Finding your Product Fit - Mark Roberge - Revenue Today - Episode # 003

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Okay. Today's guest is, well, this, this person was the first person I looked up to when I went into sales leadership. He took HubSpot from $0 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. He's a sales scientist, MIT quant, sought-after keynote speaker, professor at Harvard Business School, author of the bestseller, The Sales Acceleration Formula, the managing director of Stage 2 Capital. Welcome, Mark Roberge.

Thank you, Jared. I appreciate that. Thanks.

Thank you so much for being a guest on our show. So, You know, just jumping, jumping into it.

Yeah,

this is May 2022. Debunk a myth about generating revenue today.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this one's been out there for a while, but it's 95% of teams still aren't doing it. And that is like the second most important North Star metric for sales is revenue. The number one is customer retention and success. And like, it's, we're, we're like continually ignoring it. And I'll, I'll kind of unpack it and then Jared, you can tell me where to go. Yeah. So I guess just like if we look at an overall, a recent, like a 30-year history arc of like software, let's say, and I would say like businesses well beyond software fit into this, but I think most of our audience is software, so we'll just kind of stay there. You know, we've gone from this world of like an on-premise software world from the '80s and '90s, pre-internet, to a post- internet world where, you know, most of it was SaaS and cloud-driven, most of it was subscription-driven, and the internet gave every customer a huge megaphone to tell everyone about good and bad experiences with product. And all of those changes caused customer success, satisfaction, and retention to be like top of mind for CEOs. I would say most CEOs largely think about employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Like, that's, that's like, there's, that's a big part of their mindshare. And so when, when I talk, when I go, like, when I'm brought into companies, whether they're $10 billion companies or they're like 2-person companies, and they're like, hey, uh, we'd love, you know, We just are not satisfied with our customer retention, our customer success. First, they're looking at their product. It must be our product. Or the second place they look at is their onboarding processes and their customer success team. And those are relatively intuitive places to look. But pretty much every time, and I can't think of a time when it wasn't, the case, and I'm talking about 100, at least 100 data points, the customer retention issue lies in sales. It lies in like who, the types of customers the sales team is pursuing, the expectations they're setting during the process, and the What's the right word? The, the buy-in they're creating within the organization to make sure the customer success team is set up for success upon contract signature. That's, that's where, in my experience, like every single customer retention issue I've diagnosed sits, and we haven't caught up to it. And, and I'll, I'll add to that craziness, that whole craziness that One of the main drivers of that issue is the way we comp and pay our reps.

So. Well, what are we doing wrong with comping and paying our reps? You can't leave us hanging.

