Hubspot’s Success At Scaling A Business

Mark Roberge offers more startup wisdom in our first Upshift eBook, “59 Secrets for Startup Sales Success.” Download your free copy now!

If you’ve been following the Upshift Dispatch, by now you know we’re all about scaling startup sales. We believe the process can be quantified and measured and then repeated. So to help us hone our curriculum and optimize results for the companies that come through our coaching program each quarter, we’ve sought out the advice from people who have built awesome sales machines that have been successful scaling a business. For this installment of “advice from the field,” I talked to Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer of the HubSpot Sales Division.

At HubSpot, Mark increased revenue over 6,000% (six-thousand percent!) and expanded the worldwide sales and services team to hundreds of employees. These results placed HubSpot at #33 on the 2011 Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies list and Mark was also ranked #19 in Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. He was also awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year at the MIT Sales Conference. Mark has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Inc Magazine, Boston Globe, TechCrunch, Harvard Business Review, and other major publications for his entrepreneurial ventures.

So how does he do it?

Mark shared his process with me, which he boils down to a few simple steps. Okay, they’re not so simple in practice, otherwise everyone would be Salesperson of the Year, but they’re simple enough for me to outline for you here. Hey, it’s a start.

8 tips from Mark Roberge for scaling an early stage sales team:

1. Hire the same successful person every time.

To do this, you need to figure out what personality traits define success for your particular company, and it’s not the same for everyone.  Then you need to score each of your potential hires against each of the traits to figure out who’s going to be successful.

According to Mark, “In the early days at HubSpot, I found coachability, intelligence, curiosity, work ethic and prior success to be highly correlated with what we needed, even if they had never worked in sales or marketing solutions before.”

Once you’ve identified the characteristics by observing your most successful sales people and what makes them effective, he says, you have to figure out how to test for these skills during the interview process.” For example, test for coachability by doing a role play and evaluate the person not so much on how they presented, but how they took the feedback you gave them.” Something like work ethic, he advises, is a lot harder to gauge, you may have to rely on reference checks for this, as everyone will tell you they have a strong work ethic.

“Startups are pioneering new ground – those who possess the traits you identify as unique to your enterprise will end up being the better sales people,” he believes. “You have to work to find out what that blueprint is and then hire more of those same people every time.”

2. Train your people in a predictable way.

Keep in mind not everyone is good at everything; you have to determine what each person’s superpower is and then work to hone it, while at the same time developing the skills they are only mediocre at.

“Don’t have new hires learn by shadowing your top performers,” Mark says, “as their superpowers might not be the same and they will be miserable if you try to make them conform to someone else’s strengths.” Some people are natural rapport builders, others are maniacally process driven – the way you train each of them in the buyers journey should be the same; just be sure to build in the autonomy to hone their own superpowers as you assist them along.

3. Give everyone the same opportunity for success.

“Seed new hires with the same quality and quantity of leads every month,” Mark advises, so you can see who rises to the top. Then, once you’ve seen what makes them tick, specialize early to grow sales.

“Don’t treat all your sales people the same,” he cautions. Group them by their preferences and strengths – do they prefer to go after large pieces of business or are they better rapport builders with small businesses? Do they understand certain sectors better than others? Segment your prospects and segment your sales team to address them, especially as you grow.

4. Manage according to the same sales process.

“Your job is to lend specific guidance on how to lead customers through the buyer’s journey,” Mark says. Define what your sales process is based on analyzing your buyer’s journey, but recognize that the buying journey might be different depending on the type of company you are going after.

Mark, who holds an engineering degree, says, “Think like a ‘quant.’” You are on a scientific mission to create predictable growth. Talk to smart people to uncover tactics, iterate, update based on contextual changes, buyer personas, new features, etc., but first you need a scientific foundation.

5.  Feedback is key.

You have to make sure your hires are good at taking feedback, according to Mark. Gauge this by doing a role play in which they actually conduct a demo for your product. Then ask them how they think they did. Then give them feedback.

“Grade them not just on how smoothly the demo went, but how open they were to self-assessment, taking feedback and applying it,” Mark says.

6. Create your own space and own it.

As competition grows, your original vision may be copied or done better by another company. “Don’t duke it out in a bloody battle,” Mark says. Figure out where you excel and focus on that, and market yourself that way. Be prepared to pivot based on market conditions. “What works now may not work three months from now.”

7. Sales is about building trust first and foremost.

Mark suggests you build trust by asking great questions to understand what’s important to your prospect and deciphering what you can do to help them. “The answer might be nothing,” he says, “in which case, introduce them to a great person you know that can do it.” If you’ve built trust, you’ve succeeded, even if you didn’t close the deal.

8. Don’t underestimate sales.

Product is important but Mark says, “You should never skimp on sales in favor of product. Put your money, time, and energy into finding the right sales people, creating a culture in which they can thrive, and building a process – it’s just as important, or more, than what you put in toward refining your product.”

We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’ve built a program that focuses solely on the sales process to help startups thrive. Of course, it all starts with a great product or idea. But without putting your sales house in order, no one will know about it.

Think of HubSpot as a case in point. More than 11,500 companies in 70 countries use HubSpot’s marketing and sales software to grow. But that wasn’t always the case. It took a well-defined sales process to create leads (and no one does this better than HubSpot!) and then turn those leads into customers.

Thanks Mark, for giving us a glimpse into your thinking about the importance of sales and the people who sell, to the overall success of any startup business.

Read more of my “Advice From the Field posts,” featuring insights from some of Silicon Valley’s leading sales gurus.

To read more of Mark’s tips for startup success, along with advice and tips from other accomplished sales leaders, download our free eBook, “59 Tips for Scaling Startup Sales.”

