BAgGEAE&dct=1 (The Sales Acceleration Formula) https://predictablerevenue.com/ (Predictable Revenue) People: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ (Mark Roberge) https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronross/ (Aaron Ross) https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcosgalperin/ (Marcos Galperin) Terms: https://www.whatmatters.com/faqs/okr-meaning-definition-example/ (OKR's) https://productcoalition.com/tracking-one-metric-that-matters-omtm-458fba975288 (OMTM) https://www.netpromoter.com/know/ (NPS) Get In Touch With Santi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-bibiloni/?locale=en_US (Santi's Linkedin) Tag us & follow: https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ (Facebook)  https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital (LinkedIn)  https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (Instagram)  https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/) More about Akeel: Twitter - https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber (https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber) LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar (https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar) More Podcast Sessions - https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast (https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast)

J’ai rencontré, à distance, Guillaume Moubeche, co-fondateur & CEO de Lemlist, un outil de sales automation et de cold emailing.Créée en 2018, Lemlist, c'est : Plus de 5 millions d'euros d'ARR (Revenu Annuel Récurrent) en 2 ans et demi. Une super team de 35 personnes.Une boite à l'international avec des clients dans plus de 85 pays.Avec Guillaume, on a échangé pendant un peu moins d’1h, sur de nombreux sujets, notamment : Quelles ont été les grandes étapes de Lemlist ?Comment passer de 0 à 5 millions d’euros d’ARR en +2 ans ?Comment a-t-il vécu l’ascension rapide de sa boite ?Plus de 5000 abonnés en 5 mois sur Youtube, quelle est sa stratégie sur ce réseau ?Un grand merci à Guillaume pour ce super échange

Resources: ✅ Join the Sales Revolution: If you’re ready to do sales differently, you’re in the right place. This community is for entrepreneurs and sales pros to connect, grow, + learn the new (and highly improved) connection-based way of selling. https://www.facebook.com/groups/salesrevolutiongroup ✅ Visit the Stage 2 Capital Website https://www.stage2.capital/ ✅ Get a copy of Sales Acceleration by Mark Roberge https://amzn.to/3cxnf0Y When salespeople begin their pitch with the budget, chances are, they are driving away prospects. The question now is, how can you persuade buyers to avail of your business offers?   If you still haven’t mastered your persuasion skills, Mark Roberge and I will discuss the techniques on how to understand your buyer’s behaviour before you talk business with them. In this episode, we will dig deeper into considering their problems and giving them their needs instead of the usual selling approach.   All of these and more in this episode. Tune in now!   In this episode, we cover:   Introduction [00:00] The beginning of Mark Roberge’s career as a salesperson [3:13] How did Mark clinch the Salesperson of the Year Award in MIT [4:19] Taking Hubspot from $0 in revenue to $100 million [6:07] The Sales Acceleration Formula [8:06] Top characteristics of a successful salesperson [9:53] Understanding the human behaviour to have them engage with you [13:21] The sales training formula [14:32] The goal, plan, challenge, timeline (GPCT) matrix [19:07] Earning the trust of the buyers [21:19] Knowing the most important questions to ask to the prospects [23:09] ✅ If you're looking to take your sales to the 7th level, book a “Clarity Call” below and let’s see if you're a good fit for our sales training program!

Pauline Malt est Head of Sales SMB chez Malt.Dans cet épisode, on parle de :Ce qu'elle fait chez Malt et qu'est-ce que c'est Malt.Comment elle organise sa semaine de travail.Ce qu'elle sait sur son métier aujourd'hui qu'elle aurait aimé savoir quand elle a commencé.L'apprentissage de son plus gros échec professionnel.La chose qui l'a aidée à accélérer l'apprentissage de son métier.Les ressources qui l'ont aidée dans sa carrièreSon conseilSes ressources :- 3 podcasts : Growth Makers, Dans l'Arène et Le podcast de The Sale Game : Le Podcast de la vente B2B- Les livres : The Sales Development Playbook de Trish Bertuzzi et The Sales Acceleration Formula de Mark RobergeInscris-toi à la newsletter :Tu veux plus de contenu sur la vente comme celui-ci ? Rejoins les 633 commerciaux qui sont déjà inscrits aujourd'hui

Byron discusses two of the five traits of great salespeople from The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge. Find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Acceleration-Formula-Technology-Inbound/dp/1119047072

Mark Roberge is the Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital, Professor at Harvard Business School, former CRO of Hubspot, where he grew the company from 0 to $100 million. The author of the “Sales Acceleration Formula” and “Science of Scaling,” and in this episode, he reflects on what to pursue professionally. In this episode, Mark provides a systematic approach to the very important questions if a company is going to be a unicorn or a dud. When to scale the sales team? (if so) How fast should we scale? This episode is a must-listen if you are in product-market fit or ideas on how to scale faster as we dig into different parts of the business to find Go To Market fit. I hope you enjoy it.

Yoni Kozminski scaled an Amazon business from 2 to 5-million and built a Phillpines team and sold it to Thrassio. Sellers get stuck deep into their Amazon business, but how do you focus your day and get out of your business.Yoni has a decade spent in building digital strategy. We speak a lot about using talen to grow your business.Consulting business: www.weareescala.comTalent business: multiplymii.com Multipliers recommended book: https://www.amazon.com/Multipliers-Revised-Updated-Leaders-Everyone/dp/0062663070/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Multipliers&qid=1610986636&sr=8-1Keys to success: Hired a recruiter.Hire your replacement/multipy yourselfRemove yourself from the deliverable Put it on paperScale vs growth: Scale is staffing to the right level at the right time. How can Amazon/eCom sellers get out of the daily grind and remove themselves from the business? Give a score of all tasks from 1-5, 5 is critical, 1 don't need to be there. How competent is the person that could replace you incrementally.First step to make change is awareness. Your time should not be spent on immediate task delivery. Define the document.What is an easy way that people can delegate tasks/understand how to delegate the right tasks to their team members? - Depends on the DNA of the busienss and people.Sales Acceleration Formula book: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Acceleration-Formula-Technology-Inbound/dp/1119047072/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=sales+acceleration+formula&qid=1610987654&sr=8-5Mark Roberge categorizes talent into 5 areas: https://hiredna.com/these-are-the-top-5-traits-to-look-for-in-a-sales-rep-based-on-a-mountain-of-research/CuriousityCoachabilityWork EthicIntelligencePrior SuccessBook recommendation 3 - Traction: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=traction+book&qid=1610988056&sr=8-3VisionairyIntegratorIf someone is looking to sell their Amazon business, what would be some of the things they should consider when going to market?Be in it to win it.“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”― Abraham LincolnContact Yoni at yoni@multiplymii.comSupport the show (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/myamazonguy)

Connecting with people and helping them accomplish their dreams is priceless. Today's guest on Coffee with Closers is here to prove that close rate and revenues are not everything. Meet Mark Roberge - founder and MD of Stage 2 Capital, author of “The Sales Acceleration Formula” book, and Harvard Lecturer. Mark is also a 4th employee of HubSpot who expanded its revenue from $0 to $100 million and helped to transform it into the innovative​ marketing company it is today. In this episode, you'll learn what it's like to build a sales team in a marketing tech company, hear some fascinating HubSpot stories, and learn a few important lessons about business growth. How to align marketing and sales to get the best results? Why should you beware of premature growth? What to look at before you invest in a company and what does it have to do with customer success? Will AI replace the sales reps any time soon? Enjoy the episode! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ►Visit Stage 2 Capital website https://www.stage2.capital/ ►Find Mark Roberge on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ ►Get your copy of “The Sales Acceleration Formula” here: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Accelera... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This series is brought to you by OneIMS - a leading digital marketing agency helping businesses win new customers. ► Request your FREE marketing ROI audit at https://www.oneims.com/ ►Follow OneIMS online! Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/OneIMS/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oneims/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oneims/ If you enjoyed this video, please share it. To make sure you never miss an episode of Coffee with Closers, please subscribe.