Right. So, I mean, we have that backdrop, right, of like the '80s, '90s, pre-internet, on-prem, sell the big deal. It didn't matter if the software worked, they were stuck with it, whatever. To post-internet, everything's cloud-based, easy to buy, easy to leave. Everyone has a megaphone and 5 1-star reviews will kill your business, right? So like 2 very contrasting environments. And the way we pay our reps is we pay you for the first revenue you get from a customer. And we pay you less for Follow-on revenue, expansion revenue. That's born out of the '80s, '90s, pre-internet age. It was like, it's all about getting your foot in the door. It is frigging hard to cold call a company to build a relationship. It takes a year back in the '80s and '90s to sell that million-dollar deal. But once you got the signature, the company bought 50 servers and put them in the basement. They hooked it up to the LAN. They put— they did 6 months of training. with their employees on how the new software worked. And by the way, the software sucked. It didn't work. It was hard to use. Where did the term shelfware come from? Right? It's like, it didn't matter. The best sales team won. Right? And now, right now it's different. It's all different. And yet we're still paying our reps with a 1980s sales plan. What is my commission plan? Oh, you have to sell $1 million of software. Um, okay, cool. Um, does the expansion revenue count? And either the answer is no, or it counts less, or best case, it counts equal. Okay. And so, so basically a lot of times it's just like, no, you have to sell $1 million of new revenue from new customers. So then you walk into an account and, you know, and, and the customer's like, this is awesome, Jared, thank you so much for the demo. You clearly understand my business. I love your product. It seems easy to use. You know, we have 800 employees, but what I'd love to do is I'd love to test your software In our New York office with our 25 employees there. And what does a salesperson say? No. You really need to get the true value of our software. You need to roll this out to all 800 people on the first day. Bullshit. Why are they really saying that? Because that's how I get paid. And so now, so, so now it's like, You start off behind, you have to deploy this to 800 people as opposed to a much easier 25-person account where we were probably set up for success. Did they bother to get IT involved? No. Did they bother to bring it up to HR who's going to have to train the people? No. They got the signature. And so now this is a complete failure. Now what happens? Like, why do you think, like, when companies measure How much consumption, how many seats, how much gigabytes, how many contacts are our customers buying versus how much are they using? They're using like 50% of what they bought, what they bought because of the sales compensation plan. And do you know how difficult of a retention and an expansion conversation that is for the account manager a year later? Oh, hey, Jared. Hope you're having a good experience. So as you know, You bought 800 seats last year and only 300 people use the software. How good would it have been if they just bought 25, had an enormously successful opportunity, and expanded to 50, and then 100, and then 300, and then 400? And so, like, first off, that sale is faster. It's only 25 seats. Mm-hmm. And it's cheaper. It closes at a higher rate, and the rep sets all the right expectations because they're getting paid on the expansion. So, Why don't we just pay our reps 20% more for the expansion revenue? And I'm not even advocating that the rep stays involved and becomes CSM and account manager. Yes, they have to do their job. Just say you get paid this for the first revenue and 20% more for expansion revenue. And all that goes away. The buyer says, I want to start with 25 seats. Like, beautiful. Actually, let's start with 10. And by the way, before we do this, yeah, let's start with 5. Let's make this really easy. And, and by the way, can you just introduce me to IT? Because I make sure they're involved. Let's make— can you introduce me to HR? Because I need to make sure they're set up, because I get paid pennies for this first sale. But I'm going to make my full annual quota for the expansion. And it changes the game. But we're still using— we're, you know, we're still using 1980s sales comp plans that causing Massive retention and success issues in our customer base. And all founders are looking at their product and their onboarding process as the issue. And that's not the issue.

Oh, what, what a strong start, Mark. You know, the funny thing is when I sold for FedEx, because we handled the full lifecycle of, uh, of, of the account, like never passed it on, we could bring on just the ground business, just the express, but somehow that didn't make it to software.

That's crazy. That's crazy, right? I love that. I love that.

I'd bring on one location.

Yeah,

I'd bring on the office, but not the warehouse. That's fine.

Right?

I needed to back pocket it to hit my numbers because I only have— Exactly. Territory.

Like, wraps your coin operated. So take advantage, you know, align your strategy with that. And I'm not just like hypothesizing in a random like spot here, Jack. Like, I used this 12 years ago at HubSpot when we launched the The CRM and it worked beautifully. Like we wanted a different model than when we sold the marketing software, which got us to our first like $70 million in our first 8 years of the business. And then we launched the CRM and we wanted to do it in a product-led growth manner. And had I adopted the traditional comp plan, we would have never worked. And now you just, just look at the, the, the public information, the CRM and how much it's driving. It's like when I told the reps the plan, they were like, Robert's just so stupid. What do you mean? I have this 100-seat account that I just talked to, and he just told us about this comp plan, and I'm just gonna size up, sign up 5 seats this quarter and sign up the other 95 next quarter. And I was like, so good. That's exactly what I want. You know, so, but for whatever. And so, so I'm not just talking from like an idea, like it worked and I've used it in a bunch of other companies. So that, that would be my biggest May 2022 myth that we still haven't fully adopted.