If you’re going to run a business based on a SaaS sales model, sales guru David Baga says there are a handful of companies renowned for teaching the process – one of which is Oracle. He should know; he spent six years there rising up the ranks from an individual contributor to a Senior Sales Director, during which time the software giant acquired 72 companies and scaled from 44,000 employees to over 100,000.

Like many to come out of enterprise sales, David has since turned his attentions to the startup community, most recently at Rocket Lawyer, where he started with one sales rep and grew the sales team to more than 40 in just a few years. I sat down with David as part of our “Advice From the Field” series in which established sales leaders share their tips and tricks of the trade to help others succeed.

Here, he shares what he’s learned at Oracle that he’s used to structure and scale his sales team at Rocket Lawyer.

 1. Customers first.

New companies need to dive in and try to understand who your customer is (and is not). He points to legendary entrepreneur Steve Blank, who suggests, you have to “get out of the building” and talk to your prospects and customers to find out:

•  Who are they?
• Why are they buying your product? Or not buying it?
• How much is your product worth to them?
• How much {time, money, pain} is it saving them?
• What do they think is missing from your product?

This early investigative work helps you form an ideal customer profile that you’ll leverage across your entire organization. “At Oracle,” he said, “we were selling to large, Fortune 500 companies, but the process to build an ideal customer profile was the same even though the end user was very different.”

 2. Be results driven.

“Oracle’s sales management was really metric driven,” he said. “Everything we did was aimed at growth, looking at how we could do more with less. It was a very process-driven culture. It gave me a mindset that sales can become very predictable, even formulaic.” Early on, sales teams need to figure out their “sales recipe” and demonstrate that they can sell in a repeating manner, he advises. “You have to clearly understand the entire buyer journey and unit economics of a sale before you can step on the gas and scale out your team. It’s wasteful to scale before you really understand your team’s formula.”

This early work before there is a repeatable, scalable, and profitable model is really tough. He suggests startups hire people with a lot of drive, determination and creativity to help create the initial playbook. “Ultimately, when you put competitive people together in a transparent environment, it drives the entire organization up and to the right,” he said. “Make sure that you emphasize outcomes to prevent people from confusing activity with productivity.”

3. Design a transparent organization.

“Oracle was iconic for its transparency,” David said. Transparent means that your peers, managers – everyone – should know how you’re performing. The best sales organizations should know each team member’s goals and their progress against them. For example, the number of calls made every day, the amount of time spent on the phone, what each person’s pipeline looks like. “Your work ethic should be on display,” he advises. “This helps everyone in the organization understand what it takes to be successful; expectations are clearly understood.”

 4. Hiring is the #1 success criteria for any startup or sales organization.

David looks back on his time at Oracle, in particular recalling, “my good friend and manager James Volpentest and I used to talk about the pattern of A’s hiring A’s and B’s hiring C’s. You always want to bring in A’s, but it’s even more critical when you make your first few hires.” A core group of fun, creative, hardworking, and intelligent people should be your number one priority. If you get this part right, everything else gets a lot easier.

Work your network, get referrals, keep the hiring bar high and work like crazy to develop and retain your best people – “it’s the gift that keeps on giving,” he said. “Not only will your team kick ass, but they’ll do it faster, have more fun and you’ll be simultaneously building your pool of future front line managers.”

5. Your values should be shared.

“Take the time to define your team’s core values,” David said. At Oracle, his management team emphasized integrity, respect, teamwork, communication, and innovation, among others, and they weren’t just lip service like some other enterprise giants. (He noted that Enron went down while their corporate values were emblazoned on a rock in their lobby for all to see every day.)

Interview for the characteristics that you want your team to represent – for David, that’s creative, strong critical thinkers who are analytical, data driven, and passionate about their professional career. They should also know how to have a good time. “Hire for those values and fire to protect those values,” he said. If you make a mistake (we all do) and hire someone who’s not a fit, you’re going to have to ask them to leave to protect your culture. Yes, even if they’re your best salesperson.”

6. Put the emphasis on training.

Make continuous learning part of the culture; emphasize and invest in training and professional development, David advises. “Oracle had a regular cadence of training that was consistently developing the fundamentals of product knowledge, competitive intelligence, prospecting, opportunity management, territory planning and professional communications.

“With a startup,” he says, “you’ll want to hire for people that are naturally curious and love to learn. One word of caution, don’t assume that if they’re a great individual contributor that they’ll be a great sales manager – that takes training, too.”

7. Be careful of bringing an old playbook to a new game.

What worked at your last company, or in another market. may not apply to your current situation. Use your experience to guide your approach but be objective and test your assumptions. “In the case of Oracle,” he said, “we were selling to large enterprise clients, and it took a long time to make a sale. Things were very different at Rocket Lawyer, we quickly realized that we could do a lot more volume in a lot less time. I had to reinvent the playbook for a completely different type of sales cycle.”

Of his time at Oracle, David said, “I really enjoyed operating in that environment. It was inspiring to be part of a team where nothing else mattered but your results, a real meritocracy.”

For those not as fortunate to come up the ranks through a major enterprise sales engine, there’s still a lot you can learn about the how to scale your own sales function. That’s where Upshift comes in; we’ve created our curriculum with the help of experts like David to help young companies prepare to scale quickly. Read more about the Upshift process here.

Read more of our “Advice From the Field” posts here.

Download our brand new eBook, featuring more tips from David Baga and other salesdynamos who share what they’ve learned and what pitfalls you should avoid.

