The Sales Acceleration Formula

The problem it solves

Scaling sales is where many young companies stall. The founder can sell, the first hires are a guess, results are uneven and nobody can say why one rep does well and another does not. Roberge's answer is that sales can be run as a set of repeatable processes with numbers attached. He led HubSpot's sales organisation from its first sales hire to a company past $100 million in run-rate revenue, and he sets out what he did in the order he did it.

What changes in how you work

You stop hiring on gut feel and start writing down what you are looking for, how you will test it and how you will score it. You stop treating training as a few weeks of shadowing and treat it as a method that new hires have to demonstrate. You also change what a manager does with the week: less inspecting forecasts, more coaching one skill per person, chosen from the numbers.

The book also changes how you read results. Roberge keeps asking which earlier number tells you something is going wrong before the revenue figure does, and he builds dashboards around those numbers.

Where it connects to marketing

A whole part of the book, three chapters, is about demand. It argues for getting found through content and search, then shows how marketing and sales agree on what a good lead is and how many are owed each month. If your sales and marketing teams argue about lead quality, the chapter on the service level agreement alone is worth the read.

When to read it, and when not to

Read it when you are about to hire your first few salespeople, when you have a team and no reliable way to explain the gap between your best and weakest rep, or when lead quality is a regular argument. Read it before you design a commission plan, because the three HubSpot plans he describes show how a plan changes behaviour, including side effects nobody planned for.

It is less useful if you sell through a few large deals handled by one senior person. The examples come from a software company selling to small and mid-sized businesses by inbound leads, and Roberge says himself that the tactics worked in his context and may not work in yours. Take the method, not the numbers. The book is from 2015, so the tools it names are dated, though the reasoning holds.

How it fits a decision-based way of working

Hiring criteria, certification scores, the stage at which a lead passes to sales and the number of call attempts per lead are all decisions you can write down with their reasoning. Roberge reruns his hiring analysis every six to twelve months and compares what he predicted with what happened. That is the habit worth taking: record the choice, check it against results, adjust it.

The training method, the sales stages and the service level agreement are also playbooks. Once the work is written down in terms a new person can follow, it can be taught, measured and improved, and parts of it can be handed to software.

Roberge argues that sales can be run with the discipline of engineering. Drawing on his years building HubSpot's sales team, he sets out four formulae, for hiring, training, management and demand generation, then adds technology and experimentation. Each is a set of repeatable processes, metrics and calculations.

Foreword and Introduction

The foreword is by the sales researcher Neil Rackham. In the introduction Roberge describes joining a three-person start-up as an engineer who had never worked in sales, and writing down four goals: hire the same successful salesperson every time, train every salesperson the same way, hold them to the same process, and give them the same quality and quantity of leads each month. He is clear that these formulae are collections of processes and calculations, not algebra. By his account HubSpot passed $100 million in run-rate revenue seven years later, with more than 10,000 customers in over 60 countries.

Chapter 1: Uncovering the Characteristics of a Successful Salesperson

Roberge opens with the claim that "World-class sales hiring is the most important driver of sales success." He chose to be world-class at one thing first, and it was hiring. His early hires who had topped their previous teams did not all do well at HubSpot, because their strengths did not suit a market that still had to be taught what inbound marketing was. So the ideal hire differs per company, but the process for finding it does not. List the traits you think matter, define a score from one to ten for each, decide how to test them, score every candidate on a scorecard, then compare the scorecards of your best and slowest hires. After about a year he ran a regression analysis, and the traits people associate with salespeople, such as aggression and objection handling, correlated worst with success. He reran it every six to twelve months.

Chapter 2: Five Traits Great Salespeople Have and How to Interview for Them

The five traits with the strongest correlation were coachability, curiosity, prior success, intelligence and work ethic. Coachability gets most of the chapter. Roberge runs a role play, asks the candidate to assess themselves, gives one piece of praise and one piece of feedback, then asks for a second attempt and watches for effort rather than perfection. Curiosity shows in the questions a candidate asks, from the lobby onwards. Prior success is the easiest to measure, ideally a top ten percent ranking. Intelligence is tested by sending study material between interviews and asking the candidate to explain it. Work ethic is judged from how fast the candidate responds during the process and from reference calls that ask people to rank the traits.

Chapter 3: Finding Top-Performing Salespeople

Finding candidates is harder than assessing them. After posting adverts and interviewing dozens of applicants, Roberge hired nobody, and concluded that great salespeople do not apply for jobs. They have to be approached. He advises building a recruiting agency inside the company, with recruiters paid on results and measured on their own funnel. Before that is possible, he shows how to source candidates on LinkedIn, ask a well-placed head of sales to name standouts, and run what he calls the forced referral: preparing a list of a new hire's contacts and asking which are top performers.

Chapter 4: The Ideal First Sales Hire

Roberge compares four candidates: a senior sales executive, the top rep from a big competitor, a failed start-up founder with sales training, and a newly promoted sales manager. He ranks the former founder first and the senior executive last. The first hire's main value is not the early revenue but how fast they help the company find product and market fit, so entrepreneurial instinct and sales fundamentals outweigh industry contacts and seniority.