I mean, you're speaking to a HubSpot user that started on their free CRM, upgraded, and, uh, myself, now all of a sudden we have Marketing Pro and it's been super chill and I feel—

And in your first, your first call, Jared, was it, were they like, Oh, hey, glad you're using the software for a week. By the way, um, we have, we want to get all 550 receipts on and we want you to buy the marketing product and we want you to buy the services product. And, and by the way, it's going to be, uh, $95,000 a year. I mean, that, yeah.

No, they, I mean, frankly, we talked just about what my, what my top of mind was. They might've foreshadowed lightly some other stuff. They didn't.

We also have this stuff. Just keep us in mind. Keep us in mind when this stuff comes up, but like, this is what's top of mind right now.

I love it. Like, like incentivize the reps to gamify. Like, yeah, just get the 5. You get more on the 95. You book the 100 now, you're going to get paid less.

Yeah. And it's part of it too comes back to like sales compensation design, Jared, because I think like 'Cause right, right now we came at this from like, my retention sucks, what's happening? How do I figure this out? And no one's looking at sales. I'm like, look at sales and look at the sales comp plan. And there's other things besides the sales comp plan. But like, if we look at this from like, how do I design a sales comp plan? You know, so many founders are like, oh, I don't know. Like, I hired a VP of sales, that's their job. And then the VP of sales uses the comp plan they used at their last company. So, okay, cool. I was at salesforce.com for 7 years. This is the comp plan we use. Obviously Salesforce is a super successful company. She's used their, their, their comp plan. And that's just such a lost opportunity for the VP of sales and the founder. Because as we're seeing here, it's like when I am brought in to say, to do like a comp plan workshop or help a company with their comp plan, my first question is, can I, can we sit down with the CEO and the board and can you all list out your 3 to 5 biggest objectives for this year? And I'm asking myself, can any of those objectives be reinforced Through the sales comp plan. Oh, we have to get into Europe. Great. Easily, like, probably not the comp plan, but like, definitely like our go-to-market resource allocation. We need to move upstream. We need to move into this function department. We need to improve retention. We need to push this particular feature more because it's sticky. We need to— or strategic. We need like all of these things are reinforced through our sales strategy and/or our sales comp plan. So that's where we need to start. And that's, that's where it starts here, Jared, is like, hey, our retention sucks, our customer satisfaction sucks, our customer engagement and usage of the product sucks. It's in sales and it's in the sales comp plan. Can you align it?

Yeah, it sounds like you're saying like most people look at comp plans as like a one-size-fits-all instead of, um, Prioritizing what your company's needs and goals are. Yeah, it's an opportunity. That client or OKRs or whatever.

Yeah. And especially for our, our listeners who are in the startup ecosystem, as you go from seed to A to B to pre-IPO to IPO, your, your optimal comp plan is changing. There is no like, oh, this worked for us. We hired 5 reps. It worked. That's going to be it forever. We have it figured out. No way. No way. 'Cause that, that North Star changes from, you know, in the seed stage, it's just like, I just need 20 customers to be hyper successful. At the A stage, it's like, we need to get our unit economics healthy. At the B stage, we need to like increase our TAM and growth rate and expand into new markets. And potentially at the C stage, we need to keep our people. More than the average in the industry of 2.2 years. And these all have dramatic implications on our comp plan. So like, you know, the comp plan at the— in those early stages, the comp plan should be changed not annually on the beginning of the fiscal year, which a lot of people think about, but when the business needs it, right? So like, I think the typical comp plan has between a 12 and 24-month Like shelf life in a comp, in a, in a, and it's, there's this arc of like, you launch the comp plan with a particular behavioral design change. It takes the reps about 2 or 3 months to figure it out. Like they still stay in their old ways. And then 1 or 2 of them figure it out and start making a lot of money and they tell all their friends and they all start making the money and you're like, you're like loving life for like 6 or 7 months because the comp plan is working so well. And then they figure out the loopholes. And so like, then they start figuring out the loopholes and now your comp plan's dead and you have to, or maybe either they figure out the loopholes or it's created a different set of behavioral, you know, you know, suboptimal behaviors, you know what I mean? Like that you now have to lean into. But that's kind of how the comp plans evolved. We've been talking a lot about comp plans.

