Mark Roberge, Hubspot's Chief Revenue Officer was able to give me a sneak peek into his new book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100M, about his experience in building the HubSpot sales team. It is not very often that you get to hear the inside story on how a company receives a billion dollar valuation. So with permission, I wanted to share with all of you, part of this book.

"A lot of factors go into building a great sales force, but those factors don't have to be a mystery. Roberge breaks down the moving parts of a sales force-recruitment, hiring, training, compensation, and performance evaluation-and describes the metrics and methods he has applied to these components to make his company a success. If you want to engineer sales success, this book, written by an engineer-turned-sales-leader, is for you."
--Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human and Drive

 

Excerpt from the book:

The hardest part of scaling sales is finding great salespeople to add to your team. Sourcing great candidates requires tremendous time and effort, but it is a critical element.

Allow me to take you back to September 2007. It was time to scale the team. What did I do? I posted ads across every job board I could find. I received hundreds of applications from a variety of applicants. I probably completed about 50 phone screens and dozens of in-person interviews. I hired zero candidates. Zero!

At that point, I had an important revelation about hiring salespeople. Great salespeople never need to pull together a resume. Truly great salespeople have multiple job offers at all times, even if they are not in the job market. Their old bosses are calling them, probably quarterly. "Can I take you to a ball game?" "How is the new gig?" "Are you still happy?" "Are you making money?" "Did they change the compensation plan on you?" "You'll never believe how good things are going over here." "You have an open invitation to be on my team."

Reflecting back on hundreds of sales hires, I can't think of a single person who came to us from a job board or who was actively seeking a new role. Great salespeople are passive candidates, meaning they are not being proactive about changing positions. Shaping a passive recruiting strategy that caters to this demographic is a necessity.

Build a Recruiting Agency within Your Company.

But how do you shift to a passive recruiting strategy? Do you simply hire a recruiting firm? That's what I did at first. I probably worked with about 10 or so recruiting agencies over the course of that first year. Overall, the results were average, though some firms were better than others. At the time, these recruiting agencies charged anywhere between 15 and 20 percent of the base salary of any candidates we hired (a success-based fee). Every firm demanded that I work exclusively with them so that candidates were not contacted by multiple firms for the same job. I ignored that request and always had two or three going at once. If a firm presented a handful of candidates to me and the candidates did not make it through the early stages of the process, I stopped working with that firm and moved on. In an industry with multiple, similar competitors, it's important to be willing to move on quickly if you find yourself unimpressed with the product or service delivery.

In a vacuum, I was able to tolerate the average agency results. What really bothered me was the reliance I had on outside resources for arguably one of the most important drivers of my success. What if HubSpot wanted me to triple the pace of sales hiring? Scaling the external agency model simply wouldn't be predictable enough for me. I then received the best advice I've ever gotten on candidate sourcing.

Here is why this was such sage advice: the recruiters at outside recruiting agencies work really hard. They source passive candidates who aren't looking for jobs. They pay their recruiters well, often with performance-based variable packages that incent the staff to crush the phones and fill positions. However, these agency recruiters are not working exclusively for you. When a recruiter finds an amazing salesperson, will they pitch your company first? Will they pitch your company exclusively? Probably not. If the recruiter is a rational, currency-seeking human being, he will prioritize the company that will generate the highest commission for them.

On the flip side, and generically speaking, internal corporate recruiters are very different from the recruiters you find at agencies. They tend to value quality of life, work nine to five, and aren't particularly interested in cold-sourcing candidates. They typically make less than agency recruiters and are paid a base salary with no performance-based commission. Generically speaking, internal recruiters are better at launching job ads, directing inbound resumes to hiring managers, and ushering candidates through the hiring process. In fact, internal recruiters often hire recruiting agencies to do their cold-outreach "dirty work" for them. The advice I received (and followed) was to obtain the best of both worlds by building a recruiting agency within HubSpot. I went out and found a talented agency recruiter who was thinking about starting her own firm and I said to her, "Why not start the firm within HubSpot?"