Chapter 5: Setting Up a Predictable Sales Training Program

The ride-along, where a new hire shadows the best rep, is neither scalable nor predictable. Top reps each win through a different superpower, so a new hire copies one person's habits and may doubt their own. Instead Roberge defines a sales methodology with three parts: the buyer's path, the sales process that supports it, and a qualifying matrix such as BANT. Training follows the same order, with top reps teaching the stage that suits their strength. A written exam covers product knowledge and scored role-play certifications cover skills, graded by trainers rather than the hiring manager. He then correlated training scores with later sales results and found them a better predictor than hiring scores.

Chapter 6: Manufacturing Helpful Salespeople Your Buyers Trust

Buyers can research on their own, so a salesperson has to add value as an adviser. New hires at HubSpot spent their first weeks building a website, blog and social following, so they knew a marketer's job from the inside. Roberge also urges reps to build a reputation through social media, and compares modern selling to the relationship between a doctor and patient.

Chapter 7: Metrics-Driven Sales Coaching

A manager should coach one skill at a time, as with a golf coach who has you take a hundred swings on a single change. The chapter lays out a monthly cycle: manager and rep review the funnel numbers together, pick one skill and book the coaching sessions. Directors inspect managers' plans, and the same questions run up the chain. Roberge gives diagnoses for typical patterns, such as a lack of urgency, and shows how to split a ratio into smaller ratios, which he calls peeling back the onion, to find the real weakness. Success is measured by checking whether the targeted metric moved the next month.

Chapter 8: Motivation through Sales Compensation Plans and Contests

Roberge calls the commission plan one of the most effective tools a CEO has. He describes three HubSpot plans. The first paid up front on new recurring revenue and grew the customer base quickly, but churn spiked just after the clawback period ended. The second adjusted pay by quartile of customer churn, and churn fell by 70 percent in six months. The third paid in instalments and rewarded annual prepayment. His tests for a plan are simple, aligned and immediate. He involves the team in the design without holding a vote, uses promotion tiers based on results and not tenure, and runs monthly team-based contests, including one that scored forecast confidence.

Chapter 9: Developing Sales Leaders, the Advantages of a Promote from Within Culture

Hiring managers from outside did not work for Roberge, and promoting the best rep is risky, so he built a 12-week leadership course focused on leadership skills. Reps had to earn entry through performance, a rounded skill set and leadership potential. Before promotion they hired and managed one new rep while still carrying a quota. He lists the usual mistakes of new managers: poor use of coaching time, acting as a glorified salesperson and giving up on new hires too early.

Chapter 10: Flip the Demand Generation Formula, Get Buyers to Find You

Buyers dislike interruptive outbound tactics and trust search and social media, yet companies still put most of their money into outbound. Roberge says inbound results need two habits kept up for months: regular quality content and taking part in the online conversations of your buyers. He advises hiring a journalist, forming a committee of internal experts and running a weekly interview process that produces ebooks, posts and social messages. He also advises choosing narrow long-tail topics over crowded broad ones.

Chapter 11: Converting Inbound Interest into Revenue

Marketing should not pass every inbound lead to sales. Roberge prefers a matrix of buyer personas against stages over a points-based lead score, and uses conversion data to decide at which stage each persona goes to sales. For sales he prescribes contextual voicemails instead of a repeated pitch, calling the contact who filled in the form before the decision maker, ordering calls by engagement, and splitting inbound and outbound work between teams.

Chapter 12: Aligning Sales and Marketing, the SMarketing SLA

Roberge and HubSpot's marketing chief wrote a service level agreement with numbers on both sides. Marketing owed an agreed value of leads each month, weighted by how likely each type of lead was to close, which in effect gave marketing a revenue quota. Sales owed prompt follow-up and a set number of call attempts per lead, and a daily "Do Not Be on It" dashboard showed who was breaking the rules.

Chapter 13: Technology to Sell Better, Faster

Most sales software serves leaders and creates admin for reps. Roberge wants tools that cut data entry and capture buyer context, so reps can act on what a prospect just did. His example is sourcing leads in a browser sidebar, which took under an hour for 50 leads where a full day was needed before. He also wants opportunity stages to move on buyer actions and reports to come from data captured automatically.

Chapter 14: Running Successful Sales Experiments

Ideas should come from the front line. HubSpot used hackathons, an experiment board and open company numbers. A good experiment has a stated goal and measure, the cheapest test, a passionate leader, at least two top performers so a failure is a "true negative", and regular check-ins.

Chapter 15: HubSpot's Most Successful Sales Experiments

Two examples. A salesperson who earned the right to run a reseller programme in his spare time grew it into a team of a hundred. A new qualifying matrix, Goal, Plan, Challenges and Timeline, was tested first on the five best reps, then spread through the sales floor as colleagues heard about it.

Chapter 16: Conclusion, Where Do We Go from Here?

Roberge's closing hope is that selling is taught as a profession and that salespeople come to be seen as helpful advisers.

What to do with it

• Write a scorecard of the traits you think predict success for your own sales role, with a definition for each score, and score the next candidates against it.
• After a few hires, compare the scorecards of your best and slowest reps and adjust the weights.
• Write down your buyer stages, your sales stages and your qualifying questions, and train and certify new reps against them.
• Pick one skill per rep each month from the funnel numbers and book the coaching sessions in the same meeting.
• Agree numbers with marketing: which leads count, how many are owed, how fast sales must follow up, and review them daily.
• Test your next change on two top performers for a set period with a stated goal before telling the whole team.