Keepsakes, momentos, treasures, heirlooms — whatever you call them, everyone has certain things that they hold dear. For many people, hand-written notes fall into that category. In a world filled with 240-character tweets, rapid-fire text messages, and a stuffed email inbox, getting a hand-written note means more than ever. Even if it comes from a brand.   Personalization is one of the buzziest words in ecommerce, and every business is trying to find a way to give its customers the best, most personal experience possible. David Wachs is helping them with that.David is the CEO of Handwrytten, which uses robots to send personal, hand-written notes, which have a 300% higher open rate than other types of communication. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, David explains why personalization is the way of the future. Plus, he dives into the thinking behind subscription-based services and what it takes for your subscription to stand out to investors. David also shares the advice that he received from Conan O’Brien that has stayed with him his entire life. Main Takeaways:This is Getting Personal: Over the last few years, consumers have started seeking more personalized experiences. There are many ways to create those experiences in-store and online, but ecomm businesses have a personalization advantage due to the data they have access to. Brands that can tap into that data and then follow through are the ones that stand out.   Subscribe Here: Subscription services are popping up everywhere. When done correctly, subscription services provide a recurring revenue model, which is something most investors look for. However, creating the right model takes time, effort, and experimentation, and it’s important to be willing to put in that work to find the model that is best for you and your customers. Here’s Some Advice: When one piece of advice sticks with you 20 years later, that’s something worth paying attention to. Tune in to hear what words of wisdom from Conan O’Brien have inspired David every step of his journey.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show, we have David Wachs, the CEO of Handwrytten, spelled with a Y. David, welcome.David:Thank you so much for having me.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on the show. I just went down a great wormhole of watching your robots write letters. I think that's a great starting point to hear how you came to be at Handwrytten. What brought you to found it?David:Yeah, so this is actually my second venture. My first one was in the text messaging space. So, I started that one before the iPhone came out. We rode the wave of mobile technology with the iPhone and all that. By the end, we were sending millions of messages a day on behalf of major brands, like Toys R Us, a lot of brands that are now bankrupt, but no fault of ours, but Toys R Us, Sam's Club, OfficeMax, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc.David:What we did was we helped them connect with their customers through text messages. And then we also did iPhone apps and Android apps and all that, but our core was really text messages. What we found was, it really, really worked. I mean, these were not spam messages. These were people opted in, so they actually wanted to receive Abercrombie & Fitch offers, etc, straight to their cell phone. When we sent out those offers, they'd have literally lines out the door.David:We worked with Tropical Smoothie Cafe, which is a big smoothie shop chain. Every time they sent out an offer, I'd walk into a Tropical Smoothie. I'd say, "How's this mobile thing working?" They didn't know who I was, and they'd say, "Oh, my gosh. Every time we do it, we have to staff up, because we sell so many smoothies." So, I knew we had something good. But at the same time, I helped create a monster, because everybody nowadays is getting inundated with probably 50 text messages a day from family and commercial texts and right now, political texts, several hundred emails a day.David:I think the average office workers receives about 150 emails a day and spends 28% of their time sorting through all that email. And then you add stuff like Twitter and Facebook and Slack and all the Instagram, all these other electronic forms of communication. Maybe I'm just old, but for me, it all just becomes noise.Stephanie:It's very noisy right now, especially with the political texts that I'm getting.David:Oh, my God.Stephanie:I'm getting like five a day. Stop it. I don't want that anywhere.David:I know, I know. It all just becomes noise. The average 35 to 44-year-old receives nearly 1,600 texts a month. The average 18 to 24-year-old receives 4,000 a month. So, what I know and what you know is no matter how personalized that email or that text looks... Hey, David, thank you so much for your purchase of this coffee grinder or whatever. ... that text was automated or that email was automated. We immediately discount the value of it, right?David:Half of them or way more than half, I never even read, because you just know it's automated junk. And then junk mail, the slick stuff that comes in your mailbox goes directly to your trash can. But what I realized right before leaving, my last company, is handwritten notes not only do they get opened, but they get treasured. I have a bookshelf behind me at my last job that had the handwritten notes I received. My salespeople had all the handwritten notes they received. What I wanted to do was when I sold my last company is I wanted to send handwritten thank you notes to my employees and send handwritten thank you notes to my best clients, thanking them for helping me build up this company and sell it and all the rest.David:I started doing that. I sat down with the best intentions. Very quickly, my hand got sore or I ran out of stamps or I screwed up a card and I had to get another one. I just realized there had to be a better way. So, that's a long explanation on how I ended up with Handwrytten, which is what we have today. What Handwrytten is a combination of software on the front end and then robots on the back end. So, you visit handwrytten.com or use our iPhone app, Android app, Zapier, Salesforce.com Integration, which is a big integration for us, and I know a sponsor of the show, HubSpot integration, all these ways to get your handwritten notes into the system.David:And then we use robots, real robots that we have a patent pending on and I can get into how we develop those, but they're custom robots we built, robots holding real ballpoint pens that actually then write out the notes and mail them on your behalf. The end result is completely indistinguishable from a human.David:We're doing this for large brands and small brands and individuals. Consumers can go on and send their mother a birthday card, for example, all the way up to major brands.Stephanie:Though your mom might know. She'd be like, "That's not your handwriting, Stephanie." Do you guys have any tech that maybe could mimic handwriting, where I could go in there and write up a couple words, and then your robots come in and write it similar to my handwriting?David:So, not exactly. What we do is if you really want your handwriting recreated, we have worksheets for you. It's like you're back in middle school. You have to fill in all the letters and all the numbers multiple times, because we need multiple variations, and we need ligature combinations. So, like two Os together, two Ls together. Do you cross your two Ts with one crossbar or two? We take all that into account. We create a very robust handwriting just for you, but it's an expensive onetime thing. So, pay for it once, it's yours. It's in the system. You can use it as much as you want, no additional charge. So, yeah, but most of our clients or businesses not you sending to your mother. So, for them, it doesn't really matter as much.David:Honestly, I dissuade people from creating their handwriting style, because it is so expensive.Stephanie:Very cool. So, tell me a little bit about maybe some case studies or the ROI that some of your clients are seeing when they send out a note that looks personalized versus just a typical letter, something that's written up by a computer and is very obvious?David:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have a bunch of stats here, but I don't want to constantly give you footnotes on the stats. So, if I say any stats that are of interest to any of your listeners, just visit Handwrytten.com. That's Handwrytten with a Y. You can pull up all the resources and double check, be a fact checker, etc. But handwritten on envelopes, just the envelopes, have a 300% or a three-time greater open rate than printed envelopes. You just Google that stat and that pops up everywhere. And then also response rates are anywhere from 20 to 50% higher.David:We work with a bespoke suit company based in Canada. They send out coupons every year around the holidays. Those coupons come with a handwritten note from their CEO and his handwriting style with his signature. Those coupons have an 18% redemption rate when usually the company's coupon redemption rate is closer to the 3 to 5% rate. So, it's been very effective for them.David:We have other clients... Let me see here. We have some retention improvements. So, we have a client that does meal box or actually snack boxes for offices. Basically, they'll send you a huge box of snacks every two weeks with like beef jerky or crackers and cookies and all that. What they do is if they accidentally send your office the wrong snack box, they'll follow up with a handwritten note and the right snacks. Now, obviously, the additional snacks help increase retention, but the handwritten note doesn't hurt.David:What they find is if they screw up a client and they send them this snack box, that customer ends up having a greater lifetime value than if they never screwed up in the first place.Stephanie:That's smart. I mean, not only are you getting more times to get in front of that customer, but then you can show them how great the customer experience is even when things go wrong. Yeah, it seems like you'd be a lot more memorable by actually messing up. That's pretty smart.David:Yeah, and then we have some side effects of these, because most people just get one or two handwritten notes a month now, not like the good old days when they receive a bunch. People literally Instagram and tweet these things. So, we work with a company called VNYL.David:What they are is they are a vinyl record subscription service. So, if you're really into old school vinyl, they will look at your Spotify account and your other... I don't know about Pandora, but your other music services. They'll see what you listen to. And then they'll send you vinyl records that they recommend based on your habits. With those vinyl records, they'll include a handwritten note written by us. So, every day we'll write up a whole bunch of their handwritten notes, send them back to VNYL. They'll get inserted with these orders. Not only people love those notes, they then post them on Instagram and on Twitter. That creates a viral aspect that then helps drive more business back to VNYL.David:We've seen the same thing with a morning YouTube show. It's one of the largest morning YouTube shows on the planet. They're a client of ours. They were launching a fan club, where you'd pay 5 or 25 bucks a month or whatever to be a part of their fan club. The first thing they'd send you was this handwritten note from the two hosts of the morning show.David:What's funny is they didn't change up the language on that note at all. Everybody got the same note with the exception of dear Stephanie or whatever, but the rest of the note was identical. All these people are posting these photos of this note to Twitter over and over again. I mean, it's the same note just different names over and over. People were so upset if their note did not arrive within a few days. You know what I mean? They were so looking forward to receiving a note from these two YouTube guys.Stephanie:Are there any backlash on that? Because I could see some people feeling like maybe they were tricked, or especially earlier, when you're talking about retention. If someone is sending out a set of vinyl records every month and see similar handwriting or the exact same one every single time, it seems like there could be a risk of someone saying, "Hey, this isn't actually authentic. You tricked me." Have you seen that backlash, or how do you guys approach that when it comes to a subscription model with someone who's maybe sending out a same snack box every month with a note in it that people will eventually be like, "Oh, yeah, this is obviously not a person writing it. It's the same every single time"?David:Yeah, that's a great question. So, with VNYL, they've got a number of personalities that are the box curators. So, there's like 10 some odd people that are responsible for making these recommendations. Each one of those people was assigned one of our handwriting styles. So, if you get a note from Cody, it'll be in Tenacious Nick. Our handwriting style is called Tenacious Nick this month. And then next month, you get a message from Suzy, it might be in Chill Charity. The following month if you get one from Cody again, it'll be back in Tenacious Nick. So, you'll associate Tenacious Nick with Cody. And then that's how that works.David:We have not seen a backlash. With the morning YouTube show, I was shocked that they didn't see it because they weren't... We vary stuff on the notes. So, in fact, we worked with a home fitness gym thing. They wanted a note from their founder included with every one of their products. They were annoyed with us that there was variation in the writing. We said, "Well, this is-Stephanie:A good thing.David:"... this isn't a print product. Every line's not supposed to identically look like the other card." They were just not a great client for us, because of that. They wanted everything to be exactly... That's not how people write.Stephanie:Yeah, that's actually the exact question I was going to ask. Do you incorporate errors or smudges? How do you think about building the technology behind the scenes to make it more real?David:Yeah, for sure. So, we actually built our own font engine for one, leveraging some best of class technologies underneath it all. But we do stuff like the left margin of the card is not straight. So, it's not like every letter of every line starts on the same exposition as the line above it. There's what we call jitter. It moves in or moves out very subtly, but a couple of points. A point is a 72nd of an inch for those that don't know, but yeah. So, we move those letters in and out, so that there's some variation there. We also do the same thing with interline or intraline, I always screw that up, but the spacing between lines.David:So, one line might be slightly closer to the line above it and slightly farther from the line below it than the next one and vice versa. So, there is some line spacing stuff going on there. Then, like I said, the letters themselves alter quite a bit. We've got at least four or five copies of every letter plus ligature combos. So, you might have three copies of an L, but then we also have three copies of two L's together. So, there's a lot of variation in going into our handwriting. We get this a lot. We don't curve the text. So, there is a little bit of maybe over precision on the text is fairly straight.David:Now, the page might be slightly rotated, so that the text runs up the page ever so slightly or down the page ever so slightly, but it's not like the text is going to be on a roller coaster and go up and then down and back again. It's relatively consistent. We are working on that, but it has not been a problem. It's still very much passes most people's internal Turing tests of what looks human versus what looks robotic. So, yeah, we don't want to overdo it. The line jittering and the left margin jittering is all very, very subtle. So, that it's not like creating some uncanny valley that looks totally bogus. You know what I mean? So, those are some of the things we do there. We work with a mattress company. In every mattress box, there's, "Thank you so much for buying our mattress."David:And then there was what I call a doodle. So, they made I think like eight of these little pieces of art. So, the words, "Thank you for your mattress," were not in one of our handwriting styles. It's a direct replica of somebody writing that. And then below that, the doodle is a direct replica of somebody drawing a doodle. So, it could be moon in the stars or there's one of somebody sleeping in a bed with a little thought cloud showing what they're dreaming of, a little cat.David:What was cool about that is with eight variations, if you buy two mattresses from them, one might have one little note from one guy in it and then the next mattress might have a note from somebody else in it. So, it looks really, really real. And then you post those to Twitter. It really shows up well there. So, that's what I recommend doing. If you're doing the same note over and over in volume, let's just mix it up a little bit. It doesn't cost you really anything more after you get going. You have some great variation.Stephanie:I saw you guys moved to having a subscription model, which a lot of guests who come on the show, they talk about thinking about doing that or some of them have recently. How did you guys know it was the right time to move into a subscription model?David:That's a great question. You're the first person to ask me that.Stephanie:Good.David:Yeah, so there's a number of reasons we did that. I will be bluntly honest, because I think it's of most value to everybody. Number one, I've self-funded Handwrytten to date for the last six years. I intend to continue doing that. However, we were just written up in the Inc 500. We had a good placement in the Inc 500. That created a lot of interest by investors. One thing investors are looking for is a recurring revenue model. While most of our clients recur every month, we have like solar panel installers that send thousands of messages a month. It's not structured as a recurring revenue model. It's just whatever you do, you pay for the next month, you don't do anything, you don't pay anything for it. So, we wanted to come up with a structure for a subscription model that would work.David:This is more the PR-friendly answer, but they're both totally true. On the flip side, we have customers that wanted to send a lot of notes a month but didn't want to do them all at once and didn't want to do a huge pre-pay buy. So, before this, there were two ways to get discounts. One was to do a huge pre-pay, where you say, "Okay, I'm going to send 10,000 notes for the next couple months, and I'll pay for that at a discount;" or go on our website and bulk upload a spreadsheet of 10,000 notes. For a lot of people, those two models don't work. What if I'm sending 10 cards a month, but they're spread out over the course of a month? I mean, I'm still sending 10 cards, can't they get a little bit of a discount on that?David:So, we tried to come up with a model that serves them. It's tough, because unlike an email provider or a CRM provider or anybody else, we have hard costs. Forget about the cardstock and the labor that goes into every card and all that, we have a 55¢ stamp on every card. That's expensive. You know what I mean? So, it took us years to think of a way that would make this work. What we decided was you prepay for credit. That credit, it goes on your account. So, you pre-pay 35 bucks, you get 35 bucks of credit on your account. But that credit also gets you a 15% discount on all orders for the month, so not just on the orders you spend the $35 on. After you exhaust that 35 bucks, you still get that discount moving forward for the rest of the month.David:So, that was the model that we came up with, because we wanted to provide value, we don't want to rip anybody off, but we needed a recurring revenue option. It is strictly an option. You can use our service for the rest of your life without ever using one of these subscription models.Stephanie:I think the one thing that came to mind was I've been listening to a lot of different interviews of SaaS founders, talking about how the subscription model, the future is not as much about getting into a long-term contract. It's more actually pulling back to where you only pay for what you use. It's not actually locking you into a contract anymore, because a lot of people are nervous about that or maybe prepaying. So, were there any surprises that maybe you guys have seen within the last week and a half as you implement this or pushback from customers or anything where you're like, "Oh, we weren't expecting that"? The consumer maybe thought this one thing, but actually, our plan was different. We adjusted it. Anything that you had to change after launching?David:Yeah, there's a few things. Nothing that was a got you and nothing we're really changing. It was more interesting. Okay, so we had somebody cancel their plan today. They signed up and then immediately canceled. So, if you sign up and you get the 15% off, that's 15% off the cards. That's not 15% off gift cards, which should go without saying, but maybe we have to add some language to the FAQ and all that, because I mean, that would be an arbitrage opportunity for somebody. You go on our website. You buy a Visa card for 15% off. You then take that Visa card and buy more Visa cards for... You know what I mean? So, that's just crazy town.Stephanie:It's good you didn't figure that out the hard way.David:No, no, this pre-pay for a while has always locked you out. I mean, when you pre-pay for something, you're pre-paying for the service, not for gift cards. It clearly does not work. I mean, it could be a huge issue. So, that was one. We had a woman that was very upset that she didn't get a discount on her gift cards, and we refunded her. We have a money back guarantee. So, if anybody uses our service and they don't like the service, they don't like the handwriting, they don't like the card quality. They don't like the subscription, whatever, we'll just give you your money back.David:I think more companies need to broadcast their money back guarantee, because even if they don't think they have one, they have one. On our website, we have our money back guarantee. Before that, if anybody called and complained, we still gave them their money back. We just didn't advertise that we had a money back guarantee. So, we gave the service without getting the benefit, if you know what I mean. Side point. So, point number one was people were shocked that you don't get a discount on gift cards creating an arbitrage.Stephanie:One person, but yes.David:Yeah. Point number two, I'm surprised that... So, we have a 10% plan, a 15% off Plan and a 20% off Plan. We might go 25%. But I'm actually surprised so many people subscribed for 10% off. I didn't realize 10% off would move the needle where people would be willing to subscribe. But if you're in that area where you send that many cards, why not subscribe? So, that's great. I'm glad people are using it. In fact, it's our most popular plan right now.David:So, that was two, and then three, which I expected. But my expectation was realized was people we have a cancel at any time type offer. So, we have a lot of people signing up for the 10% off plan, sending five cards, and then canceling the plan. That's fine. If they want to do that, I'm not going to stop people from doing it. It's more important to us to be transparent and create a plan that has no lock in and deal with the people that are just trying to take advantage of it. If they want to do that, fine.Stephanie:Yeah, I mean, it also seems like that you're still getting that sale and you'll probably be remembered in the future. They're like, "Oh, that was a good experience. Okay, I'm going to go back again.” So, maybe it's not as harmful as... Even though initially, you might be like, "Oh, that's annoying," but maybe the future customer that you wouldn't have otherwise had.David:Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's totally fine. I've still sold them five cards or whatever it is. So, it's no big deal. It's funny how people will go out of their way to save 10%, 10% for me doesn't really move the needle but whatever.Stephanie:I know. Yeah, that's very interesting that, 10% moves people to act like that. I think the biggest thing that you are also saying is like the clarity in the subscription model, which I think is really important and that a lot of companies don't get right from the start, because they can make really confusing ones.Stephanie:So right now, it also seems like there could be... Well, twofold, either a big opportunity in direct mail or it's noisier than ever, because brands know that people are home and they're starting to do direct mail where maybe they weren't doing that a year ago. So, how are you thinking about direct mail right now and making sure that your notes are getting opened? Is there still an opportunity, or is that dried up with where we're at right now?David:So, I will say we are the largest handwriting provider in the world. Based on our volume, I will tell you there is room for improvement. We have very large brands using us, but it's still just a drop in the bucket of everybody that could use us. I think a lot of brands just don't even know it's an option.David:There's the BCG matrix, which is like the hardest thing to sell is a new product to a new customer. If you're an office supplier and you start selling your existing customer a different type of pen, well, they're an existing customer and they've already bought a pen from you. So, that's an easy sell. If you're selling a new customer a pen, people know about pens do an easy sell. But if you're selling Joe on the street that you've never met a handwriting service, it's very hard. So, there is a bunch of that. We're doing our best to raise awareness. That's been targeting quite frankly, a lot of Facebook advertising. We used to just go after Google and SEO, SEO, that type of stuff. But now, we're trying to drive awareness through Facebook and LinkedIn and all the rest.David:But yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity for brands to do this, because nobody is doing it or very few are doing it in a consistent, structured manner where some of our clients come to us and do a one-off campaign or one-off promotion, and then they'll say, "Oh, that was the greatest promotion we've ever done. We'll reconsider it again next year." You're thinking, "Why is it a promotion in the first place?" That should be an ongoing part of your CRM outreach strategy." Right now, we're developing a whole program just for automotive dealers to do just that, where you buy a car, you immediately receive a handwritten thank you. A couple weeks later, you receive a service offer, birthday card, happy holidays card, etc. It just repeats without the dealer even having to think about it. I think that model of moving it away from being a promotion to being a part of your CRM strategy is really what needs to happen.David:But a lot of other online brands actually have the advantage over traditional retail, because they have the home addresses of the clients where the retailers may or may not depending on if they're in the loyalty program. So, online brands have this huge benefit of creating a one-to-one personalization opportunity through handwritten notes that brick and mortars might not. So, there's that. And then also right now, it's at the disservice of large B2B brands, because they might have your work address, but then they don't have your home address. So, they're left out of the shuffle too. But even before this COVID crisis, we were seeing online brands take much better advantage of this than in-store.David:I can give you a perfect example here. We work with a very high-end perfumery that makes a very expensive cologne and very expensive perfume. Everybody that's buys this cologne and perfume from their website, they received a very beautiful handwritten note, thanking them for their purchase, etc. But if you walk into a department store, I walked in there with my wife and kids. We're walking through the mall, and we walked into this department store prior to COVID. I found the product and I was showing it to my wife. A store rep came over and said, "This is the product." I said, "Oh, yes, thank you. I'm just showing to my wife because we send out your handwritten notes." She said, "No, you don't, I have to send my own handwritten notes." I explained what I meant.David:She said, "As a store rep, we're supposed to send handwritten notes, but we're too busy talking to customers like you, finishing up a sale, cleaning up the merchandising of the department, doing whatever else is required. We never get around to it. So, even though we have the best intentions in place, because it's not automated for us, we don't get to it." We've been pushing this perfumery to offer the same service to their in-store experience, which would create a much better personal one-to-one experience than the online only.David:Where we've done a really good job of this or really the client that we have... It's all about the client. It's a high-end luxury leather goods company. They make handbags, purses, shoes, that type of thing. Every time you make any purchase whatsoever in one of their retail outlets, a handwritten note goes out from our service. But it's signed by the store clerk that you worked with or it has their name and their phone number at the bottom of the note. So, we automated what this perfumery didn't, basically. We tied it to the end. But short answer your question is I still think there's a huge opportunity here. Quite frankly, people are very lonely right now. Any handwritten mail I think will get savored and opened and really showing that-Stephanie:They need a good handwritten note.David:They really do.Stephanie:Now's the timeDavid:Yeah, people have the time for it. I think at an abstract level, so two things. One, maybe they might not believe it's actually handwritten if they start getting thousands of these a day or something, which will never happen. But they might say, "Oh, gee, this is not actually handwritten." But that doesn't stop people when they get their Christmas card from the president, depending on what election year it is. But if they get their Christmas card from the president, they probably realize the president didn't sit down and sign a Christmas card to them. But it almost doesn't matter. It's the thought that counts and there is that they went above and beyond just laser printing a note. They figured out a way to send me something that seems really personal.Stephanie:So, I wanted to circle back to what we were talking about earlier about investors and how you were self-funded for the last six years. I want to hear a little bit about why you're thinking about bringing on investors now and what that thought process is like.David:So, this really has more to do with David Wachs than Handwrytten. So, this is my second venture. My first company, that text messaging company, also was self-funded. I built that up and I was able to sell that off and do pretty well. That was a true startup. There were a lot of nights where it was just me in an empty room with a two-liter diet Mountain Dew sitting by my side as I program.Stephanie:Nice, healthy.David:Classic, stereotypical startup image, I lived that. But that company actually took off a lot faster than Handwrytten. This time, I decided, "Okay, well, I'm just going to invest my own money, I'm going to build it up." I never really considered venture until this year when we got on the Inc 500. The problem is or the problem I see is we're in a bit of a doughnut hole. Had we gone for venture early on, we would have been great, because then we would have had an idea and no track record. We would have built up this company.David:We would have taken up an S ton of cash, garbage truck cash. We would have invested all of this advertising and built it up really fast. But instead of doing that, I grew profitably and organically, I reinvested profits back into the company, so our growth trajectory is much slower. Because of that, now venture capitalists don't even really want to talk to us. Oh, you've only grown at this rate, not 50 times. I'm like, "Well, yeah, because I've grown smartly and profitably."Stephanie:That seems to be a focus, the tides are turning a bit. I mean, there was, for a long time, just grow as quick as you can, we'll give you a bunch of money. You don't even have to figure out the business model. Do you even have a business? If you want to pivot halfway through spending all the money, it's fine, but I am starting to see a shift now, where, yeah, they're looking for companies actually grow sustainably, at least some VC firms around here. So, I don't know if you experienced that yet.David:Honestly, I've been so busy. So, we entertained a few VC phone calls. They were very, very nice people and very, very big firms. They basically said, "Oh, well, you haven't grown enough this year." I said, "Well, COVID has been going on. So, there's that." Because not a lot of our clients were retailers, so we lost that business, etc. So, to answer your question, part of it was I've actually worked in VC. I've worked for two different VC firms, but I've never taken VC.David:I thought it would be good for me personally to go through that experience of receiving VC, having somebody else to report to from a funding perspective. And then potentially down the road, really working for a VC firm as a partner or something like that. I thought that would be my next transition, because this is company number two. I don't see myself going through this process again. So, that was the thought process of, "Well, if I take VC now, we could really blow this up, because I've got a well-oiled machine here that just needs money to scale, that needs to scale advertising."David:The technology is pretty much done, although we're doing some really innovative stuff in machine vision, machine learning, which I can talk about. The idea was, "I haven't done it before. Let me give this a go, if anybody's interested." I had a handful of conversations, they all went the same way. I'm short on time these days. So, I was just like, "Well, let me get back to the grindstone and maybe worry about that later."Stephanie:Got it. Cool. Yeah, thanks for answering that. I was wondering where you left off with that. All right. So, we only have 10 minutes left. So, I was going to shift over to the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, David?David:I will do my best.Stephanie:All right. That's all I ask for. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?David:Personalization. Whether it's a handwritten note or an experience that's personalized when you visit a website or anything else, I think standing out through personalization, there's been study after study by companies like Segment that say that's a huge opportunity.Stephanie:Do you name your robots?David:No, we name our handwriting. The robots are numbered. So, it's 1 through whatever, 95 right now. We used to have an animated robot, and he still is on our website. If you buy a card, you'll see this little animated robot at the end. His name is Pinbot 2000, because when I was growing up, things that ended in 2000 sounded very futuristic even though [crosstalk 00:44:47].Stephanie:Yeah.David:His name is Pinbot 2000.Stephanie:I like it. What's your favorite handwriting?David:I like Tenacious Nick. If you visit our website, it's a very sweeping block print.Stephanie:[inaudible] check it out. What's up next on your reading list?David:It's funny. I've got a bunch of books here. This one is by the head of sales for HubSpot, Mark Roberge? I hope I'm pronouncing that right. It's called the Sales Acceleration Formula. It was recommended to me. So, I figured I'd read it tomorrow when I have to fly to Chicago.Stephanie:Very cool. What's up next on your Netflix queue?David:My brother actually is a bigwig at Netflix, but what I'm watching right now is on Amazon. It's The Boys. I'm trying to finish season two.Stephanie:Oh, is it good?David:Yeah. It's a dark superhero tale. The one I liked on Netflix... It was 40 minutes and was great. I think it's called Cubers. It's great. If you don't care about Rubik's Cubes at all, which I really don't, it was still wonderful. It's the story of two Rubik's Cube masters. One of them is autistic, and the other Rubik's Cube master, who is just a really nice guy in Australia. The friendship that evolves through these two Rubik's Cube masters. That's really good.Stephanie:That's interesting. If you were to have a podcast, what would the podcast be about and who would your first guest be?David:That is a great-Stephanie:It can't be about handwritten notes.David:No, no, I think it would be about one-to-one marketing though, which is very much in the same vein and probably a sucker answer that I'm giving you. But it would be how do you market to people on a personal level that doesn't come across as junk, because everything's looking like junk?Stephanie:Yup, I like that.David:That would be what it is, and I apologize in advance for that answer.Stephanie:No, I like that one. I mean, I think it's much needed now. Who would you bring on as a guest?David:Joe Polish, who's a marketing expert. He's quite good. Dean Jackson who he works with would be a good guest for that. There's probably somebody from Segment as they have a lot of data that backs it up. So, I'd want to talk with them.Stephanie:Cool. All right. And then the last one, since you've started a company before and you've sold it and started another one, what piece of advice would you give to a new entrepreneur who's starting up a new commerce company?David:Commerce or not, the one piece of advice that I give to everybody was told to me in person over dinner. So, this is a little bit of a humble brag by Conan O'Brien. So, when I was in college, I used to be in this group that would bring speakers to campus and we brought Conan O'Brien. So, the guys that organized got to sit down and do dinner with him. This is a long time ago. So, he was relatively starting out on having his own talk show back then.David:But the advice he gave us was, "Always get in over your head." That has stuck with me for 20 some odd years now, always get in over your head. I mean, people give you advice every day, but how much of it sticks for 20 years. The way I interpret that is if you don't get in over your head, you're never going to grow. You're just never going to pull yourself out of your comfort zone and really do something bigger than you thought you could do. So, I think about it all the time.Stephanie:I like it. Okay, Conan, coming in with some good wise words, pretty good. All right, David. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Handwrytten with a Y?David:Handwrytten with Y, so you can visit Handwrytten with a Y, H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N.com. We have @handwrytten on Twitter, Handwrytten on Facebook. Personally, I'm @DavidB, as in boy, Wachs, W-A-C-H-S on Twitter. You can find me there, although I don't tweet very much. If anybody wants to try the service, there's two things I'd say. If you go to the business page, you can actually request a samples kit for free. That samples kit will have all sorts of different handwriting styles for you, including Tenacious Nick, my favorite, but they're all good.David:The other thing is if you sign up and you sign up with an email and password, you can enter a discount code. Enter discount code 'podcast', and you'll get $5 in credit that you can then use to send yourself a card or somebody else's card or send your first card, whatever. So, that's available for you too.Stephanie:Awesome. All right. Well, thanks so much, David. It's been fun. We will have to have you back in the future once you can see more about your subscription service and all that. So, thanks for coming on.David:Awesome. Thanks, Stephanie.