At Upshift Partners, we’re all about helping startups to grow and scale. One area that’s often overlooked in the rush to bring your product to market is the need to develop a strong company culture. Why? Because having defined, cohesive company values enables you to create a team that’s connected by a common set of values, values that you as the Founder establish for your company. And that keeps your engine running smoothly when it’s time to scale.

Here are 6 tips on how some of Silicon Valley’s most accomplished sales dynamos define their company culture based on their core values and beliefs. For more tips on how to scale like the pros, download our new eBook, “59 Tips for Startup Sales Success.”

Arjun Dev Arora – Every company needs a clear set of values.

Knowing your company values impacts everything – from your sales process, to attracting the right people, to reducing stress, to decision making, to being nimble and flexible, and creating a strong company culture overall. Have a 3-4 hour discussion with your partners, executive team, and advisors and nail down 4-5 values that will define your company culture.

For us at ReTargeter, they include: respect, intelligence, hard work, and adaptability. Put them on your website. Make sure your employees know them, and make sure you live them and constantly monitor to make sure they’re being followed. Know what you stand for before you try to scale.

Arjun is the Chairman of the Board and Founder of ReTargeter, where he bootstrapped the company to be in the top 100 of the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2013.

David Baga – Act on your stated values.

Take the time to define your team’s core values. Hire for those values and fire to protect those values. Interview for the characteristics that you want your team to represent – I admire people who are creative, strong critical thinkers, analytical, data driven, and passionate about their professional career. They should also know how to have a good time! If you make a mistake (we all do) and hire someone who’s not a fit, you’re going to have to ask them to leave to protect your culture. Yes, even if they’re your best salesperson.

David is SVP of Revenue & Operations for Rocket Lawyer where his team has grown revenues from $2 million to over $40 million in just four years. David spent seven years at Oracle, building and leading sales teams that delivered record-setting results.

Mark Roberge – Your culture should emphasize sales AND product.

Product is important but you should never skimp on sales in favor of product. Put your money, time and energy into finding the right sales people, creating a culture in which they can thrive, and building a process – it’s just as important, or more, than what you put in toward refining your product.

Mark is the Chief Revenue Officer of the HubSpot Sales Division. HubSpot ranked #33 on the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2011, and Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World.

David Baga – Make continuous learning part of your culture.

Emphasize and invest in training and professional development. Every successful sales organization should have a regular cadence of training that is consistently developing the fundamentals of product knowledge, competitive intelligence, prospecting, opportunity management, territory planning and professional communications.

Arjun Dev Arora- Avoid an excuse-driven culture; develop a results-driven culture.

It’s easy to blame others or situational things (marketing, bad leads, the economy) for poor results. It’s another thing to say, okay, sometimes things don’t go as well as they could. What can we do to change that? Attitude is everything.

Navid Zolfaghari – Culture breeds collaboration.

The spirit of Wildfire was built around collaboration. People came to work early and left late because they felt a sense of purpose and enjoyed the people they worked with. These were people with whom you could learn from, laugh with and share meaningful experiences. The Founders are key to setting this culture, as well as your first few hires. The genuine care that people have for each other goes a long way toward achieving results.

Navid is the Founder of Pinpoint Mobile, formerly the Founder of TriFame online talent discovery site, and an early member at Wildfire Interactive, which was acquired by Google in August 2012 for over $400M.

What does your company culture look like? Do you have a defined set of values that it’s governed by? Tell us about it below.

Get more insights from our “Advice From the Field” posts, featuring in-depth knowledge from each of these advisors.

These tips and many more can be found in our new eBook, “59 Tips for Startup Sales Success.” Download the complete eBook from Upshift Partners.

Navid Zolfaghari offers more startup wisdom in our first Upshift eBook, “59 Secrets for Startup Sales Success.” Download your free copy now!

It’s official – Derek Jeter is now an entrepreneur. In launching his new venture, The Players’ Tribune, where he will be “working with other athletes, with editors and with producers to create a platform that gives us a chance to say what’s on our mind (and)…shape the site into an online community filled with first-person stories and behind-the-scenes content,” he will have to learn the importance of “team” in a whole new way. Well he’s off to a good start with his first hire, Danica Patrick.

Someone who knows a lot about the importance of teams to a burgeoning enterprise is Navid Zolfaghari.

Navid is an entrepreneur obsessed with disruptive technology and innovation. His current company, Pinpoint Mobile, was founded on the belief that mobile is as much of an appendage as your arms or legs and that every company needs to be part of the mobile obsession. Prior to Pinpoint, Navid was an early member at Wildfire Interactive where he helped create and execute social media campaigns for brands and agencies such as GM, AT&T, BBDO, and Target. Wildfire was acquired by Google in August 2012 for over $400M. Before that, Navid founded TriFame, an online talent discovery website that helped record labels and magazines find aspiring artists.

In all the years since he’s been building startups, Navid’s most important lesson has been finding the right people to work with. Here’s his advice to America’s Favorite Shortstop – and any other founder looking to avoid some of the common mistakes associated with team building.

“There’s always someone who knows more than you.”

Identify the right kinds of people you need, including those who complement your weaknesses. In addition to their level of enterprise or startup experience, find out:

• What are their personality types?
• Are they coachable? (Jeter should be good at this one)
• Are they curious?
• Do they have a good work ethic?
• Is there a good cultural fit?

“There’s no one size fits all solution. Different people require different management.”

Being a team leader means being a mentor and enabler. You’ll want to shield your team from internal politics, make it easy for them to focus on the job and be more successful. Learn how to manage everyone differently, know what motivates them and push their individual buttons to make them better performers overall. Some people belong on first base, others in right field. Still, you want to get your whole team excited and do whatever you can to support them.

“Don’t focus on scaling bodies, scale with people.”