We paid her and her team as if they were agency recruiters. Instead of a flat base salary, we opted for a lower salary with meaningful performance bonuses that amounted to a higher overall earning potential. Their performance bonuses were based on the fill rates, timing, and long-term success of the hires they made. The team operated like an outside agency. Most of the candidates were passively sourced. Our guys did a lot of cold outreach and networking. They were prohibited from using outside agencies. The team measured themselves similarly to the ways youwould see sales teams measure themselves. How many outbound candidates did they touch this week? How many touches led to connections? How many connections led to a phone screen? How many phone screens led to interviews with HubSpot's hiring managers? How many interviews led to a hire? Now I had a predictable, scalable process to find great sales talent, complete with internal metrics and ability to iterate on them quickly.

Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates on LinkedIn

Depending on the stage of your business, you may not have the luxury of building a recruiting arm or even hiring an agency right out of the gate. I know I certainly didn't. It was not until my team had grown to 10 salespeople that I was allowed to hire my first recruiter. In short, sourcing the initial team was on my shoulders. That said, what worked?What are the best techniques for sourcing quality sales candidates? LinkedIn proved to be an exceptional source of strong passive sales candidates. There are four steps I followed in order to source quality candidates. As of the writing of this book, all four can be accomplished with the free version of LinkedIn.

Step 1: Leverage the Search Capability within LinkedIn to Source a List of Qualified Candidates
Using the advanced search functionality of LinkedIn, I was able to generate a list of qualified candidates to start screening. Here are a few filters I played with that improved search results:
Zip code: This one is pretty obvious. For me, all the hiring occurred in Boston, so filtering by the geographic location of candidates was critical in all searches.
Job title: For the most part, I was looking for people already in sales.
Including "sales" or "account executive" in the "Title" field helped me filter results down to candidates already working in the function.
School: Remember "intelligence" was a strong predictor of sales success for me at HubSpot. Screening based on the quality of the undergraduate school helped me limit results to candidates who would likely score high on the intelligence spectrum.
Company: As you hire in your geographic market, you start to identify local companies that have large sales teams with quality training programs.

One of my most effective searches was to look for former employees of companies where I had relationships with the head of sales. Over the years, I have helped and/or networked with many heads of sales, especially in Boston. You might say that many of them "owed me a favor." What I would do is choose one of those heads of sales and conduct a LinkedIn search for salespeople who had worked at her company but had since left. Within 15 minutes, I was able to generate a solid list of people that used to work for her I would email the lists of former employees over to my heads of sales contacts and ask if they recommended any of them as standout performers. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my head of sales contact would be happy to respond with recommendations on who to go after. Often, they would even bring up a few additional names once they were aware of the type of people we were looking for.

Step 2: Screen the Search Results Using the Details in the Candidate's Linkedin Profile

There was a lot I could learn about a candidate simply from his profile.
A brief screen helped me to focus my sourcing efforts on the highest quality people. The top elements I looked for in candidate profiles were:
Indicators of sales excellence. These include rankings on their team, consistent quota attainment, President's Club attendance, and so forth.
Longevity at their current/former employers. This was especially relevant for candidates at companies I knew had high-performing sales teams. Even a poorly performing salesperson can survive at a company for a year. A mediocre salesperson might survive for two years. However, when I spotted folks that had made it three, four, five, or more years in a high-performing environment, I knew they were likely to be high-value candidates.
Alignment between the prospect's current buyer context and our buyer context. Are they currently selling to large enterprises or SMBs? Are they selling a commodity or a complex product? Is their sales process more relationship-oriented or transactional? These factors help me assess the learning curve for potential candidates. If these aspects do not match my buyer context, that is not a showstopper. I am just looking for some low-hanging fruit.
School and major. As we discussed, "intelligence" and "prior success" were predictors of sales success for me. The quality of their school, the difficulty of their major, and their academic performance were all correlated with these characteristics. To be honest, I think the second-tier schools produce the best candidates. Trust me--I hired plenty of successful salespeople from the MITs and Harvards of the world. Some ended up being top leaders at HubSpot. However, many grew bored within a sales organization and wanted to achieve career progression faster than we could accommodate.