Andrea Baba, FitCo: Digitizing Fitness Centers in Latin America, Ep 125 Andrea’s first experience as an entrepreneur was starting her own Zumba studio when she was 18 years old. Within a year of operating, she started to expand her business, hiring more instructors and gaining more clients. However, Andrea saw that managing her business solely on Excel spreadsheets and notebooks was limiting her company’s growth.    In true entrepreneurial spirit, Andrea decided to find a solution to her own problem. Together with her co-founder Alex, they set out to build a tool that would help fitness centers in Latin America to scale their businesses. And Fitco was born.    I sat down with Andrea to talk about how she combined her passion for fitness and her background in finance to start Fitco in Peru’s budding startup ecosystem. We also discuss their experience at Techstars’ Boulder Accelerator as the first LatAm startup to be accepted into the program and how Fitco has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Becoming Fitco’s first client Managing a Zumba studio meant that Andrea was doing everything from teaching classes to answering Whatsapp messages from clients to managing the payroll. To take the next step in her business, she needed a tool that would help her scale her business in an efficient way. After several mockups, Andrea put her product to the test and her Zumba studio became Fitco’s first paying customer.    Listen to this episode of Crossing Borders to learn about how Andrea built Fitco and found a niche in Latin America’s fitness studios. Catalysts of change in Peru’s startup ecosystem Peru’s startup ecosystem has transformed significantly over the past couple of years. Andrea recalls the early days of her startup and the struggles she faced in finding people to hire for Fitco. Today, she is proud of how far the ecosystem has come. She considers that government led initiatives have played a huge role in giving Peruvian startups the recognition and support needed to grow and attract investors to the ecosystem.   Find out more about how Peru’s startup ecosystem has transformed in this episode of Crossing Borders. First Latin American startup to participate in Techstars Boulder Accelerator program Andrea explains what it was like to be physically on the same block as Brad Feld and David Brown as the first LatAm startup to receive investment from Techstars Boulder program. There, they learned about how to continue scaling Fitco and build a great business from the experience of other founders and mentors in the US. One of their greatest takeaways was Techstars’ people driven approach. Andrea and her co-founder were inspired to bring that philosophy to their team, and focus on people first, which in turn will lead to a better business.    Learn more about Andrea’s lessons learned from her experience at Techstars Boulder program in this episode of Crossing Borders.   Andrea Baba is helping the fitness industry transform its services to meet the demands and consuming habits of today’s customers. Fitco enables fitness center owners to digitize their businesses to better connect with their communities online.   Outline of this episode: [1:50] - About Fitco [2:30] - The entrepreneurial mindset [5:00] - Solving her own problem [6:29] - Focusing on a tech tool [7:49] -  Catalysts of change in the Peruvian ecosystem [12:44] - Techstars Boulder Accelerator [17:46] - Advice for going through an accelerator [21:13] - Responding to the lockdown [24:43] - Being a female founder in Latam vs. the US [27:43] - Books, blogs, & podcast recommendations [28:52] - Advice to Andrea’s younger self [30:23] - What’s next for Fitco?   Resources & people mentioned: Andrea Baba Alexander Mayor Fitco UTEC Ventures Techstars Boulder Accelerator Brad Feld David Brown Culqi Crehana Books: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, From Impossible to Inevitable, The Sales Acceleration Formula, Hacking Growth, Venture Deals    

