The Sales Acceleration Formula
“World-class sales hiring is the most important driver of sales success.” (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
[Sam Salesperson] “Hi, Pete, this is Sam from HubSpot. I noticed you requested more information on our website. What questions did you have?”
The ideal sales hiring formula is different for every company…but the process to engineer the formula is the same. (View Highlight)
Step 1: Establish a Theory of the Ideal Sales Characteristics (View Highlight)
Step 2: Define an Evaluation Strategy for Each Characteristic (View Highlight)
“The ideal sales hiring formula is different for every company…but the process to engineer the formula is the same.” (View Highlight)
Step 3: Score Candidates against the Ideal Sales Characteristics (View Highlight)
Step 4: Learn and Iterate on the Model while Engineering the Sales Hiring Formula (View Highlight)
“Statistics suggest salespeople who are intelligent and helpful, rather than aggressive and high-pressure, are most successful with today’s empowered buyer.” (View Highlight)
Statistics suggest salespeople who are intelligent and helpful, rather than aggressive and high-pressure, are most successful with today’s empowered buyer. (View Highlight)
To Recap
Coachability: the ability to absorb and apply coaching. (View Highlight)
Step 1: Set Up a Role-Playing Exercise That Models Your Buyer Context (View Highlight)
Step 2: Evaluate the Candidate’s Ability to Self-Diagnose (View Highlight)
Step 3: Evaluate the Candidate’s Ability to Absorb and Apply Coaching (View Highlight)
Prior success: a history of top performance or remarkable achievement. (View Highlight)
Intelligence: the ability to learn complex concepts quickly and communicate those concepts in an easy-to-understand manner. (View Highlight)
Work ethic: proactively pursuing the company mission with a high degree of energy and daily activity. (View Highlight)
Great salespeople never have to apply for a job (View Highlight)
Build a Recruiting Agency within Your Company (View Highlight)
Don’t hire a recruiting agency. Don’t build a corporate recruiting team. Build a recruiting agency within your corporation. (View Highlight)
Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates on LinkedIn (View Highlight)
Step 1: Leverage the Search Capability within LinkedIn to Source a List of Qualified Candidates (View Highlight)
Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates through Your Team: The “Forced Referral” (View Highlight)
• Candidate 1: The SVP of Sales
The entrepreneur (candidate 3) is my most desirable candidate.
Train Your Salespeople to Experience the Day-to-Day Job of Potential Customers (View Highlight)
Motivation through Sales Compensation Plans and Contests (View Highlight)
Developing Sales Leaders—Advantages of a “Promote from Within” Culture (View Highlight)
The Most Common Mistake: Don’t Pass All the Leads to Sales (View Highlight)
Outbound sales is represented by the graphic on the left. Outbound sales campaigns start with a list of leads that are presumably a good “fit” for the business. If the company targets the Fortune 5000 telecom industry, the company purchases a list of CEOs from the Fortune 5000 telecom industry. Then, Sales and Marketing go to work on that list as aggressively as possible with direct mail, email spam, targeted advertising, and cold calls hoping that 1 percent of the purchased leads respond to these forms of interruptive, outbound selling. The leads that indeed respond probably have some form of “pain”, which triggers the response. (View Highlight)
Inbound selling is represented by the graphic on the right. The inbound graphic is an inverse representation of the outbound graphic. Most of the leads generated from inbound marketing have a “pain” that needs to be solved. Why else would they have conducted the Google search, read the blog article, or downloaded the ebook? Unfortunately, not all of the inbound leads are a good “fit.” Some of the leads are perfect prospects, because they are executives from the Fortune 5000 telecom industry. These are beautiful leads. They represent the right person at the right company, and they have a pain that your product can solve. However, some of the leads are not a good fit. Some of the leads are PhD students from Asia, simply doing research for their dissertations. These leads will probably never be buyers of your product. (View Highlight)
Scrap the Elevator Pitch—Lead with Context (View Highlight)
Accelerate Lead Sourcing with Technology (View Highlight)
At the surface layer, I hope this book has presented you with some useful tactics around building a sales team in a scalable, predictable way. I hope that my anecdotes provide a blueprint for how you can effectively hire, train, and manage a high-performing sales team. I hope that you appreciate the power of executing an inbound selling model and empowering your organization with a culture of experimentation. I hope, too, that you understand the competitive advantage that can be unleashed for your business with the proper adoption of sales technology, benefiting both your salespeople and your customers.
• “Hire the same successful salesperson every time.” (The Sales Hiring Formula)