That's cool. No, I want to, I want to move forward, but like, Let's, let's understand the KPIs that are important to you today in your role in the companies that you advise, work with, et cetera.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, uh, yeah, so I have, um, I've been working on a framework for about 6 years now that has, I've been getting a lot of great love letters from the industry on of like, wow, I read this, I adopted this and it really changed the acceleration of our business. And it all originated from the time between me leaving HubSpot after the IPO and joining the faculty at Harvard Business School. And then when I teamed up with Jay Powe and co-founded Stage 2 Capital 4 years ago, there was like probably like a 6 or 7 year timeframe in there. And I was brought into a lot of Companies in general. Like, I definitely like a lot of startups from like the people who backed HubSpot, the partners at Sequoia, the partners at General Catalyst, the partners at Matrix, those types of firms. And then I did spend a lot of work time with some bigger companies too. My friends at BCG, my friends in private equity firms, et cetera. Personally, just like personal taste in SaaS, I like the startup ecosystem, but it was really cool to like see the broad spectrum and compare and contrast and all that kind of stuff. So in the startup ecosystem, it's surprising when you look at the research that the failure rate of a seed, Series A, Series B, and Series C company is actually dramatically similar. Like there are some studies that show that the failure rate of a Series A company is 75% and the failure rate of a Series C company is 75%. That's crazy. Like you'd think that these would be like being de-risked. And they're not. And so that became an area of curiosity for me. And as I looked at data point after data point after data point, either through a board seat or advisory seat or working with a student or whatever it was, the failure diagnoses came back to 2 strategic questions and decisions. And that was, when did the startup decide to scale sales and how fast? And I found that like a lot of startups were really messing that up and actually not getting great advice from their boards and investors, which was like, I think, feeding the issue that a lot of folks were, you know, I, I, I'm ready to scale when I have product market fit. Good, good answer. But what's product market fit? And now you get a whole bunch of answers. And that's weird that we have this cool term called product market fit, but no one really knows how to define it. And half the people define it as a revenue line, which I couldn't disagree with more. I have product-market fit when I have a million in revenue. Ugh, terrible. That's market message fit. You can sell, great. But does your product deliver a value? A million dollars in revenue tells nothing, right? And then, um, and then the pace by which we scale. So, so that all led to the work of, um, what I call the science of scaling, um, which defines 3 sequential phases that you go through. With, um, really concrete quantitative metrics that you use your own data to decide when you graduate from each phase. And it's product market fit that leads to go-to-market fit that leads to the growth and moat phase. And so product market fit, at that stage, what I care about, I think the best indication of in our area of software is customer retention. Okay. I think that's the best measure. product-market fit. The problem is it takes a year to figure it out, and we don't have that time. So at that stage, the key metric, to answer your question, Jared, is the leading indicator to customer retention. Like, what is it that I can measure and see in the first month of a customer's experience and lifespan with us? That if that event occurs, whether it's a, it's a setup or it's a behavior or it's an event or like an outcome of the software for them, That most of those people were new. And if they don't experience that in the first month, most of them will churn. Like, that's what we have to figure out for business. For Slack, it was like whether they sent 2,000 team messages in the first month. For Dropbox, it was whether they backed up their files in a day or an hour. And for HubSpot is whether they used 5 features in the 25-feature platform in the first month, right? So like, those are examples and it's— I've written a lot about how you come up with that. So that's my first North Star metric is your lead indicator of retention. that represents product market fit. And then your next North Star, once you graduate from that, is to essentially bring on customers that meet that product market fit model profitably. And I call that go-to-market fit. And we measure that by unit economics. And you can extract unit economics back to lead indicators. Like, you know, it's like, you can't, you can't tell a 27-year-old account executive that joins your company, like, hey, what's your— they're like, what's my job? And you can't say like, Create an LTV to CAC greater than 3, or like create a payback period less than 12 months. But what you can do algebraically is you can extract those goals back to how many leads do they call a day? How many opportunities do they create a day? What is the close rate on those opportunities to customer? What's the average ticket size? What's the cost per lead? We can like operation— now that's more tangible, right? And so— So that's essentially like, it's, it's, uh, leading indicators of retention, leading indicators of unit economics, which represents product-market fit, going to go-to-market fit, going to growth moat. That's how I think about the key, the KPIs for, for these startups.

