The Bowery Capital CRO Summit continues and the afternoon is off to a great start after watching Team USA advance to the round of 16 in the World Cup during lunch. Andrew Quinn, Director of Training and Development at HubSpot, just gave a great presentation that touched on HubSpot’s sales team growth, training and retention strategies. HubSpot has raised almost $101M since the company was founded in 2006. Andrew has trained hundreds of sales people at HubSpot and focuses on addressing actionable and tactical objectives to scale HubSpot as a sales organization.
In his presentation, “HubSpot’s Strategies for Effective Sales Team Growth, Training and Retention,” Andrew provided the audience with relevant advice based on his experience:
1) Develop a repeatable sales system with statistics and trust those statistics
Find out the numbers that will allow you to reach your goals. Some questions you must know the answers to are: How many opportunities does it take to make a sale? How many leads does it take to get prospects? How many sales reps do you need? How long should reps work on deals? Evaluate the best, average, and worst case scenarios for these questions. Once you start figuring this out, you can start to build a monthly pipeline and see obtainable steps to reaching sales revenue goals. Understanding how long reps should work on deals allows you to remove bad leads from your system. It is essential to understand good leads vs. bad leads and you must trust that your marketing will nurture leads and bring them back.
2) Hire people that can sell to a wide range of people, then train them
At the beginning of training, there needs to be a baseline of knowledge that every new hire needs to have. During training, listen to trainees sales calls to analyze what type of people they are good at communicating with. You will see that some people are better at selling to doctors, lawyers and businesspeople while others are good at selling to plumbers, auto salesmen, etc. Realize the point when general training must come to an end and begin vertical training. The length of training must be set in stone so you can assess whether or not someone is succeeding. Have a system in place that allows you to assess how a trainee is doing and analyze if they are improving or not each week. By constantly analyzing someone in training, you can start to predict if they will be successful or not.
3) Don’t use predicative indexes to try and predict if a person will be successful
Andrew realized that, after trying to use these predicative indexes, they were just as useful as a random generator. He saw much more success with the system HubSpot implemented during training and, due to the constant analysis of trainees, could almost assuredly predict if someone would be a success or not. It is also key to realize when you are holding on to someone for too long. By figuring out how long was too long, HubSpot was able to cut costs.
A huge thanks to Andrew for his energetic presentation!
