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

by Mark Roberge

Part IV The Demand Generation Formula 10 Flip the Demand Generation Formula—Get Buyers to Find You

Have you been cold-called in the past six months? Did you enjoy the experience? Did you engage with the salesperson? Did you buy the product? Have you recently received an unsolicited piece of direct mail or email? Did you open it? Did you like receiving it? Did you buy the product that was promoted? Have you conducted a Google search to research a product in the past six months? Did you enjoy the process? Did you make a purchase? Have you heard about a product in social media from people you trust? Did you look into the product? Did you end up buying it?

“Today's buyer is empowered by the Internet. A modern demand generation strategy means less focus on interruptive outbound marketing and more focus on inbound marketing.”

How do I organically get a lot of inbound links from other websites? How do I organically build a large social media following?” Here are the two simple actions you need to take in order to drive inbound links and social media following: Create quality content (e.g., blogs, ebooks, webinars) on a frequent basis. Participate in the social media discussions in which your target prospects are already conversing. “Successful inbound marketing comes from two tactics: (1) continual quality content production, and (2) frequent online participation in social media where your target buyers are already conversing.” That's it. This simple strategy will modernize your demand generation strategy. It will align your business with the habits of the modern buyer.

As an executive, don't think about taking on these tasks yourself. Think instead about creating a content production process. Delegate the process to specialists. That is your job here. Building your content production team is not easy. But once you have the team in place, the hard part is over.

Your job as an executive is to develop this journalistic capability within your company to drive the modern demand generation process. This can be tricky. Developing this journalistic capability is the hardest, but most important, part of your journey.

Let's assume you have 10 people on your thought leadership committee. An example content production process would look like this. Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., one member of the thought leadership committee will sit down with the journalist for a one-hour interview. The interview should be on a niche subject. Don't choose your product as the subject. The interview should be about a trend in the industry, a question buyers have early in their buying journey, a phrase that likely resonates with an individual your business can help, and so forth. After this one-hour interview, that member of the thought leadership committee is done for 10 weeks, as the other members will cycle in. An hour interview can generate a lot of content. From that one-hour interview, the journalist can write a three- to five-page ebook on the discussion topic. The journalist can write three or four short blog posts around niche subjects in the ebook. The journalist can generate dozens of social media messages for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook about the quotes, stats, and trends mentioned in each blog article. Although this content is created within a day or two, it can be scheduled for release to the public over an entire month.

Social media is like a live conference that is happening every second of every day. Set up your booth and get involved in the conversation. Here are some examples of the nooks in which your target buyers may be conversing, and examples of how you can engage with them online. Perhaps there are a handful of blogs that many of your target buyers read. You should read those blogs too. Add value to the conversation by leaving an intelligent comment. Sign the comment with your name and hyperlink your name back to your blog. If you leave the first comment on a hot article that eventually goes viral, that will be more beneficial than any online advertisement you can purchase.

Find the people on Twitter who your target buyers follow. Follow these same Twitter users. Read their tweets. Retweet the posts you find interesting and relevant to your buyers. A lot of these authoritative Twitter users will probably follow you back. Don't be afraid to reach out to them via email and form a tighter relationship with them, just as you did with the bloggers.

find the LinkedIn groups in which your prospects are congregating. Read the questions they ask. Answer the questions that are most relevant to your company's value proposition. Don't worry about promoting your product. In fact, don't mention it. Don't even worry about promoting your content. Simply answer their questions with smart responses. Add value. Be helpful. Show off how knowledgeable you are in the space. People will click through your response to your LinkedIn profile.

The best networkers at an event don't show up and just talk about themselves. They meet people. They ask questions. They add value. Use these same techniques online. As a rule of thumb, I like one-third of my social media messages to be about my company and two-thirds to be about other people.

To Recap Today's buyer is empowered by the Internet. A modern demand generation strategy means less focus on interruptive outbound marketing and more focus on inbound marketing. Successful inbound marketing comes from two tactics: (1) continual quality content production, and (2) frequent online participation in social media where your target buyers are already conversing. Do not overburden valuable resources at your company with inbound marketing responsibilities. Hire a journalist. Form a thought leadership committee. Put the two together to create a continuous stream of high-quality content. Focus your content on “long-tail” topics. They are less competitive and more likely to attract your target buyer.