Nice. Now, regarding challenges, what, what, what keeps you up at night?

Hmm. I don't know, to be honest, like, a lot of people bet on us with the Stage 2 mission. So Stage 2 Capital is the, it's the first VC fund run and backed by go-to-market executives. We have, we have like the CRO, the CMO, the CCO from the head of RevOps from most of the Cloud 100 software companies, from Snowflake to Asana to Atlassian to Salesforce to Oracle to SAP, et cetera. And I've been humbled by— we have 300 of them, right? So I've been humbled by how viral the entire mission went to take that expertise and bring it. And, you know, they wrote us some decent-sized checks. Like, for a lot of them, they've had great career success, so it is a small percentage of their net worth and But I just feel like a lot of pressure every day to like deliver on that mission on their behalf. Granted, they work their asses off with me to do that. And I just feel a lot of pressure to, to just make good on that mission, both from our ability to help the next generation of entrepreneurs as well as create really sound financial returns. And granted, all the underlying metrics are extraordinarily strong in terms of our markups. They're way ahead of the pack. And I'm excited, but as we all know, those who've done startups and businesses, like sometimes things are outside of your hand, whether it's a war or an economy or inflation or all these different things. And the unexpected is what keeps me up at night and the implications that that could have on what we all banded together to create.

I like that. I like the camaraderie in your group and how you feel You know, the ownership of it, which is spectacular. Now, little, little more fun question. What excites you about the future?

Product-led growth. If we, if we stick to professional side, I'm like, I just think it's like we're in inning number 1 of like such an amazing revolution and disruption to software, um, on par with what SaaS did, not as pervasive, but close. You know, I think like SaaS disrupted almost every software category. And if you were around back in 2004 and '05, it was like there was so much resistance, so much doubt. IT managers will never put their stuff in the cloud. They would never trust, never trust a cloud with the internet, with their data. And a couple early adopters did it and took advantage of all the you know, the accounting and financial advantages of that architecture, took advantage of all the user experience advantages of that architecture and started winning. And then the early majority followed and the laggards are trying to catch up or going out of business right now because of the disadvantages that not adopting created. And product-led growth has a very similar potential that most companies in software categories today created value and settled into a price point that was able to pay for the, the marketing or demand generation necessary to bring a company to your sales team. And for the sales team to do discovery and demonstrations to sign them up and for a customer success person to onboard them. And I don't know, people have settled into a $30,000, a $40,000, a $50,000 a year minimum price point. And, um, now we have these disruptors coming in who are product-led growth.

Mm-hmm.

And They are allowing people to experience the value of the product for dollars. And as those people experience the product, they've architected obviously like, you know, tripwires or payment, you know, levels that once you see the value, then you start paying. And, you know, if you are a new buyer in a category, And you're, you're choosing between 2 players who've been around for 10 years, have excellent reputations, but the entry point is $30,000 or $40,000. And another platform where you can try it for free. And oh, by the way, probably has dozens of your employees already using it and begging you to buy it. You just can't win. All right. So, and the other factor is it's just a race to the bottom on the other side. They just disrupt them. The other factor is it, remember when we talked about at the beginning, like every, every retention issue that I've seen, every customer satisfaction, retention, and success issue I've seen is rooted in sales. Yeah. PLG does not have that issue. PLG companies. Why? The natural first North Star for a PLG company is to drive people into their product and make them an everyday user. Just the model by itself challenges the issue that we pointed out at the beginning of this chat. And so for the categories where PLG applies, I think they will dominate the stock market in the 5, in the next 5 or 6 years. And we're in any number one in that disruption, in my opinion.