#027 Mark Roberge is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Stage 2 Capital. Stage 2 Capital is a fund backed by more than 100 Go-To Market executives from unicorns and Fortune 500 companies. Their areas of expertise include demand generation, sales operations, account management, customer success, and other sales related functions. He was the former Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot. He serves as a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and is the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula.  https://www.SmartVenturePod.com IG/Twitter/FB @GraceGongGG LinkedIn:@GraceGong YouTube: https://bit.ly/gracegongyoutube Join the SVP fam with your host Grace Gong. In each episode, we are going to have conversations with some of the top investors, super star founders, as well as well known tech executives in the silicon valley. We will have a coffee chat with them to learn their ways of thinking and actionable tips on how to build or invest in a successful company.

#026 Mark Roberge is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Stage 2 Capital. Stage 2 Capital is a fund backed by more than 100 Go-To Market executives from unicorns and Fortune 500 companies. Their areas of expertise include demand generation, sales operations, account management, customer success, and other sales related functions. He was the former Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot. He serves as a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and is the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula.  https://www.SmartVenturePod.com IG/Twitter/FB @GraceGongGG LinkedIn:@GraceGong YouTube: https://bit.ly/gracegongyoutube Join the SVP fam with your host Grace Gong. In each episode, we are going to have conversations with some of the top investors, super star founders, as well as well known tech executives in the silicon valley. We will have a coffee chat with them to learn their ways of thinking and actionable tips on how to build or invest in a successful company.

Today we are joined by Lukas Mikelinich, VP of Sales at Saas platform Negotiatus, who just had the best sales month in the company history this May. He is going to talk about how to find your way through Covid time and how to run an effective SDR team. Enjoy!  HERE’S WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE: How to pivot quickly from pre-Covid to a new climate Re-thinking the biggest value you can offer How to set new instructions for your SDR team What you can achieve with a high level of personalization How to deal with “not interested” answers How to hire top performers for your SDR team How you can assess the coachability level when hiring someone Lucas reminds us to remain agile - there are times when the biggest value you can bring is NOT your core offering; you have to be more creative and think of a better way to serve your clients.  Happy cold emailing! Jeremy and Jack Resources: Never Split the Difference, a book by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz  The Sales Acceleration Formula, a book by Mark Roberge Sign up for our course – Cold Email Outreach Masterclass (https://course.quickmail.io/)

Join John Mushriqui for another episode of Frankly with Mark Roberge, Managing Partner, Stage 2 Capital. Mark talks about his journey from the early days with HubSpot where he became first SVP Global Sales and Services then Chief Revenue Officer, increasing revenue over 6,000% and expanding the team from 1 to 450. Mark is the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula but it's really his latest ebook The Science of Scaling that made us want to get him on Frankly. Mark's no nonsense, data-driven approach is pure gold for founders and their teams as they wrestle with how to define product/market fit, the right time to scale, hiring sales talent and the lengths to go for those first few customers.

Dans cet épisode, on sort de l'univers des startups / scale up pour parler de la vente dans les Grandes entreprises avec Harry Marteau de la société SGS.  Harry a été embauché pour moderniser la culture et les process de vente dans cette grande société du marché des TIC (Testing, Inspection, Certification).  Chez SGS, il y'a une dizaine de Directeurs commerciaux, sur différents marchés. Harry est là pour animer la partie Sales Enablement, et également pour créer une workplace pour automatiser le plus la vente.  On aborde le sujet de l'intérêt de moderniser la vente dans les grandes entreprises. D'abord le coût d'acquisition dans le B2B et le coût de la fidélisation, ont doublé ! Alors que les prix n'ont pas doublé. Voilà pourquoi il est urgent de mettre de la science et de la technologie dans la vente dans les Grands Groupes.  La modernisation permet d'abord d'automatiser des tâches sans valeur ajoutée et répétitive. De donner de la valeur au CRM qui est souvent mal exploité.  Revoir les process et la méthode, permet ensuite d'intégrer de nouveaux outils, que le Directeur Commercial pourra s'approprier. La formation est clef dans cet environnement pour révéler les potentiels.  Ensuite retravailler les ICP (Ideal Customer Profile ou l'entreprise cible) et les Buyer personae (le client idéal).  Organiser des tunnels de vente différents selon le type de vente des départements de l'entreprise (transactionnel, mid market, enterprise).  On parle également de l'importance du playbook pour réduire le cycle de vente.  On aborde le sujet de la culture de la vente. Comment créer une culture de la vente dans son entreprise. On parle du story telling, du copywriting et d'inbound.  Harry nous présente sa stack d'outils pour ses commerciaux qui a pour ambition de créer une Sales Machine pour que chaque commercial puisse performer.  Harry nous conseille de lire Dream Team de Ludovic Girodon et The Sales Acceleration Formula. 

Mark joins me today to talk about his book "The Sales Acceleration Formula".You’ll Learn:Why data is necessary for predictable growth. Why world-class sales hiring is the biggest driver of sales success.The importance of coachability. About MarkMark Roberge served as HubSpot's SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services from 2007 to 2013, scaling the customer base from 1 to over 12,000 and his staff from one to hundreds of employees. Mark holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an engineering degree from Lehigh University. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Inc Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Business Review. Mark is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School.As SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for software company HubSpot, Mark led hundreds of his employees to the acquisition and retention of the company's first 10,000 customers across more than 60 countries. His book outlines his approach and provides an action plan for others to replicate his success, including the following key elements:Hire the same successful salesperson every time — The Sales Hiring FormulaTrain every salesperson in the same manner — The Sales Training FormulaHold salespeople accountable to the same sales process — The Sales Management FormulaProvide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month — The Demand Generation FormulaLeverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople

Entra al Club Cállate y Vende y recibe las notas del programa entrando al siguiente link http://bit.ly/clubcyv   Masterclass de Ventas en CDMX https://www.detonadoresdevalor.com/masterclasscdmx   Si nos dedicamos a las Ventas y queremos crecer personalmente, tarde o temprano nos tocará reclutar nuevos miembros del equipo pero, ¿Cómo saber a quién contratar si esto no nos lo enseñan en la escuela?   Libro sugerido en el ejercicio de entrevista: The Sales Acceleration Formula https://amzn.to/30tVwGX  

Mark Roberge is the former CRO of Hubspot, a marketing enablement company to which he contributed a revenue increase of over 6,000%. He now delivers his Sales Acceleration Formula at Harvard, in his book, and in this podcast.  Here are some of the topics covered in this episode: Why we should all dedicate time to personal development  How to fit your buyer’s needs and be a better seller The step to follow to draft an efficient sales process The impact of technology in the sales funnel  About the Guest: Mark Roberge is the former CRO of Hubspot, and now a lecturer at Harvard BS and MD of Stage 2 Capital, a venture capital fund. He is also the bestselling author of the award-winning book, “The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100 Million”. He was named one of Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World, Mark has also won the Salesperson of the Year award at the MIT Sales Conference in 2010.  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ Listen to more episodes of the Outside Sales Talk here and watch the video here!      

According to recent research, sales is the largest business sector to experience high levels of work-related stress. This can come from working long hours, pressure to perform at critical moments, dealing with setbacks (or no’s), or from taking risks We invited Ollie Sharpe on this episode to discuss stress management in the sales team environment. He gave us his best practices from his years of senior sales management at LinkedIn, SalesLoft, and CD Recruitment. Ollie is currently the VP of Revenue for EMEA at SalesLoft. He recently took on this new role after 10 years at LinkedIn. What we talked about: When it comes to stress, prevention is the best medicine Be human  Be approachable  Lead by example  Understand your sales team, but don’t be a counselor An example of hitting this ‘understanding’ balance A quick note on diversity and stress Setting expectations early on avoids stress Create happiness on your sales team to drive peak performance Are you doing the things that make you happy? Are you spending time with people you like to spend time with? Are you switching your brain off regularly? Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast: The happiness advantage by Sean Acre The Game Plan by Dr. Steve bull The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge The Making of a Corporate Athlete, a Harvard Business Review article by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

How can a veterinary clinic or business grow? This week on the show, Julien Renard of Vetstoria joins Shawn & Ivan to talk about using data to gauge return on investment, the intricacies of operating internationally, and the importance of convenience. Julien recommends The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge (amzn.to/2NaO6CJ). Learn more about Vetstoria at vetstoria.com.

How to Negotiate a Mutual Win  Salespeople are always looking for a win and when closing with clients, landing a great deal while being able to negotiate a mutual win  is the idea goal.   Adam Ayers studied mechanical engineering and built a software technology startup after graduating. He is now the Chief Technology Officer and founder of company, Number5, which specializes as an outsource CTO for celebrities, eCommerce companies, and internet brands. Fifty percent  of their operations involve running technology, and acquiring customers, for commerce businesses and executing the data science.  The other fifty percent is on custom technology where they build platforms, APIs, and high-performance software on the internet.  Negotiate a mutual win When Adam was a child he asked his father what inventors do and the response resonated with him.. He was told  the best inventors don't just invent things, they are capable of selling what they've invented. That thought motivated him to make things himself,build a team, and sell the things he created himself. As an engineer, Adam has learned to think in frameworks and processes, finding that telling stories are effective ways to negotiate a mutual win and make a sale.  The biggest problem most salespeople face is the tendency to talk more and listen less. Generally, people  want to be listened to. We want to be asked questions and understood. This is a factor that other sales reps forget. No matter what you are selling, you must put the clients' interests first. Listen  to them, ask questions, and understand where they're coming from. You learn to see their problem and present customers with a solution when you sincerely tune-in to what they are saying. This is how they make the buying decision, to trust the solution  you present to them.  The ideal ratio is 80-20, where 80% is spent listening to the clients' story and asking them questions while 20% is spent sharing  a story about how you're going to help solve their problems.  The book entitled, You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar emphasizes the Sandler sales submarine, with the initial point being we need to bond and build rapport with our customers.  Showing compassion and kindness and asking people who they are and what they need is the first step to negotiate a mutual win.  The importance of self-awareness Self-awareness is knowing who you are, what you're good at, or not,  and being honest about it. #SalesTruth It's a trait that many salespeople need to master to negotiate a mutual win. Being who you are is important because that's how you connect with  people. While compromising is a good thing,you also want to be authentic. Your flaws as a salesperson will make you more human and more relatable to others. A corporate approach in sales is uncomfortable because ultimately everyone is just looking for a smart friend with whom they can make a connection  when they're being sold to.  Adam sells software development, customer acquisition, and data science and these are products the average person doesn't understand but they know they need it to grow their business. He understands he needs to nurture confidence in his potential clients, that they want to feel good about hiring him.  Adam highlights his previous experience, his background, who he's already worked with, their integrity and what he's already delivered. Adam's team doesn't  sell. Instead, they connect with people - they talk, dine, and get drinks.   While the sales process and negotiations are pretty straightforward, the reality is that it works for his team. When Adam knows that  his services aren't going to fit what the client needs, he is upfront and honest about it. Adam knows his customers need someone who can execute the tasks and if needed, communicate to the stockholders and investors what's going on.  Unconventional approach works  This approach of combining tech expertise with a personal touch is the core of , Number5, a company name inspired by the1986 movie, Short Circuit. Because not everyone understands the technology behind the work, they're hired based on relationships.Their process on how to negotiate a mutual win is shaped around helping clients understand their needs and what their role is to make meet the company's goals. Adam shows them how his team uses technology to deliver the solution efficiently and effectively.  One company Adam was an engineer for, had the Five Four Club, a men's clothing line subscription, that quickly rose to popularity. The company needed the technology to keep up with its growth.. Adam not only offered the tech to support the growth but as a leader, helped offer resources to build up the existing team.  Adam didn't have to explain how the tech worked but still offered suggestions on how employees could support it within their roles. Clients say that Adam's approach is abrasive and shocking until they get to know him. Once they see his process and his ability working for them, they're on board.  Many salespeople aren't just selling, they're also doers. Sales grow with a better job of doing and executing.  Moving forward Adam is always looking for different tools that will help  from a market broad perspective and a sales perspective. For example, CrystalKnows, is a plugin that helps you analyze the personality type of anyone's LinkedIn profile. The results will give you an idea of how to communicate with that person. This is an amazing way technology can start connecting people more effectively and efficiently.  Technology is also helpful for companies that are looking to expand and hire people. The Sales Acceleration Formula, by Mark Roberge, points out that it's not just the experience that's important, it's the coachability of the salesperson and their ability to adapt.  “How to Negotiate a Mutual Win” episode resources Connect with Adam Ayers directly by scheduling a meeting with him through email or look him up on LinkedIn.  For other sales concerns, you can also reach out to Donald via LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Use these practical sales tips and let him know how they work for you.  This episode is brought to you in part by TSE Certified Sales Training Program. It's a course designed to help new and struggling sellers to master the fundamentals of sales and close more deals. Sign up now and get the first two modules for free! You can also call us at (561) 570-5077.  The episode is also brought to you by Sales Live Miami. It's an event put on by a group of friends and it's designed to help sellers and sales leaders improve their sales game. It's going to be this November 4-5, 2019 in Miami, Florida. We hope to see you there! You can find more about this event on The Sales Evangelist website.  We'd love for you to join us for our next episodes so tune in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Spotify. You can also leave comments, suggestions, and ratings to every episode you listen to.  You can also read more about sales or listen to audiobooks on Audible and explore this huge online library. Register now to get a free book and a 30-day free trial.  Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.