If you hire too many people at once, it’s harder to make them effective. (This goes for “athletes, editors and producers,” as well as sales folks.) The biggest problem I’ve seen is companies that try to scale too fast. If you focus on hiring a bunch of people, then you’re not really focusing on making them more effective. Even if you have a lot of money (Jeter!), you shouldn’t necessarily go out and hire everyone immediately. Take the team you have and work on making it the best it can be before you go out and find new players.

“Know your playbook.”

Okay, maybe that’s a football term, but you still need to get everyone on the same page in terms of tactics. Standardize the language you are all using so the team can better understand each other. You may have different terminology to define each stage but essentially you should look to initiate, educate, validate, justify and close, according to Navid. This way, if you hear a deal is in stage 2, you can start to ask questions as to what was uncovered during the discovery process. It could take a while to get everyone on the same page, but stay patient.

“Your team is everything.”

And not just in baseball. Hire the right kinds of people in terms of personality types and cultural fit. For Navid, that means coachability, adaptability, curiosity and a strong work ethic. But it also depends on what type of company you are and what stage the company is in. If you’re ready to recruit on an enterprise level, you should hire someone who has navigated complicated deals before and understands the process of what is needed to work with a big company.  But if you’re company is a startup, your first few hire can be from anywhere – as long as they get what you’re trying to do and have passion for it.

Navid was part of a team at Wildfire that scaled from 10 to 130 sales people. How’d they do it?

In the early days of Wildfire, he says, culture was everything. “The spirit we built there was one of collaboration. People came to work early and left late because they felt a sense of purpose and enjoyed the people they worked with. These were people you could learn from, laugh with and share meaningful experiences.” The founders are key to setting this culture, as well as your first few hires. The genuine care that people have for each other goes a long way toward achieving results. Like Jeter says, you should feel “blessed to play with the best” and “not want to compete without any of them.”

I asked Navid if he had any thoughts for Derek Jeter and The Players’ Tribune.

“I wouldn’t profess to have any advice to a big leaguer like Derek Jeter,” Navid said. “Unless of course he’d like to take his business mobile. Then we should talk.”

Read more of my “Advice From the Field” posts featuring the hard-won knowledge of some of Silicon Valley’s most accomplished sales leaders.

For more tips from Navid and other Upshift advisors on how to scale your startup, download our new eBook, “59 Tips for Startup Sales Success.”

Derek Jeter Photo: WireImage

How Important Are Company Values With Retargeter’s Founder, Arjun Dev Arora

Arjun Dev Arora offers more startup wisdom in our first Upshift eBook, “59 Secrets for Startup Sales Success.” Download your free copy now! As part of my continuing series of posts offering “Advice From the Field,” here are the highlights from my conversation with Arjun Dev Arora, Chairman of the Board and Founder of ReTargeter, a company he bootstrapped to be in the top 100 of Inc’s Fastest Growing Companies of 2013. Now, if you don’t know what ReTargeter does, you should. Have you ever wondered how your computer knows to serve you ads for things you have searched for, encouraging you to go back and buy it? It’s not a coincidence; it’s a brilliant advancement in the area of online advertising that you may one day be using to drive leads to your own company. But for now, let’s focus on Arjun led his company to skyrocketing growth levels, and what you can learn from him as you build your own startup.

“The way to be nimble and flexible in a company is to have a clear set of values.”

When it comes to building a sales team, Arjun firmly believes you need “a clear set of values; rules that you stand by.” This will funnel down in everything from who you choose to bring on board, to how you position your product in the marketplace, to decision making, and yes, to sales. It reduces the vast majority of stress in an organization, he says. “If we all know what’s acceptable vs. unacceptable, then we won’t need a rulebook for everything.” How do you develop that clarity of vision? I wondered. It starts with the founders’ commitment, Arjun told me. “Whoever is leading your sales organization better know what the company stands for, what’s important to you as an entity.” Before you go to market, before you bring on a team, he suggest you plan a 3-4 hour discussion with key stakeholders and brainstorm the following:

1. What would it take for us to scale gracefully?
2. How can we hold ourselves to a higher standard?
3. How can we set the standard for self-reflection and growth for ourselves and our employees?
4. What are the frameworks for decision-making that we strive to adhere to?
5. What would serve as an anchor from which we blaze forward?
6. What would a values-driven workplace that is inspiring and magnetic look like?
7. What matters to us?
8. What can we expect from one another?

It’s not the answers to the questions that are as important as the conversation you have in trying to answer each one. Capture the words that keep coming up in your answers; these are likely the things that define your operations, which translate into your company’s core values.

“It can be a precarious thing to do but when you do it right, the benefits are 100-fold.”

So what are ReTargeter’s values? I was really on the edge of my seat now. Arjun told me ReTargeter runs on:

• Respect – be kind; do what you say you will do; treat people well; take feedback well
• Intelligence – take pride in learning, consume and process information quickly
• Humility – acknowledge your strengths but welcome constant learning and improvement
• Bold & Direct interactions – be crystal clear in your choices and communications
• Long-term relationships – build solid relationships based on trust and integrity
• Adaptability – be aware of what is happening around you and in the technology space
• Hustle – work hard and go beyond to push ourselves and move the company forward
• Fun – connect with and enjoy people!

So if you’re anything like me, by now you’re wondering: Doesn’t every company want to abide by these values? Isn’t it just paying lip service to say this is what you stand for?

“It’s worse to have a vision that’s not enforced than to not have a vision at all.”

