And Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

Mark eloquently frames the discussion around redefining the sales rep profile to include intelligence as a critical success factor. He also provides a structural playbook for anyone thinking about scaling a sales org from $0 to $100M+. Lots of great takeaways.

Brilliant - Mark is an innovator in every sense of the word. This book should be mandatory reading for every start-up, founder, sales manager or salesperson trying to understand the science of selling. It's the best book sales book I have read in awhile.

When I interviewed Mark for my blog during his drive into the office and he told me about this book, I knew it would be great for high growth companies. But would it translate to the start up and solopreneurs, who have few resources other than themselves?

What is really great about "The Sales Acceleration Formula" is that it is not a magic formula that you can copy and paste. It gives the entrepreneur who knows nothing about sales a way to create their own unique processes- even if all you have is excel. "The key to the process was discipline, not sophisticated technology."

There are simple take aways that any sales person, executive, or entrepreneur can apply from Mark's book, like;

-the five traits that correlated to sales success (that all successful entrepreneurs need to also possess)
-how to make the first critical hire and set up sales training for future hires
-how to design your sales methodology and process around the buyer journey
-how to understand the day to day life of your potential customers
-how to make continuous improvements to the process
-the importance of a personal brand
-"...salespeople who are intelligent and helpful, rather than aggressive and high-pressure, are most successful with today's empowered buyer."
-"Buyers should not be asked to understand the salesperson's solution and how it can help...salespeople should understand the buyer's goals and how his own solution can help."

I know Mark and his family personally- he comes from good stock and is an entrepreneur at heart. Like him, I don't come from a sales background. If you asked me what the difference between BANT and SPIN were, I would have said dance moves. I didn't start to understand what sales really is until I became a business owner myself and learned the hard way.

If you are one of those entrepreneurs who know nothing about sales, this will help you.

This is the missing link in a complete inbound strategy. I am both Inbound and Hubspot certified and a huge Hubspot user and advocate of inbound marketing. If you are currently doing content marketing/inbound marketing, you need to read or listen to this book because it provides a huge piece that has been missing from all of the books and training out there, sales strategy for inbound. I love how he really gets into the weeds and provides tactical concepts and ideas that you can implement as well as high-level strategies. As somone who is so passionate about inbound, a lot of what he talked about clicked and we're excited to implement it all. While it's not required, I highly recommend if you have not already, read Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah or become Inbound certified by Hubspot (for free), as it will help you understand in great detail how Hubspot generates the leads that Mark sells to in these books.

Mark Roberge's third chapter on building a recruiting agency inside of your four walls might be the most brilliant 10 pages I've read in any sales or business book. Buy the book for the nuggets of practical know how in this one chapter alone.

If you need to scale a sales team quickly, particularly in SaaS, you must read this book.

Trust me...I've read a lot of books on sales leadership. Publishers send me many for free because they want me to write reviews. I bought 5 copies of The Sales Acceleration Formula and distributed them to our team. It's that good.

The Sales Acceleration Formula is well written and relevant. As a CEO and author of Always Forward!, I have read my share of sales books. This book is organized, succinct and supported with solid examples. On the whole, I would recommend this book as a valuable addition to your current sales training. The Sales Acceleration Formula contains excellent insight into how to reach today's decision makers and relevant suggestions for all industries and levels of sales people. It is well written and ideas formulated concisely, clearly. This book is worth its weight in gold, and there is rich content in just about every chapter.

Anyone looking to build a high-performing sales organization ought to read this book. Mark is one of the most thoughtful sales leaders when it comes to scaling a sales team. He uniquely takes a data-driven approach, from recruiting to training to managing a team. His methodology can be applied across virtually any sales organization and is a refreshing approach vs. traditional frameworks.

Mark is not just a theorist. His learnings come from years of experience and driving tremendous success at Hubspot. This is truly a sales manager's bible!

Having had the opportunity to speak with and interview Mark on several occasions - and the good fortune of working just around the corner from HubSpot - it's been pretty cool to see the company's growth from a small Boston startup into a top marketing software company. And Mark has been a huge part of it. His mastery of data-driven sales management techniques, combined with the trademark inbound process that the company has now made a necessity, has created a top-performing sales process and team.

In this must-read, Mark shares his secrets on hiring and training top performers, developing a culture that brings out the best in your employees, devoting the commitment and resources to coaching and most critically, applying keen data-driven and analytical methods to your sales management. For any startup CEO or Sales VP, this book should be referred to and referenced early and often.