Highlights: The three phases of startup growth Why customer retention and revenue expansion are the most important measures of product-market fit How you know if you have go-to-market fit And why “pacing” is critical for “growth and mo” Read more: https://notion.vc/resources/learning-how-to-deliver-predictable-scalable-revenue-growth-with-mark-roberge/ Mark Roberge is the founder of Stage2Capital investing in SaaS companies and helping them grow, he’s a Professor in Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, the former CRO of Hubspot and the author of the best-selling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. All proceeds from the book go to https://build.org/ - BUILD is dedicated to proving the power of experiential learning through entrepreneurship and igniting the potential of youth in under-resourced communities.

Today, we're speaking with Mark Roberge. Mark is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School where he teaches sales, marketing and entrepreneurship. He's also managing director at Stage 2 Capital, a venture capital firm backed and run by go-to-market executives, helping startups build world class go-to-market capabilities. He's the author of the best-selling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: using data technology and inbound selling to go from zero to a hundred million. Prior to these roles, Mark served as SVP of global sales and services at HubSpot scaling revenue from zero to a hundred million dollars. Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes top 30 social sellers in the world. He's an MIT graduate and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Inc magazine, Boston Globe, TechCrunch, Harvard Business review and other major publications for his entrepreneurial ventures. Phew, That's a mouthful. Today, we're chatting with Mark about how to be an incredible sales leader using a simple weekly tactic to coach your team. If you like what you hear, subscribe to the whole season, and please give us ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ in the reviews.

Access FREE Resources from QBS Research and Thomas Freese here    Discover MORE about the Question Based Selling Methodology and Tom's 2-Day Training Course here 

In the Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge, there are 5 traits great salespeople have. Byron discusses the success of a new agent, based on these traits. Find the book here: http://bit.ly/salesaccelerationbook

