February 2016 H OUSING N EWS R EPORT
“The Internet has completely transformed the way buyers research products and services,” he observes. “Today’s buyers are empowered to find the products they want, when they want them, with near-perfect information on the competitive landscape. The buyer is in control. At HubSpot, we recognized this shift.”
outline how to bring scale to your sales training efforts by defining the three fundamental elements: the buyer journey, the sales process and the qualifying matrix. I outline how to bring predictability to the training program using exams and certifications. I also provide a blueprint on how to manufacture helpful salespeople with whom your prospects will actually want to interact.”
Use Technology and Experimentation
The Sales Management Formula
In the final section, Roberge guides readers onhowtousetechnologyandexperimentation to sell better and faster. Today’s success sales professionals are technology geeks, writes Roberge.
Next, Roberge describes how to create a metrics-driven sales coaching environment in Part III, in a section titled the Sales Management Formula. For Roberge, all managers are “sales coaches.” “In my opinion, effective sales coaching is the biggest driver of sales productivity,” he writes. “All sales managers should maximize the time they invest in coaching.”
“They use technology to understand what information the prospect has already consumed and lead with the next piece of information appropriate for prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey,” he writes. “They use technology to understand which prospects are actually engaging with their sales efforts, opening their emails, visiting their website, and are prioritizing their sales efforts accordingly.” Roberge has done yeoman’s work in tracing how to assemble a world-class sales team. The tips and insight provided by Roberge can be implemented in any sales organization. “In today’s digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form,” writes Roberge, who earned an MBA fromMIT and an engineering degree from Lehigh University. “There is a process. Sales can be predictable. A formula does exist.” This is an eye-opening book. Anyone in digital sales will benefit by reading and absorbing the pearls of wisdom found between the covers of “Sales Acceleration Formula.” Whether your sales force is a tiny one-person start-up or a sophisticated 1,000-person operation, you’ll find much sales insight in Roberge’s book that are relevant, useful and actionable.
Mark Roberge
Sales-driven metrics varies from company to company, he claims. But Roberge “recommends keeping the first pass relatively simple by starting with the high-level metrics that are already being tracked.”
The Demand Generation Formula
In Part IV of the book, Roberge deconstructs what he calls “outbound marketing,” such as cold-calling, in a section titled the “Demand Generation Formula.” “Outbound marketing just doesn’t work anymore,” he writes. “Buyers dislike outbound marketing so much they actually invest in technology to keep these tactics out of their lives.” Despite the shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing, companies continue to pour the majority of their demand generation efforts into outbound marketing, he argues. Instead, Roberge suggests implementing an inbound sales and marketing revenue machine, which he describes in chapter 11 titled “Converting Inbound Interest into Sales.” He created a “buyer matrix” to figure out where buyers are in the sales journey.
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