The Science of Building a Scalable Sales Team

When I came to HubSpot five years ago, I had never run a sales team, so I didn’t know the conventional techniques that sales managers use. Instead, I relied on my background as an MIT-trained engineer to create a system of hiring and development that relies on metrics and quantitative analysis.

Five years later, my team is now 200 employees strong. We’ve acquired 7,000 new customers for HubSpot, placing the company as the #33 Fastest Growing Company in America on the Inc. 500 List. It has been a fun, stressful, and fulfilling experience.

Early on in this role, I defined the following mission for myself: “Scalable, predictable revenue growth.” There were four tactics I wanted to be laser focused on to achieve this mission:

1. Hire the same successful salesperson every time.
2. Train new hires in a consistent, measurable way.
3. Provide our salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads each month.
4. Work those leads with the same process every time.

Of course intentions are one thing; execution is another. Here’s how things played out in the quest to build the best possible sales team at HubSpot.

1. Hire the Same Successful Salesperson Every Time

Most companies screen sales candidates on “gut feel,” which does not scale. I aimed to inject quantitative analysis into this normally unscientific process.

Before I held our first set of interviews, I drew up a list of twelve criteria that I thought would correlate with success in the sales role. The criteria were weighted according to relative importance, and the possible scores—on a scale of 1 to 10—were defined precisely as to what each meant for that potential hire. The hiring began.

After 12 months, 500 interviews, and 20 hires, I hired a graduate student from MIT to run a regression analysis, correlating the interview scores to success in our sales funnel. This was the foundation of our own personalized predictive index. By repeating this analysis every 6 to 12 months, we continually fine-tuned the index to our business. Today, as we hire 5 to 10 sales reps per month, I sleep better knowing this process is established.

The key takeaway here is the process, not the actual results of the criteria. Each sales context is different. Each salesperson has a unique style. Some fit your context and some do not. The process helps to understand these differences. However, there were a few characteristics that were highly correlated with success that I believe will apply to most sales environments. These characteristics are prior success, intelligence, work ethic, and coach-ability. Coach-ability is definitely one that I missed early on and added in later as we studied our success profiles. Today it is the characteristic that I focus on the most.

2. Train New Hires in a Consistent, Measurable Way

When I asked candidates how they were trained in their last job, many responded that they simply shadowed one of that company’s top salespeople for a few weeks. That approach concerned me: Our best salespeople are great, but they each tend to be great for very different reasons; most of them are great at one aspect of sales (say, asking great questions) and mediocre at others. So no one sales rep can teach the whole package.

Today, our salespeople spend their first month on the job in a classroom-style setting. At the end of their first month, each new hire must pass a 150-question exam, as well as six different certification tests on the HubSpot product, our sales methodology, and the concept of inbound marketing. These exams and certifications ensure that new hires will leave training with the same foundation of skills.

To gain an understanding of our product, every new salesperson creates a blog and a website from scratch during their initial training. They experience the actual pains and successes of our primary customers: Professional marketers who need to generate leads online. As a result of this exercise, our salespeople are able to connect on a far deeper level with our prospects and leads.

3. Provide Salespeople with the Same Quality and Quantity of Leads Each Month

At HubSpot, we practice what we preach. We get our leads—more than 50,000 a month—using the same inbound marketing model that we encourage our customers to use. These are not cold, purchased leads. They are interested, educated, and confirmed potential buyers who are experiencing the problems that we can solve.

A modern process like this requires an unprecedented level of sales and marketing alignment. We try to align every possible aspect of these two teams, so that our goals, pains, and processes are as similar as possible.

Both teams are on a monthly quota. Marketing works to generate a certain quality and quantity of leads each month, while Sales is working to close those leads. Instead of focusing on a sales quota, we aim to provide enough leads to keep every sales rep productive for 40 hours a week. (Focusing on a quota ignores that a successful salesperson could produce more with more leads.) We also factor quality, not just quantity, when generating leads. A lead that asks to speak to a salesperson might close at 20 times the rate compared to a lead that merely attends a webinar. Obviously, the higher quality lead is much harder for the marketing team to generate, so we make sure that they get 20 times the credit for these leads, and we align our incentives accordingly.

4. Work Those Leads with the Same Process Every Time

Now that we’ve got all of these great leads flowing in so reliably, the next step is to decide how we can effectively assign and work these leads. Should I provide each salesperson with one lead and have them call the lead 1,000 times in the month? Or should I provide each salesperson with 1,000 leads and have them call each lead once? Obviously, the answer is somewhere in between—but where? If I call a lead today, when should I call it next? This afternoon? Tomorrow? Next week? This is another set of questions that many companies answer using nothing more than “gut feel.” When you have just a handful of salespeople, it can seem like this is an adequate approach—it’s hard to see the variability. But with hundreds of salespeople working thousands of leads, we’re able to take a far more scientific approach.

We examined a sample of 50,000 leads to determine which call patterns led to maximum sales efficiency. Once we’d identified the ideal call pattern, we agreed to follow the proven pattern that will lead to the greatest possibility of success with those hard-won high-quality leads. These patterns are programmed into our CRM, Salesforce.com. This allows our salespeople to focus their energies on more strategic questions, like how to break the ice, what the prospect’s most pressing needs are, and how we can best help them.

We’ve worked hard at HubSpot to create a culture of rigorous self-analysis and review. It can be too easy, even when a company is successful, to assume that whatever you’re doing is working, and it’s best not to meddle with it. We meddle constantly. We are forever poking at the numbers, prodding the data to tell us more: What’s working, why it’s working, and how we can do better to build a better company.