The Power of Combining Go-to-Market Experience & Capital
Mark Roberge on data-driven sales, conversational intelligence, SMarketing SLA, and more.
Who is Mark Roberge?
Mark Roberge is the Founder and Managing Director of Stage 2 Capital, the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula and the former Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot from 2007 to 2016.
Mark’s passion for startups began before the dot com boom in 2001 where he worked on a variety of projects, ultimately leading him to receive his MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sloan is where Mark met the co-founders of HubSpot and joined the team as their first sales leader. 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. Mark is also the author of the best-selling book The Sales Acceleration Formula.
Journey to The Sales Acceleration Formula:
The Sales Acceleration Formula was first published in 2015 and the majority of ideas still hold true today. Mark describes the book as “accidental”, stemming from a breakfast between Mark and enterprise sales influencer and author, Jill Konrath. Although Mark didn’t believe himself to be a writer at the time, Jill proposed co-writing a book focused on the "Art and Science of Sales" and he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. After sharing his first chapter, Jill encouraged Mark to take the project on alone. It transitioned into an autobiography of how Mark built and scaled the revenue organization at HubSpot.
The transition to CRM Systems and data-driven sales:
Building a sales organization in the early 2000s put Mark in a unique position. “It was the perfect opportunity that I didn’t even know I was stumbling into”. The presence of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems enabled Sales to become more data-driven and changed how Mark leveraged data to inform how he built and managed the sales organization. Mark explains how they were suddenly “armed with data” in a field that is usually “artistic and magical”. The Sales Acceleration Formula expands on this concept showing how Mark used data-driven insights into how HubSpot hired, trained, managed, coached, compensated, and generated demand, and how the underlying framework can be applied to any sales organizations.
Using metrics to inform coaching:
One of the most interesting perspectives Mark shared on the podcast was how he and his management team used the data being generated from the CRM system. Using the insights from the CRM data changed how HubSpot Sales Managers were able to coach sales reps based on the signals being generated. He explained how sales coaching commonly uses “anecdotal instincts” or “previous experiences” that may or may not be relevant to the current situation. One example is the traditional mantra that "SDRs just need to make more calls" as opposed to conducting more research on the target prospect and buyer(s), and creating a highly personalized outreach based upon their unique knowledge of the target customer, coupled with how these attributes are similar to another customer's. More value is created when each individual sales professional is benchmarked against the average performance metrics at each stage of the sales process, and coached to analyze and reflect on how their performance metrics measure up at each stage of the sales process. These fine-tuned coaching plans were essential to reaching the maximum potential of each sales rep.
Being Reactive vs. Proactive:
The discussion with Mark quickly pivoted to a leading sales technology of the day, Conversational Intelligence. I asked Mark why the ability to capture and listen to every sales conversation has not made funnel and opportunity performance a more data-driven, sales management and coaching process.
Mark highlighted one reason: Sales organizations are often so focused on "chasing the number", that they do not make the time to step back, take a strategic planning approach to the future based on historical performance metrics, and use that as the primary basis of the planning process versus the traditional top down, excel modeling approach.
This "reactive mode" creates an organizational culture of one focused on high urgency - low value reactions to noisy and often biased signals versus one prioritized on the high value - low urgency strategic activities that lead to increased revenue performance.
Mark suggests getting a head start on the annual planning process in September and October, so that the budget, hiring plans and compensation plans are ready to go in December - for a company with a January start of the fiscal year.
Lean into the data with SMarketing SLA:
Another interesting process Mark leveraged at HubSpot was the 360 lead review process, 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 a joint analysis of pipeline generation performance. Far too often, there is significant friction between Sales and Marketing, which can be addressed by leaning into the data versus the personality dynamics.
A data-driven, aligned lead and pipeline generation program begins with defining what a "lead" really is and then measuring lead performance and conversion across the lead-to-customer process. Mark notes that a lead should include anyone from a perfect fit prospect in the identified Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), not just directors and above.
One example was when a lead came in from an intern at a company in the target ICP, the SDR should call the intern, find out who asked them to download it, find out what’s going on leading to that point of engagement and then go and sell to the executive buyer persona.
Founding Stage 2 Capital:
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 operating experience across each stage of a B2B SaaS company's growth. One of Mark’s “aha” findings was that the failure rate to scale across different stages of growth is much too high…and not limited just to early-stage companies. The Science of Scaling is based on research that Mark conducted across several early-stage companies, and then he applied the "challenges of scale" to inform the unique formation structure of Stage 2 Capital to include successful Go-To-Market leaders as both capital sources for the fund and knowledge sources for the portfolio companies.
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, listen to the full Metrics that Measure Up podcast episode with Mark Roberge here.
The episode is extremely instructive based on the experience and success of Mark and hundreds of other B2B SaaS Go-to-Market executives involved as Limited Partners in Stage 2 Capital.