Guest: Daniel Dackombe - Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel (Formerly @LinkedIn) Guest Background: Dan is the Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel (Series B, $865M Valuation, $77M Raised), where is leading Mixpanel's rapid expansion into EMEA & LATAM markets.  Prior to Mixpanel, Dan was at LinkedIn as Global Sales Director - Search & Staffing focused on growth and strategy of the Search and Staffing vertical globally. Prior to this, during his 8 years at LinkedIn, Dan built, managed, and led the Search & Staffing vertical expansion throughout EMEA from scratch to a 9-digit ARR business w/ over 150 employees. Guest Links: LinkedIn Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The EMEA B2B SaaS Playbook: Market Selection, GTM Considerations - Compete AND Compliment- The New Fragmented Market Reality for Sales - Hiring Profile Tips - Sales Reps & Sales Managers - Global vs. Regional Leadership - Influence, Focus, Consistency vs. Flexibility Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Dan Dackombe on the show. Dan is the Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel (Series B, $865M Valuation, $77M Raised), where is leading Mixpanel's rapid expansion into EMEA & LATAM markets.  Prior to Mixpanel, Dan was at LinkedIn as Global Sales Director - Search & Staffing focused on growth and strategy of the Search and Staffing vertical globally. Prior to this, during his 8 years at LinkedIn, Dan built, managed, and led the Search & Staffing vertical expansion throughout EMEA from scratch to a 9-digit ARR business w/ over 150 employees. Here we go. Naber:  Double D, Dan Dackombe. Awesome to have you on the show. How are you this morning? Daniel Dackombe:         I'm well. I'm well. Thanks, Brandon. Naber:  You've got your go-to tee shirt on. You're ready to rock in the morning and had your cup o'tea. I'm loving it. Hey, what I think we'll do in our chat, go through some personal stuff first, and talk a little bit about you growing up. What Dan Dan was as a kid. And we'll go through some of the decisions you made as a kid, and what you were like. And then ultimately, go through the bulk of where we'll spend our time, which is professional stuff. Sound okay? Daniel Dackombe:         Sounds great. Naber:  Awesome. All right, let's start with Dan Dackombe as a kid. So Crawley, England, I could have said that horribly, with the American accent. Totally understand that. However, Crawley, England, believe you grew up there. What were you, what was Dan Dackombe like, as a kid? What were you interested in? And what were some of your hobbies and things that you were doing when you were younger? Daniel Dackombe:         Oh, man. Yeah. So, I'm the oldest of three. Two younger brothers. Yeah, my parents divorced when I was about 12, and they both started another family each. So there are five brothers all in all basically. Which is, which is pretty cool. So I'm the oldest of five really. I was, I was pretty intense. My Dad was a rugby guy, so I played a lot of rugby growing up. So yeah, I'm not great at the kind of default, what's your favourite football team? I kind of have to take a bit of a back step in terms of my credibility around anything regarding football, more of a rugby guy growing up. I boxed through it while I really enjoyed that for a few years. But yeah, I was a pretty social guy, pretty social kid. I was, I was always...and this is quite an interesting dynamic actually because I've thought about a lot of these ideas. I was always the worst kid, in the top class. Okay, and so what that basically meant...And that has kind of scarred me and blessed me. Take sports. I remember being on again, my son's 14, so this is really like...I remember being 14, 15 in the cross country race. So you imagine a freezing cold, February morning in the UK, frost on the ground, and there being a big line of in my mind, giant 15-year-olds. And there'd be like, me, and I always got smashed. So I'd always be like, maybe not last in the top group, but I definitely went the champion jog. And so I was always frustrated that I'd worked hard enough to get to the top group, but I was never kind of capable in that sense. And likewise, academically, I always found I did pretty well at school. I wasn't the most gifted, but I was always in top sets, but I wasn't one of these people that were crazy naturally gifted. I had to revise really hard. And so, I think a lot of that translates to both, I think what helps set me up for future success, but probably also like, it has caused a lot of the scarring and imposter syndrome that we all kind of face. Maybe it'd be different if I was in the one class down and like, the top kid there. Yeah, it was great. I was, I enjoyed growing up with where I lived, had a whole bunch of friends I'm still in touch with. Probably half a dozen of them. You don't see someone for a year, two years, three years, and then you catch up in a bar or pub and telling the same mom jokes, or talking about the time that someone did something stupid. And you know what man, we just been repeating these stories for like 30 years. It's nice to maintain those types of relationships. Naber:  Oh, that's great. That's good, that's a really good start. You got me smiling a lot over here. It's great. And you always do. Okay, so, two more questions. What was the first thing you did to make money? Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, I mean I've always had a pretty good work ethic. And so I worked from a pretty young, I mean I did like, standard, paper rounds at a young age, gardening work. My first actual employment I worked, cleaning the cars on the four court, on early, early Saturday mornings. So that when people are out looking at new vehicles, they can go in and again the cars don't look like they're covered in crap. But this was a show that was right in the middle of an industrial estate, right next to this great big dual carriageway. So I used to come into work every Saturday when these cars were like rotten. I was like, I gotta clean every single one of these calls again. It used to kill me. I just think maybe like, I don't understand how they get so written off. So I did that probably 14 or so. But yeah, I spent a lot of time, doing construction jobs. My Dad was a construction guy, ran his own companies. I mean, you wouldn't do it now. I mean, I would probably be, yeah, my first salaried wage. I could have been maybe 15, maybe 16, and you'd be working in a building site in central London. He'd like dropped me off. I mean he dropped me deep in. And so talking about learning confidence. And building relationships with like, grown men who are kind of in the construction stage, and I'm like 16. And my dad was the boss and no one knew this. So basically, I was the boss's son. He would drop me off, and at the end of the week. I'd meet him in the pub, as you do when you're 16. And everyone would be like, Oh man, you know...I'm like, that's my dad and all of these guys be like, oh man, we've been bossing this kid around for a week, and this is the boss's son. I, I've got a whole bunch of stories I can probably tell you in the pub about my time doing that sort of thing. But yeah. So I've done some different jobs and worked from a pretty young age. Naber:  The things that folks have done when they were younger that they don't think are that fascinating, or just normal, are fascinating to a lot of other people. So you're saying that you worked for your dad's construction company, you just got dropped off and then picked up. That sounds a crazy, interesting scenario for many people that didn't have that as their normal day to day as they're growing up. So maybe it doesn't come to mind, for you or for the folks that are talking on this on our show a lot, but it's really fascinating. That's really cool. It probably, I mean it forms and shapes you. Daniel Dackombe:         Totally, I mean I've got a really vivid image in my mind. Bearing in mind this would probably be early to mid-nineties. So it wasn't quite deep in the eighties, but there was still that 80s hangover of music, what people wore. And so the work that we did was a lot of, like, data centres and dealing floors. And so basically just as the trading community began to really digitize their business, and they used to have big data centres basically, that's what my dad did. He built out trading floors and data centres. So all of my work would be in the city. Okay, so you'd be all of these companies that had been doubling down on technology. And so I remember being in a bar in the city and there was like, two divides. I mean on one half of the bar you had all of these construction dudes, and on the other half, you just have all these traders. You know, handmade suits. And it was really interesting for me too because it was like, hey I'm here, but it baked this aspirational, I want to be on the other side of the bar, and I want to be with the traders crowd. Those are the guys that are drinking bottles of champagne, and you know all of the builder guys were pretty dismissive about them. And I kind of was looking at them in a fairly, sort of aspirational way. Like yeah, at some point I'm going to be, I'm going to be that guy on the other side of the bar. Naber:  I love that. Cool. That obviously shaped your mentality for a long time. Great Story. All right. So, you're making decisions about where to, about where to go to school. You head over to University of Surrey, in Guildford. Explain, why you went to University of Surrey, and then we'll hop through some of your first professional, gigs and up through, up through TotalJobs to LinkedIn. Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, sure. I mean, I loved history and I loved...The A levels that I did, so I did English, I did history, and I did an early, what was called then, a media studies course. And in that media studies course, we studied a product and a principle called the information superhighway. Okay. And that was the first name of the Internet. So basically, I remember writing essays and stories and dissertations on potential outcomes and the impact that this would have in terms of like, they were really around personalization. I mean basically what we wrote about then, in terms of IoT and personalized content, seems so abstract because we didn't understand the hardware and the kind of infrastructure requirements, and that felt too advanced. If you can let go of the how you're going to make it happen, and kind of focus on the what, it becomes quite inspirational. So, so I did that. So I applied for two types of colleges. My number one choice was, nautical archaeology in North Wales. Okay. So my life could have been very different. Then the other piece, so the Surrey course was a BSc in media production and business. And so it was all in documentary making, filmmaking, radio shows, graphic design, web design and business around that. So a lot of my pals from college went on to do some sort of media production based job. And I, yeah, I mean, I loved it. It was great. It's a great course. It was really practical. I didn't really apply myself I think as well as I could've done. I think I did the classic, straight from high school, did A levels that were pretty intense. Then straight from there went to college, and at that point, I was just like, I wasn't there with a purpose apart from kind of having fun really. Yeah. It was a, it was a great course. Made some great friends there. Still in touch with those guys. And yeah, really, really enjoyed my time there, but it was mainly focused around media production and business. Naber:  Nice one. Awesome. All right, so you're leaving Surrey, you're getting into your first gig out of school. Walk us through the first few gigs you had a school and take us up through the end of TotalJobs, and then we'll talk about your jump into LinkedIn. Because we'll spend the bulk of our time in LinkedIn and Mixpanel and talking about a few of your superpowers and going through some mindset and method on some of the things that I know that, one, you're really passionate about, and two, that you're really good at. Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah. So, I mean, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do when I left college. The career track if you want to kind of continue some type of media production based job is that effectively you leave college and try to effectively get an apprenticeship or an internship. And I just was too impatient for that. And to be frank, I needed the money. And I couldn't wait around, in terms of what I wanted to do in my life, and where I wanted to go. And so, I struggled. The idea of kind of like, dragging myself up into central London, to work for some sort of media production - pre or post-production business - for almost minimal wage with a view that at the end of a period of time they may or may not offer you a job. I was like, man, I don't know if I've kind of got that in me. And so I'll paint for you because it gives you a nice snapshot of the times. So I was in a pub smoking cigarettes. Back in the days when I used to smoke cigarettes and back in the days when you could smoke in a pub. I'm reading the Guardian, which is a pretty left-wing paper, back in the days when I was fairly left-wing. And it had hundreds of pages of job adverts, and this is pre job board, so the technology of job-seeking was sitting in a pub looking at a newspaper, which kind of suited me quite well. And there was an advert in the back of this newspaper saying, are you a graduate? Do you earn 30,000 pounds a year? I was like, yeah, that's an easy take on those two. Circle. I'll go and grab another beer. And basically dragged myself up to London for an interview. I had a phone interview, go invited it up for a second interview, and walked into this place that was basically a massive contract publishing business. And they had like two hundred people, on this huge Salesfloor. There was a huge amount of energy. There's a huge amount of fun going on. I used to get paid weekly in cash, which was hilarious. It was just a real boiler room basically. And basically the end of that first year, I was the number one Salesperson. I'd paid off my student loans, I'd bought a car, and I'd bought my first flat in my first year. And so basically, I used to get paid weekly in cash. I was living on my Dad's sofa at the time because I came out of college and I was like, I needed to get into London. My Dad worked in London. And I was like man, I'll just bunk up with you for some time. And that was it. The Sales bug, you're hit man as soon as you start moving into that world. So I did that for a couple of years, beginning of the .com boom. Headhunted for an Inside Sales role. Went over, joined that company, and that company went on and was rebranded to coming from Stepstone. And I stayed there for a number of years, moved into my first leadership role, managed a pretty big team there. So I moved on to managing probably 18 people. And then literally the DOTCOM bubble burst, share price completely tanked, we had to fire half the people. I kind of walked away from there being completely disillusioned with management and leadership because I just personally found it so hard. I left there, pretty bruised, to be honest, I'd kind of gone through a pretty tough time prior to me leaving there. Had burn out periods, took a couple of months off. And in many ways that's actually one the best things that happened to me because that has really helped me sort of, mediate and moderate my own thinking around work. Mental health in the workplace is another topic that I'd love to talk about. But maybe that's another, another topic for another time. Went over to TotalJobs, which was basically the digital division of RBI, a large publishing business owned by Reed Elsevier, a global FTSE business, Anglo-dutch company. Went to their digital division. Started off as a Field Sales guy. I'd spent, up to that point, I'd been an Inside Sales guy and Inside Sales Manager. Managed a team, then managed two teams, managed the channel team and the advertising agency and RPO team. So moved up the ranks there every period of time, had great fun. They're highly, highly competitive. Highly in the UK. So kind of learned a lot around just operating as effectively as you could against the backdrop of peak competition. And then really the big change for me at that point, I was then headhunted again by LinkedIn to basically be their first EMEA Enterprise Sales Manager. So I was responsible for and launched the UK business. And there's, there's a whole other chapter to follow on after that, I guess. Naber:  Excellent. So that's your jump into LinkedIn, first role at LinkedIn. So, let's pause there for a minute. You were at TotalJobs for eight years. I mean that's a long, long time. What were one or two things that were the biggest things that you learned that you took with you throughout your career from TotalJobs? And then we'll hop into your roles at LinkedIn and I've got some specific questions around your superpowers there. Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I think, key lessons learned, there were one, around the importance of short term execution. This was a business that would operate with pretty strict deadlines. And so as opposed to the kind of annual quota philosophy, there was almost a monthly execution. And I think that created a good sense of kind of both urgency, and then how do you kind of manage a team to kind of operate so that there's like, twelve billings periods as opposed to one or even four. And so I would say that was definitely one of one of the key pieces. And then, actually the back end of my time there, the global credit crunch had really just started. And so actually it was a really, the year before I left, it was actually really quite tough. And basically we got to the point whereby if a bunch of headcount we'd removed from the business. And we were down to right, this is the skeleton crew that we need to run. But if we don't hit the following financial milestones, further cuts will need to be made. And I was quite transparent about that with my teams. I was like, look, this is where we are with it. And so I guess out of that adversity came a belief around the importance of honesty, transparency, authenticity, and then how the team then galvanized. And basically, you would get to a point whereby at the end of every month or the end of every quarter people were working for each other, working for a particular cause. And I come on to this, but I've always believed people work better for a cause than the company. And that cause for us at that time was like, we don't want to lose anyone from our team. And so, those were, I would say, the urgency of the billing, but then also the importance of galvanizing a team around a particular mission. Even if at that point that mission was pretty negative. But it still showed me the importance of relationships, and how to lead through adversity. And those, I would say probably the two things that really stand out. Naber:  That's great. Okay. So you jumped into LinkedIn, you're headhunted into LinkedIn. You've talked about what you're responsible for in your first role, so jump through maybe in two minutes, the responsibilities you had in that first role again, and then through your jump from Mixpanel and just run us through what you're doing at LinkedIn and what you're responsible for. And then we can jump into a couple of topics. Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, sure. Okay. So, I mean, there were 30 people in the UK, probably no even many, 20 people in the UK. Maybe 50 people, not even 50 people in Dublin. There's now what, 3000 people in Dublin? So, one of the early guys. I spent my first six months literally interviewing, I think I did 133 face to face interviews in my first year at LinkedIn. Literally, I was just focused on building just building the best team I possibly could. And so we built a team of, 18 Enterprise AE's. And we covered the UK market at that point because we had no other Sales functions outside of the UK covering EMEA. My guys would also cover particular geographical territories. So I remember at one point, you had people covering like, all of public sector UK and the Middle East. You look at LinkedIn now, and you look at how many people are employed in those two sectors, I mean, it's hundreds. So, it's that greenfield opportunity, which in itself brings a number of challenges around prioritization. And so yeah, my first year was building up Enterprise AE team, and then help to launch a number of different offices. I helped hire the guys that and onboarded the guys in Sweden who ran our Nordic office. We opened the Paris office and helped with the training and support in getting that office up and running. The UK RM business was launched that point as well. And so, the business really started to kind of build, and grow, and scale-out. So my first year was around hiring, building, specifically focused around the Enterprise AE space. Moving into the second year, I then managed Senior Enterprise AE's. And so there was, those were guys that...we had different gradients of Enterprise AE's. And then also managed our first kind of efforts in regards to channel and partnership program, in terms of both re-sellers and lead referral program. That was, that was really interesting to see that, and there's a whole bunch of challenges around that. By then, started to diversify the Sales team to be focused on different verticals. And that kind of moves us into my third year at LinkedIn had the opportunity to put together a business case for a specific vertical and then spend the next four years building that business up in EMEA. And built that essentially from scratch to over 200 people, 163 million ARR, 12-13,000 customers, 33% growth year on year. Even bigger than that obviously, in the first few years. And then that took me to my last role at LinkedIn, which was effectively a global overlay role for that entire vertical. A fantastic opportunity. But those are, I guess, the the main broad chapters of my time at LinkedIn. Naber:  When you were at LinkedIn, and now at Mixpanel you've built out a playbook for building an EMEA-wide B2B SasS go-to-market strategy and plan. And you've done this over the years, you've iterated on it, and then you've obviously you added on the global remit you had at your later stage of being at LinkedIn. Let's talk about that playbook for building an EMEA-wide B2B SaaS go to market strategy and plan. So, I'd love to hear a couple of different pieces of it for the audience so they can hear how you think about it. So a couple of pieces being building strategy, selecting markets and when to start to expand into them, building product and enhancements to product, and then ultimately team and building out the structure and timing of your team - physical geography as well as hiring, managing them. So let's go through building strategy. So if you're thinking about building an EMEA-wide B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy, how do you think about building out the strategy and building out the market selection that you're going to then go execute on? Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I think I would start off by thinking around, it's a case of having, you start off from directional confidence. And I think, at this early stage, getting to a point where you are 80% comfortable and confident in the decisions that you're making, is really how you need to operate. And so some people say, oh, you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that's BS, because the nature of being uncomfortable is, it is uncomfortable. But my interpretation of that is you've got to be comfortable with being 80% confident, and it's okay to kind of...Because actually, the time it takes to get to the point of 100% confidence is actually dead time most of the time in a kind of scale-up phase, well, I guess I'm talking about both start-up and scale-up. And so in terms of that directional confidence, you look at really just triangulating a number of different data points. And those are both hard and soft data points. And so, those could be things like, do you have an existing customer base? Do you have an existing user base? Do you have an existing user base from customers who are billed outside that particular geography? So whether you're a consumer business or a B2B business, understanding where is the traction that's currently, in the product, that's currently being made. If there's an associated user base to it, what is does the user base look like? What are the growth rates geographically for each of those sectors? Have you got companies that are growing far quicker than some other sectors? The other pieces of information you'd probably overlay on top of that is looking at the existing customer base in terms of, are there any characteristics within that, in terms of company size, company type, industry? And so I guess it's a case of, really looking at all of the various different data points that you've got available to you in terms of what you understand about your products, the product-market-fit, and also the individual psyche of the marketplace that you want to sell into, and their ability to buy the products. And I think that's actually quite often overlooked, and it's quite often overlooked from a cultural perspective, certainly with North American, West Coast technology companies. And so I'll give you, I'll give you two examples of that. So number one, when we launched in EMEA if you looked at LinkedIn, one of the proxies we used for potential success was, well, how engaged is a particular geographical region in regards to LinkedIn.com? And the assumption we made on that was we'll actually if there's significant traction on LinkedIn.com we think we can sell the concept of that audience to people within a particular geography. So, for example, we had a high degree of engagement amongst members within Denmark, But actually the notion of direct sourcing and headhunting from your competitors from a cultural perspective, was something that actually locally in Denmark is like, really, that's not the case now but certainly 10 years ago, whatever, the principle of direct sourcing kind of from an ethical perspective was something that they were uncomfortable with. So unless you happen to know that, a bunch of decisions could be made in North America based around data, in terms of wow, okay we've run an algorithm based on penetration of membership, growth of online Sales agent within the product. We've identified Denmark as a top-four market EMEA. But actually, the reality of that is there are cultural blockers to that particular product that we weren't aware of. So another practical example of that as well, is you can have a customer that in principle looks they should really use the product. But actually, when you dig into the particular persona of that company, do they actually have the capabilities of using the product? And so, I find that in lots of technology companies or lots of technology that I've sold to, you can have on paper a company that looks the perfect persona that you should sell into, but actually, they've got no evidence of purchasing similar products before in the past. They've got no evidence of being a pro-technology company in terms of the investments they make. And in addition to that, from an organizational point of view, they didn't have someone internally that's the right person to use the product. So, an organizational understanding and sector understanding should be one of those data points that you kind of look at now. So you go back to my original point of like, directionally accurate. If you took the Nordic region and kind of made a series of assumptions, you're like, okay, yeah, we believe that that is a market that we want to be kind of going after. That is a core market for us. And effectively the way that I would categorize EMEA would be, what are your kind of core and emerging markets? And have a framework around how you define what your core markets are based on a bunch of data points that you triangulate to basically create an algorithm and a scoring mechanism. And then you can have a bunch of core and non-core markets. You then orientate Sales teams around those core markets with a percentage of their time focused on non-core markets that when they reach a particular tipping point, you kind of pull them into the fold and put more of a focus on them. Naber:  That's great. Thanks so much, Dan. This is a good transition and segue. As you started to think about it within your playbook, building out those teams, what's your mindset for hiring in EMEA in general? And then maybe even any regional nuances that you know that you need to go through, or process changes you need to have, or mindset shifts you need to have. Let's start with reps and then we can go to Frontline Managers. So as I'm starting to hire out my first few reps, within my Sales team. How do I think about going about doing that within my playbook? Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I think one of the key things to think about is who do you need for the job that you need right now? And I think some of the mistakes that I've made before in the past is I've hired people that are the people that you would need in three years time. And so for me, I think, there's a whole bunch of challenges in selling technology now because companies have changed the way in terms of how they buy technology now. Technology purchasing has been, in many ways, it's been democratized by the employee. And so if you look at companies Slack as an example, you can have a company that's got 5,000 slack users, and they're not an official Enterprise customer of Slack. You've just got an employee base using a product. So you've got, companies now buy technology through individuals, through departments, and then at an Enterprise level. And so I guess the part of you understanding your own go to market strategy of, are you trying to go in at an Enterprise level? And is it a major infrastructure project? Or is it a rip and replace a competitor? Or is it land and expand? And so depending on your approach on how you want to go take a product to market, who your audience is, and the channel in how you want to introduce your products to that company, really depends then upon the type of persona, or personality, or experience of the person that you're looking for. So just being conscious of that I think is probably the first thing to think about. Off the back of that, you can then start to build out a whole bunch of skill sets and characteristics around what it is that you're actually looking for. I think one of the key considerations now is if you look at the backdrop against cloud computing and really the commoditization of every sector. If you look at, any business now needs to think about, okay, in three years time we will have five times more competitors. And all competing for the same budget, with the same decision-makers. And so, the very notion of that means the persona of someone that you need to be able to operate against that backdrop is really different. And so that's definitely something that I kind of think a lot about. And so the ability for people to then, be able to build relationships and network with an organization, help create consensus around how a decision is made, is key. The case of like, I'm going to try and sell to the CEO because he's the decision-maker, those days are gone. People don't buy like that anymore. Companies don't buy like that anymore. And so there's a whole different set of skills that you need from people in terms of their softer skills, their ability to market, their ability to communicate about how your product both compete and compliments their existing technology stack in the sector, is key as well. Customers, by the way, won't even know this. If you go look at, I don't know, the Sales industry as an example. Five years ago you had LinkedIn Sales Navigator and a couple of other pieces of technology maybe. When you look at that sector now, I mean there are literally dozens of players doing dozens of different jobs there. And if you look at marketing, jeez, I mean that's an even crazier marketplace. And so your ability to be able to articulate, to a customer who themselves may not fully appreciate all of these different pieces of kit, and how you can either complement, enhance what they've already bought, or actually how you can compete and say, Hey, I don't think you need these other three vendors because we can do the following things. And so that mindset and that skillset are different. So what you've got to be able to do to be able to identify...a, have an awareness of that. B, be able to work out what are the skills and the behaviours that you need to be able to do that. So there's a good book, The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberg is a great book around, scaling business. He's one of the early guys at HubSpot, and I actually think that's a really super practical book. So I definitely recommend reading that. For me, two things that stand out that I always look for - You've got grit and curiosity. And grit is to execute with passion and perseverance over time. Intellectual curiosity, someone is genuinely...I talk about this technology sector because I'm genuinely interested in trying to understand why are customers buying the products they're buying? What is it they're trying to do? And how can you help that? And then the ability to be able to articulate and communicate the reasons as to why you think your value proposition makes sense. Naber:  Awesome. So let's say I'm building out my first Frontline team. I've built out my reps, I'm hiring for the job I need now. I'm thinking about how they need to build relationships, build consensus, communicate internally around how the product competes, enhances and compliments within the market. And then I've hired against grit, curiosity, and communication. Now I need to build out my Frontline Managers. What's your mindset, some of the methods you use for hiring Frontline Managers? Daniel Dackombe:         I'm a fan of the core, strategic, and venture kind of methodology. Where you take a particular topic, and things that are core to that you assign 70% or seven out of 10, strategic is two out of 10, and venture is one of 10, 10% whatever you make to look at it. And so I think, for me, for a Frontline Manager, if you take the notion of, the science and the art of that. It's almost like, right, what are the core attributes, what are the strategic, and what are the venture? So what are the must-haves, nice- to-haves, and it would be good if but that is not as important? And so you're never gonna find somebody ticks the box on all of those things. There's always gonna be trade-offs. What are you not going to trade off on? One hasn't got or illustrates the following things, they're just simply are no. And that's across the two sectors of the science and art of management and leadership. So for me, it's having an under having a selection framework where you feel you're clear on exactly what the key skills and attributes are that you're looking for. Having an understanding or an appreciation of where you have a level of flexibility on that, and where you don't, are some of the key things. And actually taking the time to really go through that process in a pretty data-driven way, in terms of making sure is there a scoring mechanism against these things. Looking at other performers in the business who are doing really well, and how can you benchmark them against that particular person. And then also, hiring a leader for the role that you need now, and that you need in probably the next 24 months to 36 months are the key things. People talk about over hiring, and I think that's a good point, but if you overhire someone who has been a Frontline Manager, but then spent the last five years as a VP of Sales, and then you want to drop them back into a Frontline Sales Manager role because they've got lots of experience, that doesn't work out. Because actually what you need them to be able to do is to have the appetite and the energy to focus on the core nucleus functions of a Frontline Manager, which involves deep level forecasting, deal coaching. So, who do you need to do the best job right now is one of the most fundamental questions I think you need to ask yourself, separate Frontline Leaders. Naber:  Yup. Got It. Excellent. So we've covered a lot of the different pieces of the playbook than that you've built out, especially when you started at TotalJobs, built out even more expansively when you're at LinkedIn, now that you're Mixpanel. We've talked a lot about some of those pieces around building strategy, market selection, team and hiring across the different levels that you need to hire at. One more thing that I want to talk about is the difference between - and we talked about building these teams within EMEA - a lot of your mindset sounds globally applicable. However, I know that you have been in roles where you've had a global remit and managing teams that are in EMEA, both at the same time as well as consecutively. So can you talk a little bit about some of the best practices that change when you are managing a regional team in EMEA versus managing on a global remit? Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I mean, I, I would say, so I would say having a clear set of expectations around what are the objectives, goals, and KPIs around the global piece of the job. And don't underestimate how difficult it is to influence and implement a global-wide initiative. And so I think, some of the things when you think about from a global basis, I think you've got to change your mindset in terms of, if you're a hands-on Frontline Manager or even regional Director, you're personally in the region, you've got a management team, you may not be on the Frontline with your reps or even front line Managers, but you've got people that are within touchable distance from you. I think when you were then thinking about, well actually if there's an international organization, you're relying on and going to be working with a whole bunch of people across different continents, different geographies, different roles. And so managing and leading through influence becomes then a completely different kind of skillset. And I think the advice I would give on that is, if you take on more than you can effectively deliver, you will fail. So say, this sounds crazy obvious, okay, we want to do three things. And people always say, pick one of them and do that really well. And then in the back of your mind, you're saying but all three of them need to be done. And so you kind of try and delegate two of them out, and whatever it may be. But I would have a clear set of expectations with whoever you're reporting into to make sure that you can identify, okay, this is the global initiative or global change that I want to put in place. And just have a far more thorough and intensive approach to that kind of either change management or implementation of that than you think you need to do. And then just when you think you're kind of there, double down on it. So really prioritizing, pick the one thing that's going to impact globally, and drive that. And then for the things that fall underneath that, you either need to be comfortable that you're going to park that for a period of time, or that you're going to allow that to be managed and interpreted in a different way across different regions. And so I think that was one of the things when you've got to a global overlay role, it's like, what are what's the systems, processes and methodologies that you want to see global consistency on. And actually, where do you want to ensure that you can encourage a more local dynamic approach. Naber:  Okay. That's a good time to talk about your jump into Mixpanel from LinkedIn. So why did you make the move to Mixpanel, and talk a little bit about what you're responsible for there. And then I've got two more topics and we'll wrap. Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah...I've got kind of like a Venn diagram answer to that question. And so effectively, the assessment process that I go through in regards to any opportunities. Number one, the first circle is like, is there a big enough macroeconomic backdrop driver that makes this product or company important enough to matter or viable enough? And if you look at the impact of industry 4.0, you look at the huge exponential growth around the app economy, you look through the digitalization that all companies are going through in terms of how their digital products are now their company. You talk to a financial institution, a major bank, their online experience for their customers is now no longer a nice to have, that is what their business is built around. So you've got these, this huge backdrop of industry 4.0, digitization, the applicant economy, consumer behaviour. It's never been easier for a consumer to switch any product. You look at how cloud computing has commoditized all industries and all sectors. There's basically this massive backdrop of opportunity around the digital economy. I've always been a big fan of, during the gold rush be the guy selling shovels, or pickaxes, or whatever. And so for me, that was a pretty big backdrop. The second piece is around, so how does the product that you're selling actually impact that major global trend? And so when I assessed Mixpanel, Mixpanel was already nine years old, 26,000 customers, 40% (four-zero) were based in EMEA and there were less than a half a dozen people in EMEA. You had companies from one person, digital-first companies in Finland, to major Enterprise companies in Turkey. And so you've got scalability of the product in terms of geography. You've got scalability of the product in terms of company size. And scalability of the company in terms of sector. And so that was the second piece for me. And then thirdly, it's around the people. And to be frank, this is more important, really, is around the people and the culture. Mixpanel has brought in a new CEO, a guy called, Amir Movafaghi. He's like, just one of the best leaders I've worked with, really inspirational. He's an ex-Twitter executive. He's was like the Mr Fix it at Twitter. He's an incredible leader to work for. And I believed in his vision of what he wanted to do to build and take the company to its next level. So those were the three criteria that I looked at in terms of assessing any opportunity. And for me, Mixpanel fits squarely in the middle of those three things. Naber:  Awesome. Okay. Just tell the audience what you're responsible for it Mixpanel, and then I've got two questions for you. Daniel Dackombe:         Yep. So, I'm basically the Director of international for EMEA and LATAM. So primary responsibility for building out the go-to-market teams in those two regions. I'm based in London, but we've just opened a new office in Barcelona, we've opened a new office in Paris, and we're opening in Amsterdam. Taking the team from when I joined at 10 people, to we've got a financial headcount plan for the end of the year, it'd be probably, 110, 115 people in EMEA alone. So 10x in the business in terms of headcount, and obviously trying to grow the revenue contribution pretty exponentially on top of that as well. So I'm at that early expansion phase. This year I've done a hundred interviews. We've now got ten AE's in the UK, four RM's. We've got 10 AE's in Barcelona, and four RM's. We've got a half dozen people across Amsterdam, and Paris. We've stood up an SDR team in Barcelona as well. We've got a whole bunch of pre- and post- technical Salespeople that we're introducing into the company. And so we're building the EMEA business from the ground up in terms of not just our Sales teams but all of the cross-functional partners that we need in place to be able to execute as well as we can. Naber:  Nice one. I love how your 10x'ing, the headcount this year. In three or four years from now, you and I are going to have a conversation about how early that sounded, and how early-stage that sounded for where you're going to be in three or four years. Okay, great. So thanks for that overview. And then the last topic I have is, let's talk about Mixpanel. What does Mixpanel do extremely well? That is a competitive asset because they're just excellent at it naturally. It's at the core of what they do. Daniel Dackombe:         Yes. I think there is an institutional belief and passion around what it is that we're trying to do and the impact that we are trying to have for our customers to help them be successful, to help them build better products, to help them operate against this backdrop of huge disruption that we see. And I think the passion and belief that runs right through this business is something that's both powerful and intoxicating, and absolutely a competitive advantage. So, belief in purpose, belief in the vision, and collective alignment around what it is that we're trying to do collectively creates a really powerful unified business. The power of the pack is the wolf, and the power of the wolf is the pack. This definitely, definitely feels like an aligned business. And that's one thing that is built by having good leaders in place, having a great vision, having a great mission, having a product team listens to customers. One of the things that we do better than any other company I've seen, this is the single best company that I've ever seen in regards to, how we truly listen to our customers and don't have this arrogant perception that we know better than what our customers want. And this is definitely a competitive advantage. Naber:  And what have you seen are some of the ways that the leaders in the business are making sure that you keep those core competencies? Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, I mean it's kind of the notion of, to some extent it's the Jeff Wiener notion of Next Play. Whereas like, you don't allow your successes to become overly important, and you don't allow your losses to pull you down. If you think about ultimate performance is like a flat line, okay...that big spike up, the higher that spike up, the longer it takes to get back down to your optimal performance. If things go bad, and that drop falls through the ocean floor, it takes longer to get up to the optimal motion. So it's, recognize what you're doing well, be happy about it, move on. Something bad happens, learn from it. Don't do it again. Move on. And the quicker you can kind of go through that cycle - of celebration, recognition, learning, moving on, through to failing at something, learning from it, and then moving on - the quicker you can operate. Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciated and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love The Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five-star review on iTunes. Until next time - go get it.