It’s all in the implementation, according to Arjun. “Your clarity of vision goes to how your company acts in the world,” he believes. If you pay lip service to that, then it’s likely your values are “uncaring” and “phony.” I went back to my trusted Upshift library to see what other experts were saying about the importance of core values and how to not only figure out what you stand for, but how to make sure those values are transmitted so that everyone in your organization embraces them. How to Implement Your Company’s Core Values In Verne C. Harnish’s book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, I found this checklist that offers some tips on how to bring your core values alive in your company:

1. Create Legends — Link a company story with each core value to make it memorable. Story-telling is the best way to teach.
2. Recruitment and Selection — Use the core values in your hiring ads and selection process. Have them serve as the section themes/headings for your structured interview process.
3. Orientation & Handbook — Have your core values serve as the major themes for your orientation process.
4. Appraisal Process — Have your core values serve as the section headings for your appraisal process. With a little creativity, any performance measure can be made to link with a core value.
5. Recognition and Reward — At the quarterly or annual company gathering, if you’re looking for recognition and reward categories, look no further than your core values. And this serves to generate new stories to bring them alive.
6. Internal Newsletter — Highlight a core value each issue with an example of someone exemplifying the value.
7. Quarterly Themes — Whether as a theme for a particular round of good news stories or as a company-wide quarterly theme, use the core values to bring focus to improvement efforts.
8. Everyday Management — Relate decisions, reprimands, praisings, customer issues, and employee concerns back to the core values. These daily actions will do more than any of the other strategies to strengthen the culture within the firm.

Thanks to Arjun Dev Arora for living his company’s values every day and sharing them with us here. What are your company’s core values and how are they reflected in your day-to-day operations? Share them below. See more of my “Advice From the Field” posts for emerging startups. For more insights from some of Silicon Valley’s most exemplary sales leaders, download our free eBook, “59 Tips for Startup Sales.”

At Upshift Partners, we firmly believe in setting up a specific process for scaling your business. Hiring the right people to help you sell your vision to prospects is one of the most important parts of this process, but if you don’t have a few things in place before this, you are likely to suffer in terms of wasted time and money with little positive return.

We feel so strongly about the need for a process that we set up a curriculum and 12-week coaching program for startups to teach them these steps and actually set up and implement the systems at their own companies. We also created an eBook with strategies on the complete process, including how to hire and manage your team, from some of the most respected sales leaders in the industry today. Here’s a sampling of some of the strategies our Upshift advisors recommend for any startup looking to make inroads and grow in a Saas or marketplace business:

David Baga – Make hiring the #1 success criteria for your organization.

A core group of fun, creative, hardworking, and intelligent people is your number one priority. If you get this part right, everything else gets a lot easier. Work your network, get referrals, keep the hiring bar high and work like crazy to develop and retain your best people – it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Not only will your team kick ass but they’ll do it faster, have more fun and you’ll be simultaneously building your pool of future front line managers.

David is SVP of Revenue & Operations for Rocket Lawyer where his team has grown revenues from $2 million to over $40 million in just four years. David spent seven years at Oracle, building and leading sales teams that delivered record-setting results.

Navid Zolfaghari – Hire the right kinds of people in terms of personality types and cultural fit.

For me, that means coachability, adaptability, curiosity and a strong work ethic. But it also depends on what type of company you are and what stage the company is in. If you’re ready to recruit on an enterprise level, you should hire someone who has navigated complicated deals before and understands the process of what is needed to work with a big company.

Navid is the Founder of Pinpoint Mobile, formerly the Founder of TriFame online talent discovery site, and an early member at Wildfire Interactive, which was acquired by Google in August 2012 for over $400M.

David Skok – Hire up.

It can be intimidating to younger entrepreneurs who haven’t been in a CEO position before to hire people that have been in roles more senior to what they have experienced themselves, but you need to hire people who are better than you. Recruiting is one of the key skills that an entrepreneur needs to do; dedicate the time to it. This is where a business can break down if proper consideration isn’t taken from the outset. Focus your energy on getting hiring right.

David is a serial entrepreneur turned VC.  He started his first company at the age of 21, and over the next 25 years, founded a total of four companies and oversaw one turnaround. He is currently a venture capital partner at Matrix Partners, the firm that had backed his last two companies.

Mark Roberge – Don’t hire based on a rolodex.

The natural instinct for an entrepreneur is to hire based on domain experience. But some of the best people I’ve hired have been top performers out of mortgage, real estate and recruitment, not marketing software sales. Find people who can help you build the business from the ground up, rather than step into an existing sales structure, especially if you’re early stage.

Mark is the Chief Revenue Officer of the HubSpot Sales Division. HubSpot ranked #33 on the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2011, and Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World.

Andrew Riesenfeld – Don’t skimp on back channel references.

Back channel references are those that don’t come directly from your candidate. Find a common link with someone you want to hire through personal references, LinkedIn, common networks – anything that can give you a frame of reference. Some of mine are Cloud & SaaS Startups, Salesforce Power Users Group, and Social Selling University.

Andrew is currently VP of Sales at GuideSpark and the former VP of Sales Development + Pipeline at Responsys, where he helped lead the company to an acquisition by Oracle for $1.6 billion.

Arjun Dev Arora – Understand that hiring is one part research, one part execution, and one part gut.

For the research, investigate what they sold before. For execution, give them an assignment and see how they do. Don’t rely solely on gut; look for signs or past examples of flexibility, consistency, intelligence, follow up and creativity. Do they have a desire to close and win? Are they driven? How badly do they want it? It may be hard to quantify these; that’s where the gut comes in.

Arjun is the Chairman of the Board and Founder of ReTargeter, where he bootstrapped the company to be in the top 100 of the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2013.

Aaron Ross – Know what you need in a sales director.

