How to Sell More (Without Being Salesy)

There's this shift that's happening in sales now. It's been happening for a while and we're seeing it at HubSpot, is that some people are not great at selling, but they're actually really good at getting sales. Now this sounds like a paradox. It's like, well, what do you mean? Like they're not good at selling, but they're getting sales? It's because we confuse the activity of selling with the outcome of sales. Selling is one of the possible activities one could do to result in a sale. And as it turns out, one of the best ones instead of hustling is actually helping. So we've been testing this theory at HubSpot. Some of our best performing salespeople at HubSpot came from our customer support team that are used to helping customers all the time. So this works. I'm not suggesting that we stop hiring kind of classically trained salespeople. I'm suggesting we have a new pool of talent that are much more effective than we would likely expect them to be. We surveyed a bunch of sellers, salespeople, and asked them. Do you believe that you are adding value to the prospect? You're adding value to the conversation? 82% said, yes, I believe I am adding value to the prospect. We asked the buyers, do you believe in the sales conversations you've had, do you believe that value was added to you, that the salesperson added value? Only 34% said, yes, I believe the salesperson added value to this conversation. This is a big problem, but also a big opportunity for us. And the lesson we have learned at HubSpot is we should be doubling down on sales conversations, but in the same way as we thought about marketing, which is not doubling down on quantity, but doubling down on the quality of sales conversations we're having. When you think about the sales process, it's part of a larger end-to-end customer experience. So you don't want a brilliantly written blog article that pulls someone in and then have a crappy sales experience. That's not— it has to be delightful the whole way.