Bruno Bin joined Smarp as their Head of Marketing just under one year ago and in this episode we hear how Bruno and the Smarp marketing team were able to 10X lead gen and 2.5X pipeline during his first six months. We hear about their strategic shift to focus purely on the enterprise segment and discuss topics from positioning and narrative storytelling, right through to Bruno's four step framework for building a pipeline engine and some of Smarp's most effective demand gen tactics. --- Links: Smarp >> https://smarp.com/ The Sales Acceleration Formula >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24953002-the-sales-acceleration-formula --- Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Follow Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

¿Cómo usar los datos y la tecnología y el inbound marketing para crear un equipo de ventas? ¿Cómo acelerar las ventas y convertirte en la empresa que vendió 100 millones de dólares? Esta semana te resumo el libro Fórmula de aceleración de ventas (Sales Acceleration Formula, 2015), un libro de Mark Roberge, el responsable de llevar la empresa de marketing hubspot de $0 dólares a 100 millones de dólares de ingresos, mediante una fórmula de ventas que es escalable y predecible.      Recuerda que lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: CONSEGUIR EL LIBRO "Sales Acceleration Formula": https://amzn.to/2IkhPrf   ¿Quieres el resumen escrito de este libro? En esta página encuentras las notas del episodio, el resumen del libro por escrito y todos los enlaces mencionados: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/111 ________

¿Cómo usar los datos y la tecnología y el inbound marketing para crear un equipo de ventas? ¿Cómo acelerar las ventas y convertirte en la empresa que vendió 100 millones de dólares? Esta semana te resumo el libro Fórmula de aceleración de ventas (Sales Acceleration Formula, 2015), un libro de Mark Roberge, el responsable de llevar la empresa de marketing hubspot de $0 dólares a 100 millones de dólares de ingresos, mediante una fórmula de ventas que es escalable y predecible.      Recuerda que lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: CONSEGUIR EL LIBRO "Sales Acceleration Formula": https://amzn.to/2IkhPrf   ¿Quieres el resumen escrito de este libro? En esta página encuentras las notas del episodio, el resumen del libro por escrito y todos los enlaces mencionados: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/111 ________

In this episode we talk to Dan Murdoch, Head Of Global Marketing at Harri. This is Dan's 2nd time on the show, last time he shared, A 3 Part Formula to Ditch Traditional Lead Scoring w/ Dan Murdoch, Episode 831. InsideSales.com & Sales Acceleration Formula biggest problem in SDR - who/how/when MKTG has data on engagement SDR are having the conversations--can drive what content created Report in means they accountable for the same goal Marketing can better track performance of content, budget, more agile does it create career confusion? where does SDR go next? Want to get a no-fluff email that boils down our 3 biggest takeaways from an entire week of B2B Growth episodes? Sign up today: http://sweetfishmedia.com/big3 We'll never send you more than what you can read in < 1 minute. :)

