![]() We recently found a kiddie pool under our guesthouse deck, left behind by our renter, a mass of vinyl, pine needles, and hidden slugs. We cleaned it up with some high powered squirts from the garden hose and some serious scrubbing. I started inflating the thing by mouth in that way that Moms, Dads, and loved ones dedicated to preserving summer bliss can do, only to find that there was a small leak. Repairing inflatables is as simple as fixing a bike tire tube or Thermarest for camping. We got out the tube repair kit and made a quick patch and the inflating resumed. How many plastic kiddie pools are thrown out in our community each year? Likely hundreds. #Kiddie pool plastic PatchĪll that vinyl, headed to the landfill because someone didn’t have a patch kit or couldn’t deal with the gross slug slime-n-pine grime. It’s been two and half years since I published my book, The Sales Acceleration Formula, and over a year since I left my job as Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot.When you’re done with your pool, hopefully it’s still in working order for you to pass your pool on to another family that will frolic freely in their BuyNothing-ed frog pool. A lot has changed in that short time period, but two things are still true for sales teams: hiring great salespeople continues to be the most important activity, and there is still no single formula that every company can apply to the process. When I joined HubSpot in 2007, the company was a small startup with three people and a small office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Within seven years, the company scaled to more than $100 million in revenue. One of the most essential parts of that journey was figuring out the process by which we hired salespeople. Every time I get up on stage to speak or meet with founders, they ask me the same question: What should I look for in a salesperson? As it turns out, this is a dangerous question, and I had to learn it the hard way. Some of the first reps that I hired at HubSpot were top performers at their last company. I wined and dined them, took them to ball games, and even convinced a few to join our small startup. Yet, some of those “sure bets” didn’t work out. I learned early on that each salesperson is gifted in what I refer to as a “sales context.” There are reps who can close dozens of deals a week in a transactional SMB environment, and then struggle to close a single enterprise deal. Some reps were born to sell to marketers, and others can hardly speak the same language as the VP of Marketing on the other end of the line. Similarly, every company has its own sales context. Some have sales cycles that last multiple quarters. When the unique strengths of the salesperson align with the company’s sales context, it is a beautiful thing. When they do not, it becomes an uphill battle.įortunately for sales managers, success (and failure) in sales is arguably the most quantifiable compared to other functions (e.g., product, HR, marketing, etc.). Key performance indicators (KPIs) vary by company, but ultimately customer lifetime value is what determines success for every rep and sales team. The question is how to hire the people that can accelerate healthy revenue and beat their quotas.Īt HubSpot, I spent many restless nights thinking about this question. Over the years I developed a process that helped us identify good candidates in the hiring process, evaluate them, and then feed that data back into the model. It was simple, but at times the insights that we gathered were counterintuitive. Below, I’ve shared that process in hopes of helping you build your own unique sales hiring process. Step 1: Establish a theory of the ideal sales characteristicsįirst, I listed the characteristics I thought would correlate with sales success. For each characteristic, I documented a clear definition. What did I mean by “intelligence?” What did it mean to be “aggressive?” My intention was to score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10 for each characteristic.
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