Find someone who is a problem solver, and who is entrepreneurial. After that, you really just want smart people who can figure things out, who know something about business. They also need to be able to develop trust, and have high integrity. They should have a good sense of process, because if they are disorganized, it’s not going to be effective. Plus, you should like them.

Aaron is the #1 best-selling author of Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com, and the Founder of Predictable Revenue Inc. consultancy. He is a former sales guru at Salesforce.com, where he helped increase their revenues by $100M.

What has worked for you (or hasn’t worked) in terms of making your first few hires?

Get more insights from our “Advice From the Field” posts, featuring in-depth knowledge from each of these advisors.

These tips and many more can be found in our new eBook, “59 Tips for Startup Sales Success.” Download the complete eBook from Upshift Partners.

If you’ve been following our blog, you know we’re all about high performance – about going from zero to 360 – or bootstrapping from zero to several million, to be more accurate. But we do it in a very process-oriented way. In our new eBook, “59 Tips for Scaling Startup Sales,” we give an overview of the six steps of our process for scaling growth, along with great tips and insights from some of Silicon Valley’s best sales dynamos who have learned from experience what it means to scale, and to scale for long-term success.

In last week’s post, we highlighted their advice on how to hire the right sales people. Here, we’ll share their wisdom on how to manage your sales team, once you’ve hired them.

1. David Baga – Be results driven.

Hire people with drive and determination and create an environment that is very transparent and metric oriented. Ultimately, when you put competitive people together in a transparent environment, it drives the entire organization up and to the right. Make sure that you emphasize outcomes to prevent people from confusing activity with productivity.

David is SVP of Revenue & Operations for Rocket Lawyer where his team has grown revenues from $2 million to over $40 million in just four years. David spent seven years at Oracle, building and leading sales teams that delivered record-setting results.

2. Aaron Ross – Identify where you are and what you need.

Identify which category your potential hires fall into, builders vs. growers. Builders grow from scratch. They start with nothing. Growers grow once everything is in place. Most people are not good at both. Know what stage you’re in and what type of sales person you need, and ask questions to separate the builders from the growers.

Aaron is the #1 best-selling author of Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com, and the Founder of Predictable Revenue Inc. consultancy. He is a former sales guru at Salesforce.com, where he helped increase their revenues by $100M.

3. Navid Zolfaghari – Manage expectations accordingly.

You want to get your team excited and do whatever you can to support them. I think everyone knows what over-performance looks like, but not very many have defined what under-performance looks like. Are you comfortable with a sales person that consistently performs at 90% of quota or one who can be at 150% one month and way under the next?

Navid is the Founder of Pinpoint Mobile, formerly the Founder of TriFame online talent discovery site, and an early member at Wildfire Interactive, which was acquired by Google in August 2012 for over $400M.  

4. David Baga – Training matters.

Make continuous learning part of the culture; emphasize and invest in training and professional development. Every successful sales organization should have a regular cadence of training that is consistently developing the fundamentals of product knowledge, competitive intelligence, prospecting, opportunity management, territory planning and professional communications.

5. Mark Roberge – Coachability is key.

You have to make sure your hires are good at taking feedback. Gauge this by doing a role play in which they actually conduct a demo for your product. Then ask them how they think they did. Then give them feedback. Grade them not just on how smoothly the demo went, but how open they were to self-assessment, taking feedback and applying it.

Mark is the Chief Revenue Officer of the HubSpot Sales Division. HubSpot ranked #33 on the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2011, and Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes’ Top 30 Social Sellers in the World.

6. Andrew Riesenfeld – Set the bar high.

When there’s a high goal, there is something worth pursuing and your group needs to believe that anything’s possible. If you achieve only 70% of a stretch goal, you’re doing better than achieving 100% of a mediocre goal, as long as there is a collective nirvana about what’s being built that is fueling your success.

Andrew is currently VP of Field Sales at GuideSpark and the former VP of WW Sales Development + Pipeline at Responsys, where he helped lead the company to an acquisition by Oracle for $1.6 billion.

7. Aaron Ross – Use the volume-versus-value ratio.

Your highest value people (most expensive) should be spending time on the lowest volume (but highest importance) activities – like building relationships, securing referrals and partnerships. Your lower value people should focus on higher volume activities, like turning prospects into leads. This holds true for leads, too. Go after fewer, but better prospects.

 8. Navid Zolfaghari – There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

This is because you have lots of different personalities working for you. Your role is one of mentor and enabler. You want to shield your team from internal politics, make it easy for them to focus on the job at hand and be more successful. Different people need to be managed differently – figure out what motivates each of them and push those buttons to develop better sales people overall.

9. Mark Roberge – Specialize early to grow sales.

Don’t treat all your sales people the same. Group them by their preferences and strengths – do they prefer to go after large pieces of business or are they better rapport builders with small businesses? Do they understand certain sectors better than others? Segment your prospects and segment your sales team to address them, especially as you grow.

 10. David Baga – Design a transparent organization. 

Transparent means that your peers, managers, everyone, should know how you’re performing. The best sales organizations should know each team member’s goals and their progress against them. For example, the number of calls made every day, the amount of time spent on the phone, what each person’s pipeline looks like – these should be available for everyone to see. Your work ethic should be on display.

11. Navid Zolfaghari – Think through how you distribute accounts.

It’s only natural to want to give your best opportunities to your best sales people but you also want to balance that with a system that is fair. You want everyone to feel that there is a good opportunity for them to succeed, so make sure you invest in your new talent and give them a chance.

12. Arjun Dev Arora – Incentivize your team.

For example, invest in a few screens around the office displaying a live feed of deals closed and current monthly dollar value, or deals closed for each person. This creates transparency across the organization and team, and a sense of urgency and motivation.