Mark Roberge is a senior lecturer with Harvard Business School, former CRO of Hubspot and author of the bestseller "The Sales Acceleration Formula". Join him as he takes you through his step by step guide to revenue growth.   Missed the session? Here’s what Mark talks about: An in-depth guide to driving revenue growth by company stage When to scale and how fast Product market fit, go-to market fit during the experiment stages If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin SaaStr Mark Roberge

In this episode of #GrowthTalks featuring Mick Griffin, we break down our Sales Funnel and talk about marketing vs sales turf war. We provide tips on how to setup your marketing goals as well as sales goals so both teams work together. We talk about sales tactics, sales funnel awareness, bonus systems for marketing team members and much more. How to generate quality traffic that converts to actual customers? Some onboarding tips we recommend to optimize conversion and grow sales. List of materials / tools / books we mention during the video.Sales Acceleration Formula: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG_ey...Marketing Automation Tools we mention:http://userengage.iohttps://synerise.comhttp://salesmanago.comhttp://intercom.io

As a self-proclaimed podcast fanatic, Trevr Smithlin always wanted to find a way to help out the industry. First, he made an app that added visuals to podcast episodes, but for some reason, it didn’t sell. Then he thought, why not try something he was already good at? Trevr founded AndertiseCast to streamline the clunky process of advertising in the podcast industry. His business has finally made it simple to manage campaigns, sponsor shows, and target audiences so that advertisers get results and podcasters get the revenue they need to focus on what they love. On this episode, Matt and Joe get all the facts out of Trevr about how to build your podcast to land sponsors, picking the right podcast for your advertisement, and how to leverage episodes to increase revenues. After you’re done listening, go check out our talks with Nick Loper and Justin Malik & Lee Rankinen for more tips to make a successful podcast. “You gotta take this thing super seriously if you want this to be your business… and there are new mechanisms to get to that level.” -Trevr Smithlin Some Topics We Discussed Include: The different metrics to measure a podcast’s influence What the next wave of podcast content is going to be How to make your podcast a revenue channel you always control Ways to leverage social networks to improve ad revenue Cross promotion strategies for seamless advertising How to know the perfect episode length for your audience An easy advertising campaign to jumpstart a new podcast The number of listeners you need to gain sponsorships How to pick the right podcast to sponsor Tricks to turn the episodes you sponsor into evergreen advertisements The latest targeting to keep your ads on current, relevant content How to get your ad on a popular podcast (even with a small budget!) Contact Trevr Smithlin: AdvertiseCast Create Photo Calendars Connect on LinkedIn Or email him: trevr@advertisecast.com References and Links Mentioned: The Perpetual Audience Growth Course – Learn how to drive consistent, high-quality traffic day in and day out GenM (Sponsor) – Find marketing apprentices for $50/mo The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge Google And YouTube SEO Strategies For 2019 – Brian Dean Side-Hustles To Make Money In Your Spare Time – Nick Loper How To Create A Massive Podcast Without Creating Your Own Content – Justin Malik & Lee Rankinen

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview famous CRO, thought leader, and author, Mark Roberge.   Mark was the first sales hire at Hubspot and helped scale that business from $0 to $100M.  During his time, he developed the key concepts that would lead to the “The Sales Acceleration Formula”, the foundational factors that help a company deliver predictable consistent revenue growth. Mark walks us through his time at Hubspot, provides detailed insights into the factors driving predictable revenue growth, and breaks down the essence of his new framework centering around go-to-market fit.

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview famous CRO, thought leader, and author, Mark Roberge.   Mark was the first sales hire at Hubspot and helped scale that business from $0 to $100M.  During his time, he developed the key concepts that would lead to the “The Sales Acceleration Formula”, the foundational factors that help a company deliver predictable consistent revenue growth. Mark walks us through his time at Hubspot, provides detailed insights into the factors driving predictable revenue growth, and breaks down the essence of his new framework centering around go-to-market fit.

Don has more than 25 consecutive years of quota over-achievement. Currently, he is the Vice President of Global Inside Sales for BMC Software. Don is responsible for over 200+ sales people at 6 world-wide locations including Raleigh-Durham, Tampa, Dublin, Buenos Aries, Singapore and Salt Lake City. BMC Software is an IT game-changer! Global Businesses rely on BMC Software to transform their Cloud, Mainframe, Virtual and Mobile IT services. BMC Software innovates and secures extraordinary business performance at significantly reduced risk. Topics Discussed: Sales Quotas – Accepting quotas that are attainable, while still being a stretch, and creating a plan to achieve them Filling your sales pipeline with the right sized opportunities Engaging your Executive Team on big deals The 3 Whys of Forecasting (why buy anything, why buy from me, why buy this quarter?) Applying your time on the opportunities that have the best chance of closing Standardizing the sales candidate interview worldwide (6 different offices) based on the book, “The Sales Acceleration Formula” – by Mark Roberge Qualities important to being a successful salesperson “Don’t let fear keep you from pushing forward.” Laugh about your mistakes. Create an environment where it’s OK to make mistakes Leadership Hire the right people, and get out of their way Work ethic is most important, followed by being coachable Work hard AND work smart Millennial employees Leveraging ExecVision to review inside sales phone calls (good and bad) Don’s evolution as a sales leader What can I do to help my team today? Their success is my success! Personal Achievements Climbing the 7 highest peaks…one on each continent (7 Summits) Dream big…your dreams should scare you a little Sharpening your skills Read books, listen to podcasts Take care of your mental, physical, career, family relationships Prospecting Cut through the noise in your prospecting (uses Consensus for video messages) Video messages, handwritten messages, make your message personal, get your recipient to laugh SendBloom Find your own groove Artificial Intelligence in sales #AI   Don’s Bio: 2015 – Present – Vice President Global Inside Sales, BMC Software 2009 – 2015 – Vice President Inside Sales and Account Development, Adobe 2004 – 2009 – Vice President Sales and Account Development, Omniture 2000 – 2003 – Senior Director of Mid-Market Sales, Siebel Systems and Oracle Company   Music Provided by: https://www.bensound.com Share This:

Companies have made significant investments to date in tools and technologies to enable sales. Usually, the core of this investment is a CRM system deployed with high expectations of streamlined selling and new insights. Unfortunately, CRM systems are rarely fully utilized and often fall short of these expectations. What is needed beyond the CRM to help sales organizations unleash additional sales growth? In This Episode You'll Learn: What organizations need to think about before they buy technology What are optimal sales technologies every company should have What mistakes do sales leaders make when buying technology Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: 64: The Harmony Theory: A Marketing and Sales Acceleration Formula w/Dan Murdoch @WorkMarket 53: Unraveling the Sales Stack: What 600 Sales Leaders Say Are Must-Haves 14: Using Sales Operations to Drive Growth and Productivity w/Leaders from Apttus, New Relic, Xactly, and Splunk

Antiquated systems, processes, data structures, and ideologies plague sales and marketing. If we do not optimize our sales and marketing technology stack to empower a formulaic approach that seamlessly manifests itself as clearly defined business results, we will not create sustainable and predictable growth for our organizations. In this episode, Dan Murdoch Director of Demand Generation, talks about the Harmony Theory and how sales and marketing can work together to drive success. In This Episode You'll Learn: Defining the assembly line to revenue Building the optimized technology stack Employing an ABM, Omni-Channel surround sound strategy Implementing industry leading sales and marketing operations Defining clear divisions of labor to move leads down the funnel Employing the Harmony Metric as a means of prioritization for sales action (A weighted avg metric of Lead score + Account Fit score + Contactability score)

Rob Biederman’s co-founded Catalant (formerly HourlyNerd) while getting his MBA at HBS as a requirement to for his Field III Course. They started by going to small businesses surrounding the campus and asking what problems they were facing and how they could help. MBA students from surrounding schools would then carry out the work needed for the small businesses. Today, Catalant has over 28,000 experts on their platform and has completed projects for small companies and enterprises such as GE. Companies turn to Catalant when they have a project they need completed but don’t have experts in-house capable of completing the work. Catalant experts cost a fraction of hiring a top tier consulting firm because they remove resources who aren’t necessary in solving the problems the company is facing and only include resources that are necessary for your need.   In this episode, Rob talks about:   How freelancers on the platform are vetted   How freelancers on the platform can stand out   What drove the decision to rebrand from HourlyNerd to Catalant   The difficulties with building a two-sided marketplace   Why he decided to continue working on the company after graduating from HBS   How he sees the gig economy affecting the overall job marketplace in years to come   How they were able to get Mark Cuban as an investor   Links from today’s episode:   Bain   BCG   Behance   Uber   Lyft   Postmates   UpWork   GoDaddy   InsightSquared   Kuvee   Slack   Sonos   Zero to One   The Hard Thing About Hard Things   Sales Acceleration Formula   The Challenger Sale   If you liked this episode:   Follow the podcast on Twitter   Subscribe on iTunes or your podcast app and write a review   Get in touch with feedback, ideas, or to say hi: nic {AT} startupbostonpodcast [DOT] com   Music by: Broke For Free

Managing a sales team requires about 50,000 moving parts. Between hiring, strategizing, educating, executing, evaluating, and adjusting...things can get chaotic. The reality of the matter is, sales teams have been in existence since the dawn of time, and most companies and salespeople struggle with the same issues. In this episode, Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot and Bestselling Author of The Sales Acceleration Formula, shares his solutions to problems that occur over and over again in the world of sales. Mark breaks down his formulas for hiring a sales team, building a strategy, managing a team, and generating demand.

Entrevistamos Mark Roberge, CRO da HubSpot & autor do livro The Sales Acceleration Formula sobre Vendas, desde a primeira contratação, treinamento e avaliação dos vendedores, processos e previsão de Vendas. Confira!

In this second part of my two-part conversation with Mark Roberge, CRO of HubSpot sales division and author of the best-selling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula, describes the process that he created to build the sales team that produced predictable scalable revenue growth as it rapidly marched from $0 to over $100 million in sales. Among the key topics we discuss are: How to scale your demand generation efforts How to put in place the process and resources to align marketing and sales. The unexpected skill set you should hire into your content marketing efforts. Why companies are under-investing in inbound marketing and how to balance that with proactive outbound demand gen. How to project the mix of inbound and outbound demand gen required to scale your sales. If you have the responsibility to grow a business, or scale a sales team to increase revenues, or maybe you want to run your own business someday, then this is a must listen episode. Don’t miss it! Listen today.

In this first part of my two-part conversation with Mark Roberge, CRO of HubSpot sales division and author of the best-selling book, The Sales Acceleration Formula, describes the process that he created to build the sales team that produced predictable scalable revenue growth as it rapidly marched from $0 to over $100 million in sales. Mark shares the process that he developed to identify and hire sales candidates that have a higher probability of being successful. He also provides detailed insights into the system he developed and implemented that effectively onboards new sales reps and enables them to rapidly become productive. If you have the responsibility to grow a business, or scale a sales team to increase revenues, or maybe you want to run your own business someday, then this is a must listen episode. Don’t miss it! Listen today. And come back next week for Part 2.  

Episode Summary Mike Brown Jr. was an Associate for Virgin and worked closely with Richard Branson where he used Richard Branson's money to invested in early stage software companies. He also worked as the General Partner for AOL Ventures before becoming the Founder of Bowery Capital. Mike shares his thoughts on what he calls, 'internet natives' and how they're now at an age where they're reaching C-level positions in large corporate companies. He also shares his thoughts on who he decides to take to the next level in his pitch deck. Key Takeaways 01:45 - How did Mike become a VC? 08:10 - What's Bowery Capital's process like? 12:00 - What's a good pitch deck? 13:05 - Write down 10 key sentences that you want to convey to an investor. 14:05 - Keep your pitch simple. Those 10 headline/sentences are key. 15:25 - Why are you qualified to solve this problem? Why are you qualified to run a company? 22:30 - Bowery focuses heavily on who they invest in and how they can help the companies. 24:05 - Sales deck versus a pitch deck? 26:10 - The best founders are the most passionate and not necessarily the best sales people. 27:20 - Internet natives are making purchasing decisions and are being hired into C-level positions. 33:20 - Mike has an amazing podcast called Bowery Capital – Startup Sales Podcast. 34:45 - Mike recommends two books. The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. Tweetables Write down the 10 key sentences that you want to articulate to an investor.Best #founders are the ones with the most passion about why their idea is the best one now.Internet natives changing the way #business is done.Successful founders can answer why you are uniquely qualified. Links Mentioned Bowery Capital Blog The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. Want the Transcription? Click Here to Download Share The Show Did you enjoy the show? I'd love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review! Click this link Click on the 'Subscribe' button below the artwork Go to the 'Ratings and Reviews' section Click on 'Write a Review'

"The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million" by Mark Roberge https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/the-sales-acceleration-formula-mark-roberge

We highly recommend you to read this book because it has affected our business in a positive way. The author, founder of HubSpot, shared how they got started and how they were able to grow from a small team of 3 through his Sales Acceleration Formula. Listen to this episode to learn more! SUBSCRIBE ON […] The post MBA324 Must Read: The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge appeared first on The $100 MBA.

We highly recommend you to read this book because it has affected our business in a positive way. The author, founder of HubSpot, shared how they got started and how they were able to grow from a small team of 3 through his Sales Acceleration Formula. Listen to this episode to learn more!   Stitcher | SoundCloud | Podcast […] The post MBA324 Must Read: The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge appeared first on The $100 MBA.

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