Being an aspiring sales manager, this book is truly inspirational. Mark lays down the critical foundations for using data to build a rockstar sales team. In addition to many other topics, he focuses on the keys in the hiring process and how to create an optimal sales environment to enable your sales team to skyrocket.

Given that our sales team has a monthly book club, I've read many sales books in my day, yet Mark's book is easily the best. His insight and examples make this formula extremely easy to follow and implement. If you're trying to figure out how to create a killer sales team and have them blow away their quota, this book is for you.

Having had the opportunity to speak with and interview Mark on several occasions - and the good fortune of working just around the corner from HubSpot - it's been pretty cool to see the company's growth from a small Boston startup into a top marketing software company. And Mark has been a huge part of it. His mastery of data-driven sales management techniques, combined with the trademark inbound process that the company has now made a necessity, has created a top-performing sales process and team.

In this must-read, Mark shares his secrets on hiring and training top performers, developing a culture that brings out the best in your employees, devoting the commitment and resources to coaching and most critically, applying keen data-driven and analytical methods to your sales management. For any startup CEO or Sales VP, this book should be referred to and referenced early and often.

Being an aspiring sales manager, this book is truly inspirational. Mark lays down the critical foundations for using data to build a rockstar sales team. In addition to many other topics, he focuses on the keys in the hiring process and how to create an optimal sales environment to enable your sales team to skyrocket.

Given that our sales team has a monthly book club, I've read many sales books in my day, yet Mark's book is easily the best. His insight and examples make this formula extremely easy to follow and implement. If you're trying to figure out how to create a killer sales team and have them blow away their quota, this book is for you.

Learn by looking over the shoulder of the author, an engineer turned sales management executive, responsible for building the sales team that helped drive marketing automation startup HubSpot from 0 to $100 million in revenue in 7 years, and a market capitalization of $1.2 billion! Warning! No silver bullets here, just a thoughtful, disciplined approach to team-building that recognizes the critical importance of hiring and training with very explicit goals and directions guiding you, married to a commitment to leveraging training and technology to position the team to perform at their peak. This is not an easy stroll - it's a peak performance manual for those leaders willing to make and stick with a rigorous commitment. And the promise of exceptional performance that comes with it!

Mark has introduced a level of science to sales that will help to guide every decision in building and managing a sales team. The beauty here is that Mark has done the heavy lifting: running hundreds of tests of different approaches to hiring, managing, training and scaling sales orgs. I guarantee that the results he shares in this book will provide at least one idea or process you’ll want to implement immediately. It goes against the grain of some of the more traditional sales approaches, but is geared perfectly for today's sales environment and sales manager. There are not many books that I earmark for reference, but this book is a no-brainer for anyone interested in how to build a successful tech sales org in today’s world.

Mark's book is required reading for everyone working (or hoping to work) in a leadership role in SaaS. I wish this book was available 3 years ago when I was starting to build Zendesk's Asia sales organisation.

In particular Mark's experience and insights around hiring high performance inside sales executives is invaluable - there is lot of quality material you can start actioning on immediately.

I highly recommend this book to anyone running a sales organisation (particularly if in SaaS) or anyone just wanting to better understand what goes into building successful sales teams.

Nick Franklin - CEO ChartMogul (former Zendesk)

I hate that most business books feel like they're written by academics, far removed from the day to day grind of actually building an organization. This is not one of those books.

The Sales Acceleration Formula is filled with down to earth details that can only come from someone who has actually done it themselves. Mark doesn't talk in the abstract. This book delves into specific, actionable examples from his experiences at Hubspot. It's authentic in a way other books on sales are not. If you're looking for a framework to think strategically about building a sales organization, this is it.

In entrepreneurship, revolutionary ideas often occur at the “intersection of things.” Mark’s approach toward scaling a sales organization through a formulaic, metric-driven framework is a must-read not only for entrepreneurs, but anyone who is interested in sales or optimizing a revenue generation strategy. At a time when interruption-based selling is less effective than ever, Mark has nailed the traits that are essential for sales new hires to posses. The Sales Acceleration Formula is an academically-sound and calculated methodology that should go a long ways toward dispelling some of the negative stereotypes that unfortunately still exist around sales and salespeople. Mark is also an incredibly down to earth, approachable guy that is genuinely interested in helping others succeed, and we have been fortunate to get to know this side of him over the course of the past year.

Mark built a phenomenal machine. Taking the time to share the fundamentals of what it took to make it all happen is a must read for anybody in a sales role. It's no longer about "don't confuse efforts with results", it's about how can I repeat the results I want and scale it across my entire team. So many companies have no understanding of the key metrics they need to be paying attention to drive the outcomes they want. By taking the time to share his process with everyone Mark has shared an incredible gift to the sales world.