Yeah. So how do you, how do you see the future evolving the current state of PLG? Are more companies going to go to market with the PLG motion? Are people going to change?

Definitely. Definitely. Like, and we're looking at that hard at Stage 2 Capital. I want to bet on a lot of PLG attackers in various categories we already have. And I've written some stuff on it. So some of the stuff that I've done is, first off, I got some really, I was really blessed to have this experience in the last few years of HubSpot, where I took a leadership role with Christopher O'Donnell, who ended up running product, to bring their, the CRM to market. And we wanted to do it in a PLG way. Now, PLG wasn't a term back then. It was called freemium, and we wanted to do it in that way. And so the first thing I did was I flew out to San Francisco and took Brian Belfort out to a drink and tried to convince him to move to Boston and run the growth function for that group. And he did. And if you don't know Brian, you can look him up. He now runs the Reforge School, which is, I think, the best school in the world for learning growth, and part of which is PLG. So I got to learn from one of the best in terms of setting that up. And then, you know, I definitely got involved with various companies early on, like Asana, and would always like, you know, got pretty friendly with Jay Simon at Atlassian and just like, and Drew Houston was in class with us at MIT. So they got to stay close to some of the early PLG players to study it. And then when at Harvard, I actually launched a class called Decoding Growth in Silicon Valley, where I brought in the heads of growth at what I thought were some of the best growth companies. Facebook, they came in, the head of growth came in, LinkedIn, Shopify, Pinterest, Lyft, those types of companies. Now, most of them are consumer, but I think that's where the opportunity in PLG is. You ask like, where is it going?

Yep.

Is I think we're going to be looking to our consumer growth leaders who are probably like 5 years ahead of us in architecting an optimal PLG motion. And we're going to be inspired on how we redefine our B2B structures around that. Okay. So I can give you a couple examples. One example is if you look at all these super successful growth Companies, um, they have created a new function called growth, which a lot of PLG companies have done. But the problem is in the PLG B2B companies, they put that growth function in— Yeah, of course. We're gonna— so we'll be looking to our consumer, like, leaders on the growth side for inspiration in B2B PLG. And so I can give you a couple examples of that. For example, if you look at all those great companies, They have a function dedicated to growth that sits side by side with marketing, sales, product engineering, HR, finance, and growth. It's as important right now. A lot of the PLG B2B companies have that. The problem is the growth function rolls up to marketing. And if you look at the growth orgs in these consumer companies, they all roll up to product.

Mm-hmm.

And, and here's why that's important. If you have growth roll up to marketing, you will not have any engineers and product people on your growth team. No engineer in the world wants to work in marketing. Okay, so you're gonna remove any engineering, you're gonna remove anything bottom of the funnel. If you want like an in-app notification to go off, if you want to tweak like an activation flow, if you want to do anything like that, you can't do it. So you've restricted your growth experimentation footprint. To just real top of the funnel stuff. And if a competitor comes in and has growth roll up to product, or even to the CEO, and truly has a cross-functional team of 1 or 2 full-stack engineers, 1 or 2 designers, a product manager, a marketer, a data scientist, which is what most of these teams look like, they're going to be able to experiment on the entire full-cycle funnel, and they're going to beat you. Okay, so that's That's one example

of

things we haven't adopted yet in B2B PLG that are just evident across the board in the consumer growth world that I think will be coming.