Quality of LinkedIn profiles. To be honest, this had limited impact on my screening process. However, a weak, photo-less profile was a huge red flag for me. With the growing importance of social selling, how can a poor social presence be acceptable? On the other hand, a great profile with a professionally taken photo, 500-plus connections, and loads of recommendations from high-level executives made a really positive impression on me. Again, I would not get carried away here, but any candidate at either end of the profile quality spectrum would influence my impression.

Step 3: Engage with the Prescreened Candidates
Once I found a profile to pursue, I found that being connected to the person through a good friend or fellow employee was an enormous advantage. I would always ask our mutual contact for an introduction, and it almost always got me access to the candidate.
The second-degree connection, while a great resource, is not always available. In the case of a candidate with whom I had no mutual connections, I would guess at the individual's corporate email format and send them a direct email. I never really used the InMail capability in LinkedIn, as I figured his email inbox was more valuable real estate to occupy.

Here is an example of a typical email I would send. In this
example, the person I am trying to reach is an employed salesperson
at Yahoo! and graduate from Boston College a few years ago.
____________________________________________________
Email Subject: Yahoo!/Boston College
Email Body:
John,
Congrats on all your success! I run the sales team over here at HubSpot. Our current team can't keep up with the inbound lead flow so we are expanding the team. Your background is similar to those of our current top performers. Are there any folks in your network who are in the job market and have a background similar to yours?
Best,
Mark Roberge
SVP of Global Sales
Mobile: 123-456-7890
____________________________________________________
There are a few reasons why I think this email performs well. First, the subject line contains the right content. Remember, the point of the subject line is to get the recipient to open the email. In this case, the subject is simple: [Current employer/undergraduate school]. Wouldn't you open an email with that subject?

Second, the email is appropriately brief. At the point of the introduction, I do not need to overwhelm prospective candidates with all of the great things about our product, our culture, or our team. In as few words as possible, I want to encourage these candidates, who are likely not in the job market, to wonder if they are missing out on a life-changing opportunity. Fortunately for me as the author, I believe they are.

Third, the "ask" is not guilt-inducing. I am not going in for the kill. I am asking for a referral. Obviously, I am interested in them for a role at my company, but I'm not going to ask for it outright. By avoiding the hard ask, my approach is perceived as far less confrontational. The recipient feels less "dirty" about responding or helping me. Furthermore, it is genuine. Yes, I am interested in John, but I am equally interested in his friend who has similar successes and is looking for a job. After sending the email, if I do not hear back, I follow up with a phone call the next day. Two nice things about cold sourcing salespeople: they all have phones (unlike engineers) and they usually pick up inbound calls. It is not extraordinarily hard to get a connection.

Find Quality Passive Sales Candidates through Your Team:
The "forced referral" is a specific tactic used within the context of sourcing LinkedIn candidates, in which a hiring manager leverages the existing network of his team. It was by far the best technique we used to find talent. It is tougher to do when you have only one or two salespeople on staff and you are not growing quickly. Once you start scaling, it works beautifully.

Here is how the forced referral works: I would connect via LinkedIn with all of my salespeople, including my recent hires. About one to two months into the job, once they were comfortable with their new home, I would ask these new hires for referrals. Now, that approach is nothing new. However, it is this specific tactic that worked great. Instead of just saying, "We offer $2,500 for new hire referrals--do you know anyone?" I would say, "I am going to set a 20-minute meeting with you tomorrow. Tonight, I will go through your 275 connections on LinkedIn and look for salespeople in Boston to whom you are connected that look like they may be a good fit for our team." The next day, I show up to the meeting with the 18 people they are connected to that fit the criteria mentioned. They then proceed to tell me which prospective candidates are top performers and whether they are comfortable introducing me. This tactic is more work up front, but it is beautifully effective.

If you liked this article, check out Mark Roberge's new book launching this week, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100M, about his experience in building the HubSpot sales team.