The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

by Mark Roberge

Pete envisioned a new sales channel. He wanted to focus on all of the small marketing agencies, web design shops, and SEO consultants that were following the HubSpot story. He believed we could convince these organizations to resell our software. Prior to Pete's arrival, we had considered a VAR program. In fact, we had even experimented with the program with a large reseller. I find that most start-ups consider selling through resellers as an attractive starting point. Rather than invest in the hiring and management of a large direct sales force, wouldn't it be great to just get someone else to do it for you? For most early start-ups, this approach fails. We were fortunate to have executives from many successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses on the HubSpot advisory board. They advised us against starting a VAR program in the early phases of the company. They warned that these partnerships required significant effort to establish, especially with resellers of reasonable scale. Furthermore, getting an agreement in place is only half the battle. You still need to capture the mindshare of the partner's sales team. The sales team needs to be trained on your product. Oftentimes, your product is lost in the shuffle of dozens or even hundreds of other products they are expected to resell.