At HubSpot, we tried the lead scoring approach, but ran into the problems I just described. We evolved to implement an alternative approach we called the “Buyer Persona/Buyer Journey” matrix, or buyer matrix for short. Figure 11.2 shows an example of a buyer matrix. Figure 11.2 Buyer Persona/Buyer Journey Matrix

Figure 11.3 illustrates the lead conversion progress for each buyer persona in our example. Figure 11.3 Analyzing When to Pass Leads to Sales

Sales' Role in Converting Interest into Revenue Just like Marketing, Sales needs to evolve its strategy when handling inbound leads. Any difficulties that salespeople have adjusting to these inbound leads usually stem from the fact that some of the classic training that salespeople have received over the past few decades does not apply when working with inbound leads. In fact, these legacy tactics can actually hurt the sale. There are three specific aspects of legacy selling that hurt inbound lead handling the most. Scrap the Elevator Pitch—Lead with Context

use this contextual approach to prospecting. Understand your prospects' context by reviewing the way they found you, the blog article they read, the ebooks they downloaded. From these actions, the salesperson can infer the prospects' specific interests. Share content related to these interests. Tailor the content to the size of their business, their industry, or their role. Instead of suggesting the next step be a demo of your product, suggest a free consultation on whatever topic will pique their interest. Ask one of your internal experts to help. Send your expert's bio to the prospect and offer to connect them on a call. There is so much opportunity to engage with the prospect in a contextual way.

Now, there is a critical element of the modern voicemail sequence that has its roots in traditional, old-school selling strategy. I need to tip my hat to my dad, Rick Roberge, for introducing me to it. Regardless of whether you are coaching your salespeople to leave three voicemails or 12 voicemails, the final message should always be the “going negative” voicemail. “Hi, John. Mark at HubSpot. I left you a few voicemails with suggestions and best practices on Facebook marketing. I have not heard back from you. I am going to assume that Facebook marketing is no longer a priority for you this year. Give me a call if it ever becomes a priority again.” For whatever reason, the “going negative” voicemail has the highest callback rate. There must be a psychological phenomenon at work here. In any case, if you have done a good job adding value through the contextual prospecting process, the prospect will likely call you back after this voicemail. You have been providing such great information to them. Why would they want the relationship to end?

To Recap, when implementing an inbound sales and marketing revenue machine Marketing needs to: Filter the leads. Avoid passing all inbound leads to Sales. Avoid the lead scoring trap. Use a Buyer Persona/Buyer Journey matrix to decide when to pass leads to Sales. Sales needs to: Call low, and then call high. On the call, scrap the generic elevator pitch. Prioritize prospecting by engagement, not call cadence or alphabetical order. Consider specializing the team by inbound or outbound.

The teams were not as aligned as we had hoped. The Sales team preferred active free trials. However, the way the SLA was structured, the marketing team was better off focusing on product collateral downloads. As precise as our approach to the Marketing SLA was, it did not account for the fact that different prospect actions reflected different stages of the buyer journey. The process needed to be refined. To account for the different qualification levels of leads, we focused less on the raw number of leads generated and more on the implied dollar value of leads generated. Here is how we engineered each lead's implied dollar value: For each buyer state, we calculated the average rate at which these leads converted to customers. For each segment, we calculated the average purchase price for each customer generated from these classes of leads. We then multiplied the conversion rate by the average purchase price. This simple arithmetic exercise yielded the dollar value of each lead in that Buyer Persona/Buyer Journey segment.

“The Marketing SLA provides a framework to put Marketing on a revenue quota, similar to Sales.”

“Every lead from the website should be called within one hour of converting.” “Sales is accountable to Marketing just like Marketing is accountable to Sales. The Sales SLA defines a series of behaviors expected of the Sales team to ensure each lead is worked effectively.”

As a sales leader, should I strive to give each salesperson one lead per month and have the salesperson call that lead a thousand times? Should I prefer to give each salesperson a thousand leads per month and have the salesperson call each lead once?

what is the right balance between calling more frequently and managing the time invested per lead? The y-axis attempts to answer this question. The y-axis plots the profitability of calling a lead the number of times denoted on the x-axis. Whichever call attempt volume yields the highest profitability is the ideal per-lead call volume we are looking for. In this example, Figure 12.2 illustrates that the optimal number of times to call a small business lead is five. For mid-market leads, the optimal number of call attempts is eight. For enterprise companies, the optimal number of call attempts is twelve.