Arjun is the Chairman of the Board and Founder of ReTargeter, where he bootstrapped the company to be in the top 100 of the Inc. 500 list of Fastest Growing Companies for 2013.

What has worked for you (or hasn’t worked) in terms of managing a high performing team? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Get more insights from our “Advice From the Field” posts, featuring more in-depth knowledge from these advisors.

These tips and many more can be found in our new eBook, “59 Tips for Startup Sales Success.” Download the complete eBook from Upshift Partners.

In addition to bringing you advice and insights from some of the greatest sales leaders in Silicon Valley (see my “Advice From the Field” series), this post kicks off the debut of a new series focused on Founders. It’s great to learn from the pros, but sometimes, it’s just as meaningful to learn from a peer what they did to jump start their sales process that you can also apply to your startup business.

I couldn’t be more excited about launching these conversations with Zach Goldstein, CEO and Founder of Thanx, a customer loyalty and rewards system for retailers. Thanx has only been around for 18 months, the last few of which have yielded exponentially more sales activity than they could have ever envisioned in the early days. Recently they raised $4.7m from one of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the nation, Sequoia Capital. How did they do it?

Thanx is one of the first graduates of the Upshift program for sales acceleration. Here, Zach tells his story of what it was like to go through the program and what he learned.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Describe the state of your sales process when you first started out.

Zach Goldstein: Our sales process was virtually non-existent. We started out with one sales person and very little monthly recurring revenue (MRR). We worked on honing our sales message, but had no idea how it was resonating with our customers. We were flying by the seat of our pants initially.

GLO: I think that’s true for most startups. Why do you think that was the case?

ZG: As a Founder, I understood why someone would buy our product, but it was much harder to support a sales team in learning our product as well as I knew it. More importantly, we weren’t learning from the market quickly enough or actively adapting our process based on measurable results. We weren’t tracking activities and there was no consistency from our effort, so it was impossible to make it repeatable. We were moving the company along, but we couldn’t connect the dots as to what made us successful. There was a lot of excitement about our product and technology in the marketplace, but it was frustrating to have deals so close to the finish line that we couldn’t close.

GLO: What options did you consider when looking at trying to scale sales?

ZG: We considered 3 things at that point: 1) Bring in a VP of Sales to get us structured, 2) Hire some sales people and figure out the structure myself, or 3) Get outside expert help in setting up a system, which is ultimately what we did through the Upshift program. For the first alternative, I ran the risk of paying someone a lot of money without complete confidence they were going to be effective, and I wasn’t an experienced enough sales leader to know that I would be able to evaluate that hire critically several months in. The second alternative meant an uphill battle for me as I have never been a sales executive myself and also was likely to lead to high employee churn as we got it figured out. I ultimately decided that the #1 most important thing I needed to be good at and remain involved in was sales. I could only get there by learning to do it myself and I needed support to do it quickly.

GLO: Based on your experience, what does it mean to accelerate?

ZG: The pace at which you need to change things in the sales process is very fast. Everything you touch – from tools and dashboards in Salesforce, to your sales script, to your process for prospecting, to your compensation plan for your sales team – all of it should be different than it was three months ago and will be different three months from now. We now treat sales iterations like we do product iterations – constantly evolving. This wasn’t the case before Upshift. We commit to destroying it and building new things at a higher frequency.

The takeaway:

• There is never a static point at which you figure it out; it’s constantly iterative.

• Whatever success you have from putting something in place should be used as a baseline to build upon. What works for one prospect may not work for another or may not work in the future.

GLO: Can you take us through the steps of how your company accelerated?

ZG: I would define it this way:

1.  We needed the infrastructure in place to measure accurately.

The takeaway: Put the tools in place to be up and running.

2.  We had to understand the steps we needed to take to get customers from “never heard of Thanx” to signing a contract. We needed to be able to understand what stage the merchant was in, and could only do that by defining our buying process. 

The takeaway: Define your process and stages through which a sale is made.

3.  We had to have the sales team take a step back and be honest with themselves about what’s working and not working, and then be willing to try new things to improve results.

The takeaway: Motivate your sales team to understand why there needs to be change.

4.  We had to be precise with our sales team about why Thanx matters and what our core unique selling proposition was. Why are we ramping things up? Why does each enhancement matter? How do we know something is useful? What category of wins should we highlight?

The takeaway: Get your messaging right.

5.  We needed to understand what metrics mattered for moving someone through the pipeline, and constantly evaluate and iterate.

The takeaway: Develop metrics and an ongoing formula for repeating all of these steps.

GLO: Can you share any specific progress metrics with us?

ZG: I can tell you that prior to going through the Upshift program, our sales process generated about 100 activities (phone calls and emails to prospects) per month. After the program, we were up to 1,500 activities per month and currently we are on track for 400 touch points with prospects weekly. We are currently trying to grow our team to five, with an ideal team structure of two junior reps, two senior reps and a director, and evolve from there once we get the formula right.

GLO: That’s awesome to hear. What mistakes do you think you could have avoided?

1.  Hiring sales management before really knowing how to sell. Becoming my own sales leader helped me make me better decisions and save money. The downside is I had to feel all the pain of a new sales manager, but now I’m much better positioned to hire someone else to do the job right.

2.  Madness is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That’s what we were doing with our sales process. We could have saved a lot of time focusing on the same customers with the same message without knowing why they weren’t saying yes.  We could have learned how to break from that deadly cycle, find greater efficiencies and make improvements, rather than paying for salespeople who were not paying for themselves.

GLO: What were the three biggest takeaways you got as a results of going through the Upshift program?

