Book Digest: The Sales Acceleration Formula

Mark Roberge’s The Sales Acceleration Formula is the sales book that pretty much everyone should read. It’s a great resource for sales and marketing professionals who are looking for advice on developing and scaling a team. Leaders in other departments should read it so they can contribute to the growth conversation.

Roberge takes an engineering, process based approach to developing a sales team: Prioritize the most important tasks and use data-driven techniques to increase efficiency and quality. He identifies hiring as the highest priority and suggests developing a hypothesis about what traits are most important, measuring these traits in candidates, and then using data from your current team’s outcomes to adjust your hypothesis over time. In discussing training, Roberge criticizes typical shadowing training programs, favoring structured training that maps to the buyer’s journey in purchasing your product. Regarding management, Roberge advocates using a few simple processes and metrics to be sure that each salesperson is developing the single skill that will be most important for their future success. Finally, Roberge discusses demand generation, outlining a strategy to focus marketing on providing quality leads rather than quantity and for ensuring that sales gives these leads the follow-up they deserve.

Below is a more detailed summary of the book. I’ll be publishing my own reflections on startup sales management in the next week or so.

Introductory Material

• Modern B2B sales management requires many skills found in engineering training: numeracy, logic, analytical ability, metrics, and process-orientation.
• Keys to success
  • The Sales Hiring Formula: Hire the same successful salesperson every time.
  • The Sales Training Formula: Train every salesperson in the same way.
  • The Sales Management Formula: Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process.
  • The Demand Generation Formula: Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads each month.

Part I: The Sales Hiring Formula

• Hiring the best people is the most important determinant of success.
  • Many say they agree with this idea, but then, in practice, spend their time elsewhere.
• The ideal sales hire differs for every company.
• You need a process to determine the right profile for your company.
  • Create a theory about which characteristics are important.
  • Define an evaluation strategy for each characteristic.
  • Score each candidate.
  • Learn and iterate on the model.
• Five great traits and how to interview for them.
  • Coachability
    • Most important
    • Use role playing of a sale, give feedback, see if they at least try to incorporate it.
  • Curiosity
    • Do candidates ask questions of the interviewer, do they ask questions during the role play?
  • Prior success
    • Look for top 10%.
  • Intelligence
    • Not as important in a commoditized sale.
    • Is important in evolving market.
    • Send training materials and evaluate how well candidates absorb it.
  • Work ethic
    • Reference checks, behavioral questions (what do you do every day?)
• Finding top performing salespeople
  • Great salespeople never apply for a job – they get recruited.
  • Create an internal recruiting agency paid partly on commission.
  • Criteria to look for on Linkedin: Team ranking, tenure, profile quality.
  • Reaching out: School/Employer subject line, soft ask “know anyone who might be interested.”
  • Forced referrals from current employees. Sit them down, take them through their contacts and ask who would be good.
• The ideal first sales hire
  • Bad choices
    • Former SVP of sales won’t get his hands dirty.
    • #1 salesperson at another company won’t succeed in unstructured environment.
  • Good choices
    • Sales manager at another company would have potential and willingness to work, but has less entrepreneurial instinct.
    • Former entrepreneur is a the best choice. Creative instincts, good at improvising, can learn to be a manager.

Part II: The Sales Training Formula

• Ride along training is a bad idea. Candidates learn as many bad habits as good ones.
• Sales methodology has three elements.
  • Buyer Journey
    • Steps the buyer goes through to purchase the product, both internally and externally.
  • Sales Process
    • Supports the buyer journey at each stage.
    • Training spends a half day on each step of the sales process.
    • Use several exams to award certifications and persuade hires to take it seriously.
  • Qualifying Matrix
• Train your salespeople to experience the day to day job of potential customers
  • E.g., Hubspot hires spent their first few weeks creating their own web presence.
• Have sales team members build a topically relevant personal brand through social media
  • Goal is to be perceived as a trusted advisor by prospects.
  • Spend less time on normal sales activities to facilitate this.
  • Find the people your prospects on twitter follow, retweet their tweets.
  • Find the LinkedIn groups where your prospects are active and answer questions.
  • Read the blogs your customers read. Promote and comment on them.