Yeah. I mean, our head of growth also runs product for us. We don't have, you know, a super technical product. We've been, we've been looking at how Facebook did it, right? Like, yeah, understanding, you know, they have the 3 criteria. One, how do you get people in the door? That's the traditional growth. One, two, how fast can you hit them with value? You know, that's the, once they have people in

the door. Aha moment type thing. Yep, exactly. 7 friends.

That was exactly it. The aha moment, the 7 friends. And the third is just keep hitting them back again, again, again for engagement. Yep.

So, so everybody— The highest, the highest, like, uh, the highest, what is it, back in the day, like the highest open rate and click-through rate email in the world was you have a new friend connection, or you have a, you have a new message from a friend, you know what I mean? Like on Facebook. And so, they just crushed that. So, you're absolutely right, Jared. And like, that bleeds into like, what these teams do great is they actually specialize their engineering teams. So, we're used to it in go-to-market. We, we specialize like SDRs from account executives, from account managers. That's what they're doing in growth is they're having, um, some engineers work on the roadmap. They often call that core. product, core engineers, you know, and then some work on growth. And they're kind of different engineers. Like, the core product engineers, they kind of like to know what they're doing in the next month. They're doing, like, you know, all these roadmap, like, you know, processes, et cetera. And the growth folks, they're like, great, I have no idea what experiments I'm running this week, because I'm running experiments this week, and we'll learn from them, and we'll figure out what experiments we'll run the next week. You know, like, they're just kind of different.

Yeah, it's rad. And that was important to us. Um, you know, I, I had an e-commerce background. Our head of growth product had e-commerce. B2C—

Awesome.

Was a big thing. Like Gmail, Stripe, like eBay, like all these companies, uh, we were all using them. We, they'd been in our lives, but in SaaS, this is a newer phenomenon, partially because we labeled it right. But No, this is awesome, Mark. So for the first half, we learned from you, and that was awesome, like diving in. The second half, we learned more about you. So who is Mark Roberge?

Okay. Holistically? Yeah. I mean, I do try to put a lot of emphasis in living a relatively well-rounded life. The 2 most important things to me are my sons and my spirituality, right? So just being a great dad and just being a great human being, right? And like, so I'm a pretty spiritual person. I'm certainly a religious person. I'm a deacon at Old North Church, but I'm also a spiritual person. Those are somewhat different. Like, I love to read about all religions and see and seek inspiration from them. I'm a 4 times a week yogi. I'm a meditator. And then like I said, being a good dad has always been really important to me. I've always tried to carve out adequate space for that, for picking up my boys at school, dropping them off, for being a coach in every season, to running with them, to gaming with them, to just hopefully And then now they're 14 and 15. So hopefully I've laid the tracks the best I can during these more challenging times. And then, you know, I love exercise, is a big part of my life. I used to run every day, but now, like, I can't— you can't— your body just breaks down. So I run every other day and I do yoga the other days. I love to golf as well. And from a professional standpoint, you know, when I left HubSpot, My first principle was an appreciation for this gift that I've been given. I've always, I'm actually more of an entrepreneur than a sales leader, to be honest with you. That's where things originated from. And so for me, it was to look for platforms to maximize my impact to entrepreneurship, to the next generation of entrepreneurs. And obviously, given the experience that I've been blessed with, That is through a lens of go-to-market. And so that led to a couple things. It led to me writing the Sales Acceleration Formula book, uh, toward the tail end of the HubSpot experience, which is really just like, when HubSpot started to take off, I used to get a lot of entrepreneurs call me and I, I had an hour commute to and from work, so I just talked to them on the commute. And I, for years, I got the same questions and I gave 'em the same answer and they always wrote me back and said, that worked perfectly. So the book was just about that. You know, it was really about like all the questions I was getting from entrepreneurs around how to run a data-driven sales org that's predictable. And it was pretty, it was like such an easy experience to write because it was like I was talking about it for years and I knew what the market wanted and I knew what helped. So, and so I put that out there and I also gave all the proceeds to a great nonprofit called build.org. That brings entrepreneurship to the worst-performing high schools in every city. So kids who, who are, you know, grew up in tough homes and gangs, and they basically introduced those kids freshman year of high school to entrepreneurship. And 99% of them graduate, which is like not the average in those schools. And like 85% go to college. And I'm very proud that over $100,000 have been donated through the book. To that organization. And then that led to Harvard, right? Like, what better platform? They approached me and said they were trying to be more entrepreneurial with their faculty and classes, and they needed a sales course. And I mean, you couldn't think of a better academic platform. I mean, there's a bunch of good— there's some good ones out there, but Harvard is near the top, if not there. And what was unique about Harvard is, which is definitely the case, is they sell the most cases. taught at other business schools. I think they sell $30 million a year. And so not only when you build a class and a case, not only are you building how it's taught at Harvard, you're building how it's taught at like 90% of the other business schools. And so that would seem like such a, a, um, an aligned opportunity for me to take advantage of a platform to influence the next generation of entrepreneurs. And then that, the final piece was Stage 2 Capital and Jay Poe. Uh, who was at Bessemer at the time and just said, you know, he just felt like the advice from the investors and boards to the entrepreneurs was great on strategy and capitalization and even in product to some degree, but not up to par on revenue and sales. And we needed to start the first firm that's run and backed by go-to-market leaders to fix that. And that also seemed like a very important platform to contribute. So, That's kind of like the first principle through which I, I view professional life.