I first met Mark Roberge when I introduced to him the idea behind a startup focused on Customer Success Management - he got this immediately and we kept close touch. Over the years I can't begin to describe the valuable advice we has given me from time to time on building, scaling and optimizing my sales team. All of these golden advices and much more are in this book. I highly recommend to get those first hand from Mark, and the second best option - read the book!

Guy Nirpaz, CEO & Co-Founder,
Totango - Lead with Customer Success

This is the definitive book on how to implement a Sales 2.0 process. Mark has brought true innovation to sales, and he generously shares it in this informative guide for sales practitioners. You may have read countless sales tricks/tips books, and eaten too much candy to stay awake in sales training sessions... This is different. I've been in sales for more than 20 years, and I found the book to be a page-turner, packed with practical, useful how-to advice that every modern sales manager should put use immediately. Save money on training, block your calendar -- and read it. Then do it. You'll sell more.

Mark is quite simply one of the best sales leaders out there. His holistic approach to growing businesses is elevating sales to a new level. It's not only a sale that both salespeople and customers actually enjoy but it's also a sale that pulls all components of an organization together; encouraging sales, marketing and customer success to work together as one unified team of growth.

If you're not learning from Mark, you're missing the boat!

Through a test and learn approach, Mark has built the playbook for the modern day sales force. He has transformed a business built on relationships to one built on data. For any leader looking to scale a sales organization, The Sales Acceleration Formula is the definitive guide to doing so. Having watched Mark grow the HubSpot team from only 3 people scraping for revenue to a public company north of $100MM is proof positive that this formula works. This book is a must read!

Mark Roberge invented the inbound sales and marketing process and built a predictable sales and marketing machine at HubSpot. From an MIT engineer to a sales leader, Mark brings the best of both worlds. This book will help you understand what sales and marketing alignment is all about and how to make you revenue generating teams a predictable machine!

This was an easy read with amazing insight. I work for Mark directly, so there may be some bias here, but I truly believe there are dozens of valuable stories and lessons in here from real-life successes and failures that should be read by anyone looking to start or grow a sales team. This is the real story of how HubSpot went from 0-100, I have had the fortunate opportunity to watch him execute this exact blueprint for our new sales software.

Mark is an incredibly innovative and effective sales leader, who's tactics have certainly proven true. I can tell you first hand that the strategies Mark deploys in the book hold true to how he built Hubspot. For any innovative sales manager, you know sales has transitioned from an art to a sheer science, and optimizing on the data is key. Mark can help with the Sales Acceleration Formula.

Roberge provides an invaluable look inside the sales philosophies and systems that drove HubSpot from a marketing technology startup to a billion dollar publicly traded company. The Sales Acceleration Formula is required reading to entrepreneurs, sales executives and marketing leaders.

Simply one of the best business and sales books that I have read, EVER! Mark does a brilliant job of introducing and proving the importance of real data when it come to driving sales performance. For too long sales managers have been flying blind... but now, Mark gives you the formula to follow. This is one book you don't want to miss.

The concepts in this book outline the future of sales. If the manufacturing environment can build reliable, predictable, measurable processes then why not sales? Its possible. Mark shares how he did it. Worthwhile reading for any sales manager in any organization big or small.

I've spoken with Mark on several occasions and what he's accomplished at HubSpot is nothing short of miraculous. He has a brilliant mind for sales and I can't wait to read more details behind his proven strategies and approaches. As a CEO, just knowing Mark, I consider this a must read.

The Sales Acceleration formula takes the guessing game out of having a successful sales team. Roberge distills it into clear and actionable formulas that are easy to follow. Great read, highly recommended.

I heard Mark recently speak and he walked us through his philosophy on scaling sales and lead generation. It was truly inspiring and I have begun to implement some of his thinking on my own business Signal. I thoroughly recommend any young entrepreneur, aspiring sales or marketing person or in fact anyone involved in business to have a read of his book.

Mark Roberge + Neil Rackham equal a winning combination. Mark's writings have helped guide Rivalry to a 6 figure run rate with double-digit growth month over month. The Sales Acceleration Formula will be on the bookshelves (digital) of every sales manager who wants to own their role.

You can easily tell this book has been written by someone who has experienced the high’s and low’s of sales. I love the fact that Mark sheds light on the different aspects of human behavior with sales and how every situation needs to be adapted to accordingly. Too often we are set in our patterns and fail to adapt.

This book has it all. Simple practical methodology that can be implemented immediately to help your organization that can be iterated over time. This book is gasoline! Thanks Mark. You've inspired me just in time!