Part III: The Sales Management Formula

• Coaching is critical and needs to be focused on the one skill that will have the biggest impact at a time rather than on many areas simultaneously.
• Implement a monthly coaching cycle where managers speak with each rep on the first of the month to agree on a skill development plan, and then the director and VP meet on the second of the month to review each skill development plan.
  • Walk through the numbers at each stage of the funnel with the rep to determine which area would be the highest priority.
  • Basic metrics to watch: (1) % of leads created to leads worked, (2) % of leads worked to demo, (3) % of demo to customer.
  • Each of these metrics can be unpacked to “peel back the onion” and isolate a deeper issue. For instance, % of leads worked to demo is a combination of (a) connect rate and (b) connect to demo rate. Which area has the problem?
• Commission plans are critical and have to be continually adjusted to fit the strategy.
  • Could pay for closing customers, customer tenure, or a combination.
  • Plans should be simple, aligned with strategy, and immediate in payoff.
• Have objective criteria for promotions
  • Have tracks for individual contributors, managers, and internal entrepreneurs.
• Use contests to solve issues.
  • Use prizes that are team based, use short term results.
  • Just one contest at a time.
• It’s best to promote from within.
  • There’s huge variance between traits that lead to individual success and management success.
  • Book contains a list of leadership development resources.
  • Have a 12 week leadership development program.
    • One topic and one assignment per week together with reading.
  • Balanced skill set is desireable. Need to be good but not necessary #1 on the numbers.
• Common problems for new managers
  • Bad time management regarding coaching. Trying to coach on everything rather than just the one most important thing.
  • Too much time in the trenches. Trying to close deals for salespeople rather than manage.
  • Giving up on a new hire too early.

Part IV: The Demand Generation Formula

• Have customers find you – don’t rely on interruptive marketing.
• Have a highly ranked website.
  • Get people to link to you.
  • Continuous high quality content production.
  • Frequent online participation in social media where your buyers are already active.
  • This takes time.
• Have a content production process.
  • Have a journalist, who is the writer, and a thought leadership committee that gives the journalist ideas for what to write.
  • Use interviews with the thought leadership committee to give new information to the journalist on a set interval.
  • Focus on the long tail, not the head. In other words, look for niche topics you can dominate, not ones of broad appeal dominated by the top blogs.
• Converting inbound interest into revenue.
  • Inbound leads have pain but may not be a good fit for your product.
  • Marketing should pass fewer leads that are more likely to be fits otherwise sales will give up on marketing leads.
  • Use lead scoring as a way to determine where a lead is on its buyer journey.
    • Decide, for each buyer persona, when you want to engage them.
    • Don’t use superficial measures like website visits.
  • Sales follow up.
    • Should use details from engagement with marketing materials.
      • I saw you downloaded our whitepaper and I looked at your website – I have suggestions for you. Would you like to review them?
    • Call low then call high.
      • Talk to the subordinate first. Provide value and mine for information.
      • Then call high and note that you’ve been working with the subordinates.
    • Specialize teams so that one does inbound and the other outbound.
  • Create a service level agreement between sales and marketing with quantifiable commitments.
    • Marketing agrees to provide quality leads, not just quantity. You could quantify this by the implied dollar value of the leads. Demo requests are worth a lot more than whitepaper downloads.
    • Sales agrees to follow up quickly and persistently.
    • Have a dashboard listing the names of people who are not meeting their obligations.

Part V: Technology and Experimentation

• Technology should help salespeople, not generate more work.
• Sales stages should be based on buyer actions, not subjective salesperson opinions. For example, did the prospect confirm the sales call summary as accurate?
• Good teams continually improve with experimentation.
  • Develop a culture of innovation coming from the front line.
  • Sales hackathons to attack a critical problem.
• The process for systematic innovation.
  • Define a clear goal and measure of success.
  • Develop a way to test, ideally by looking for a true negative. Put your best team on a new method, if they can’t make it work, you know it doesn’t work.