Mark Roberge, HubSpot's VP of Sales, explains how they use data to build predictable revenue. They segment by company size: small businesses get 3-4 calls, enterprises get 12-15 attempts. Sales reps follow data-backed playbooks embedded in the CRM instead of guessing.
Alright, hey, this is Aaron Ross. I'm here with Mark Roberge from— did I get that right, Mark?
You got it.
Alright, the head of sales at HubSpot, and we're here at the Sales 2.0 conference in the beautiful— I don't know, all I know is it's the Fairmont and they've got the second largest fig tree, I think, in the world here behind Mark. Mark gave us a great talk, and Mark, tell me a little bit about what you're doing here at HubSpot.
Sure, so thanks, Aaron. I run the entire sales team at HubSpot. I own the entire revenue stream for us. We've got about 100 125 folks in the group, a lot of hunters, probably 75 hunters, a dozen or so farmers, a couple of employment centers, a couple managers. So I'm in charge of that group and try to set the stage every day.
That's a great point, which is you, you specialize your salespeople to different roles.
Yeah, absolutely.
So what's one, you know, you gave a great talk earlier, but what do you think is one thing, one of your keys towards creating predictable revenue?
Yeah, so that's just my mission is predictable revenue, and I think the hinge for us is really being a very metrics-driven organization. You'd be surprised how often the gut of either leadership or the salespeople or marketing on key decisions is actually inaccurate. Yeah, I mean, moving to the world we're moving to in a Sales 2.0 environment, we're sitting on mounds and mounds of data, and there's more opportunities than people leverage to take advantage of that data to answer critical questions on how to bring more predictability to your sales process.
So actually, there's a great— one thing I'd love to point out is you had a great chart up there around the number of— how many calls should you make to a— is it someone who signed up with you?
Yeah, exactly. There's a whole space in there of questions that I talked to so many people today that they're leaving up to chance and the gut of the reps. Things like, how quickly should I call a lead? How frequently should I call? When I call a lead today, should I call in a day or 2 days or 3 days? When should I give up? Should I give up after 4 times or 5 times? On the second attempt, what should I say? What should I send? On the third tap, what should I say? What should I send? Those are great examples of questions where there's mounds of data we're sitting on that can give us statistical answers to those questions. And honestly, reps don't want to be thinking about that stuff. They just want to know what helps them make the most money and the most success. So as leaders, we really need to dive into those metrics and answer those questions for them.
So for example, how many— would you tell your guys how many times should they call after someone signs up on your website? How many times should they call?
More than they're doing, and it depends on the type of lead. Right, so the answer to that is not generic across all types of leads. Lots of times it depends on customer size, like small leads you can usually get a connect early on and calling them more often is not gonna be worthwhile.
That was like, yeah, with less than 10 employees, right?
Yeah, exactly, versus larger leads where you're calling into a busy decision maker that's used to dealing with sales teams, that's gonna warrant and need more calls, but on the backside of it, it's gonna lead to a bigger deal. So the stats are, you can segment the stats based on the type of lead and build that into your sales process. Your Salesforce or CRM system.
Yeah, what I remember is I'm like, alright, if it's a small business, you know, only call them 4 times, but if it's bigger, up to 8.
And that was for us, right? I think the process is what we want to focus on and getting the data. But yeah, for us, we build out in the system that when a lead in, say, like 10 employees, yeah, we'll call that 3 or 4 times versus a lead that has 1,000 employees, we'll probably call that 12 or 15 times before we give up and move it back in the nurturing cycle.
Great. Well, again, it's HubSpot.com. Is there a better way? You have like a LinkedIn or Twitter or something you want to tell people?
Mark Roberge across the board.
Twitter.com/MarkRoberge.
Markroberts, hubspot.com. I'm a contributor to the blog, and don't forget about websitegrader.com, which is a great place to get some free tips.
Yeah, all right, thanks, Mark.
Thanks, Aaron.