I love that so much, Mark. How could people connect with you and what's going on with Stage 2 Capital to stay in touch with what's on?

Yeah, sure. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to be as active as possible there. I apologize. I can't reply to everyone and it kills me, but I do my best. But yeah, what's going on Stage 2? But I don't want to— I don't know when we're going to release this, but like, we've, we've, we're done, pretty much done with our 3rd fund, which is great. The MIT Endowment is our anchor, which is great. We've got another like 200, 300, you know, folks who've invested in us across those great companies. You know, if you, you know, what do we invest in? We invest in B2B, any B2B software company anywhere in the world. Usually when they're around $1 million in revenue, you know, that's, that's the promise that we made to our anchor investor. That's how things work. So I apologize that we can't invest in you pre-product, and I apologize that if you're trying to raise $20 million, $100 million valuation, we can't invest in you then either. So usually around $1 million in revenue. But if you're interested in, in looking at future funds with us to invest, if you're interested in getting our capital, and then we also have a couple programs for people that are that are kind of rising up to those levels. So we have, we have an emerging leaders syndicate where people who are like sales directors and managers that, that want to be a CRO and maybe even want to like learn how to invest a little bit, we have a group for that. And we have an accelerator, a go-to-market accelerator. It's a 10-week course in the summer. So if you have tens of thousands of revenue or maybe low hundreds of thousands, there's an application open right now, open till May 18th, um, uh, that you can apply to. You'll get $100,000 in capital and go through our 10-week course. Last year's instructors were like Jim Steele, the president of Salesforce. It was Sue Barsamian, the board member at Gainsight and Box. It was Jay Simon, the president of Atlassian. It was Greg Holmes, the founding CRO at Zoom. So like, you are one of 15 people that gets to sit in a fireside chat with those types of folks and learn about the early days of those awesome companies and try to figure out how they can impact yours. So, You can, you know, a lot of different ways to get involved if you're an early-stage entrepreneur.

That's an awesome program, Mark. Thank you for sharing that. That's pretty badass. So thank you so much for being here, Mark.

Cool, Jared. Yeah, thanks for putting it together and building such a great community.

Yeah, and thank you for listening, everybody. If you learned something today or laughed, tell someone about this podcast and Thank you again, Mark. It means the world that you joined me today.

My pleasure, Jack.

This has been another exciting episode of Revenue Today. See you next time. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank Thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Bye.