To Recap The dysfunctional relationship between Sales and Marketing is the kiss of death in a buyer-driven world. Use the Sales and Marketing SLA to replace the subjective and qualitative aspects of the Sales/Marketing relationship with well-defined targets and quantified goals. The Marketing SLA provides a framework to put Marketing on a revenue quota, similar to Sales' dynamic. Sales is accountable to Marketing just like Marketing is accountable to Sales. The Sales SLA defines a series of behaviors expected of the Sales team to ensure each lead is worked effectively. Send daily reports updating the entire Sales and Marketing team on the Sales and Marketing SLA. Manage the Sales and Marketing machine on a daily basis.

“Companies should strive to adopt sales technology that enables better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople.” In this chapter, I will provide detailed descriptions of how sales acceleration technology benefited our sales team at each stage of the sales process. As of the writing of this book, I had teamed up with one of our most talented product leaders at HubSpot, Christopher O'Donnell, to commercialize this sales acceleration technology so that every sales team could benefit from our insights. The first application that originated from these efforts was Sidekick, available for free at www.getsidekick.com

“Sales technology enables faster selling for salespeople by eliminating admin tasks and automating data capture.”

To Recap Historically, sales technology has been built for the sales leader, not the salesperson. This technology does not work for salespeople. Instead, it creates work for salespeople. Companies should strive to adopt sales technology that enables better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople. Sales technology creates better buying experiences for customers by capturing customer context and making that context readily available to salespeople. Sales technology enables faster selling for salespeople by eliminating admin tasks and automating data capture. Sales technology developed for the salesperson in the end benefits the sales manager with more accurate reporting to run the salesforce and the business.

To Recap Great teams have a core philosophy of continual improvement. A key ingredient to the sales acceleration formula is fostering a culture of experimentation. A key role of the executive team is to set up a culture around innovation, rather than generate all of the big ideas themselves. Follow a specific formula for experiment execution so that you can be confident your experiments are efficient and effective.

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.

The other major issue with a partner strategy is the lack of a feedback cycle from the partner's front line to your product team and executives. It is rare that a start-up nails its product-market fit right out of the gate.

As time progressed, we measured his VAR channel just like the rest of the business. For you SaaS experts out there, we measured LTV/CAC, payback period, salesperson productivity, customer retention, and a few other metrics. The results were phenomenal. Six years later, Pete oversaw a VAR-focused team of 100 cross-functional employees and was responsible for a significant amount of HubSpot's monthly new revenue generation.

the first qualifying matrix we used at HubSpot was BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing). As we reviewed sales opportunity after sales opportunity, it became apparent that, in our context, the “N” in BANT (“Need”) had become the most important component of the discovery process. HubSpot salespeople who established a strong “Need” with their prospective buyers had very high lead-to-customer conversion rates. A well-developed “Need” sounded like this: “The buyer is adding two salespeople in Q4 and needs to increase lead flow by 20 percent by the start of the quarter in order to support the sales expansion. If they do not increase lead flow, the new salespeople will need to resort to cold calling, which has been unsuccessful for the team in the past. The expanded sales team will likely fail at accelerating customer acquisition if the company does not increase lead flow proportionately.”

Some of our salespeople did not develop “Need” well. These salespeople had much lower lead-to-customer conversion rates. They failed to understand their prospects' needs beyond the surface level. When I would ask these salespeople about the needs they had uncovered, they responded generically, “The buyer needs more leads, just like everyone else.” No kidding! Why? How many? How did they come up with that number? What happens if they do not generate more leads? Where does increasing lead flow fit on their overall priority list? If our salespeople didn't have these answers, it was a bad sign.

A few years into the business, we were struggling to develop effective “Need” discovery with some of our salespeople. A different approach was necessary. As a sales leadership team, we started the brainstorming process. Ultimately, we decided to iterate on our qualifying matrix. We came up with an improved matrix that better summarized the discovery approach our most successful salespeople were taking with potential buyers. We called this qualifying matrix GPCT (Goal, Plan, Challenges, Timeline).