ZG: We learned that:

1.  The challenges we had in closing deals stemmed from failures earlier on in the process. We weren’t doing sufficient discovery to know what merchants were experiencing in their own world. We didn’t have a thorough understanding of their pain points in order to stress them at end of process; that’s where we were going astray.

The takeaway: Know how to reinforce how your product addresses those crucial pain points when it matters most, right at the end of the sales cycle.

2.  Our technology was evolving at a faster pace than our pitch and messaging could keep up.  When pushing something new into the market, we weren’t able to keep step with our sales messaging; we had no idea if we were still selling the right way. We needed to iterate our sales process at a more rapid pace.

The takeaway: Your product evolution is just as important as your sales pipeline evolution. You can’t succeed in scaling without having both in place.

3.  The Upshift program helped us to make our process more of a science. We needed data to understand where volume was good and where it was struggling, how to change it, and be more quantitative in our approach overall.

The takeaway: Have the right rules in place, including a CRM system, and make sure your whole team is tracking everything in Salesforce or another sales management software solution.

GLO: Overall, how would you characterize your experience with Upshift?

ZG: Executive coaching, streamlined sales operations, and a clear process for how to be a well-functioning sales organization. It’s not a boot camp, not an incubator, it comes later than that. I guess the best way to describe it is, it’s like a secret weapon.

Upshift partners with a small number of fast-growing technology companies each quarter to help engineer their sales growth. If you think your company could benefit, we’d love to hear from you. 

David Skok offers more startup wisdom in our first Upshift eBook, “59 Secrets for Startup Sales Success.” Coming soon! 

Every startup business has the same dream, according to David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners, five-time serial entrepreneur and author of the ForEntrepreneurs blog. The dream of building a successful company that can make a difference in the world. But the reality, he says, is that the journey is much harder than people romanticize it to be. So he’s set out to make it a little more manageable by working with startups as an advisor, offering a wealth of tips and information on his blog, and by sharing his insights with me for our “advice from the field” series of posts from people who have achieved the dream, sometimes more than once.

Here are a few things he looks for when considering a startup for funding:

1. When meeting entrepreneurs, he looks for a “powerful ability to see around the corner, look into the future, and recognize something important in a new way of doing things.” A really strong entrepreneur has a unique insight into the market they are trying to address.
2. The vision they have should be for something big. Something that really matters. Investors are far less interested in small ideas, or variations on existing visions. “A twist on this or that, without a fundamentally new vision is not going to cut it,” he says. The idea should also be unique, and have long term sustainable differentiation and a very large potential market.
3. Personality traits he looks for in founders he takes on include smartness, raw intelligence, a way to navigate interesting and tricky challenges, creative ways to solve problems, oh, and you have to have “unbelievable fortitude, the grit to go through brick walls.”

Still reading? Good.

His own rise through the ranks early on (he built his first company in 1977!) have roots in his engineering degree, which is very different than coming from a background in sales or marketing to approach a problem. He credits his curiosity about business, ability to listen to customers and interpret the bigger picture behind the problems they were describing, combined with an understanding of where new technology had emerged that could solve their problems, as the keys to his own success, and what make him adept at spotting future success stories worth cultivating.

When approaching an investor for funding, he urges founders keep these 4 things in mind:

1. Be transparent. Investors can sense when they’re being sold. “Spin,” he says, “can be off-putting.” Be yourself, be honest; talk about the problems as well as the good things about your business.

2. Be very prepared. Make sure you know your business and can answer questions about the customers and the market you are addressing.

• Describe the problem you are solving, what’s changed that makes it possible to solve this now, and how your solution works.
• Discuss the competition, and why your approach is clearly better.
• Talk about how you plan to go to market, and be ready to discuss the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC), and the lifetime value of a customer (LTV).
• If you are a SaaS business with revenue, be ready to discuss the key SaaS Metrics (for more details on metrics, read this post on David’s blog.)

3. Make sure you answer questions, and be crisp with your    answers. “You should have a crisp, short answer for every question,” he says, “and make sure that you actually have answered it.” Don’t get distracted, or give a long-winded answer. And don’t be evasive. It’s not a turn off if someone doesn’t have an answer, he says. It’s fine to say, ‘let me get back to you on that.’ Just make sure you do get back to them quickly.

4. Recognize that you need to find an investor who is passionate about your idea. Investors see many ideas and only invest in a few. Those are typically things that they are passionate about. You only need to find one investor who likes the idea to be successful, so keep going until you find that match.

So if you have that ability to see around walls and manage to find an investor who believes in you and is passionate about your idea, the story doesn’t end there. I asked David what advice he had for people working with investors (or advisors) and this is what he told me:

“Most investors will give you advice, especially for first time enterprises, but you have to use your own brain as to whether or not that advice makes sense.”

Investors aren’t that close to your business and they can’t see everything.  Especially if it’s an investor who hasn’t run their own business before. The business school path to investing is different than having come up within the ranks, and there are merits to each, he said. You may get good advice, just keep in mind where it’s coming from. They may not know or understand the full situation. “You ultimately have to make your own decision and use your common sense and judgment to figure out what to do,” he advises.

So there you have it. Ready to go out and get investments now? I didn’t think so.

It takes preparation, like David says, and you have to prove you have a scalable model already in place before anyone will think about giving you money. If you think you might be ready for the investment phase, you might be surprised to learn there’s a stage missing before that, and that’s the Upshift phase. Read my post on what it means to Upshift, and why it’s crucial to make sure you’ve gone through this phase before you approach any investor.

Read more “advice from the field” posts featuring insights and tips from some of the most accomplished sales leaders in Silicon Valley.

Plus, read more tips from David and other Upshift advisors in our new eBook, “59 Tips for Scaling Startup Sales.”