20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot from $0-$100M in ARR, The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise, How to do Channel Partnerships Right and How to Construct Sales Comp Plans Early On with Mark Roberge

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark was the founding CRO at HubSpot, where he scaled ARR from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark was 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.

In Today's Episode with Mark Roberge We Discuss:

1. Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot to $100M in ARR:

What are Mark's biggest lessons in what worked in their sales strategy in scaling to $100M in ARR?
What elements of Hubspot's sales strategy did not work? What would he have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?
What does Mark know now that he wishes he had known when he started at Hubspot?

2. How the Best Startups Scale into Enterprise:

What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise?
When is the right time? What do founders get most wrong on timing of scale into enterprise?
What do you need to have in place both from a team and product perspective to make the transition?

3. Second Product and Second Channel:

When is the right time to launch the second product?
Why does Mark believe that you should be turning down customers in the early days? Why is not every customer right for your company?
How does Mark think about channel diversification? Does Mark agree you only need one channel to scale to $50M in ARR and two to scale to $100M in ARR?

4. 99% of SaaS Founders Do Partnerships Wrong:

What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when doing channel partnerships?
What can and should they do to set channel partnerships up for success?
What do the channel partners need to have to be equipped to sell the partner solution?
What level of buy-in and from who on the channel partner side is needed for the partnership to be successful?
What did Mark learn from Hubspot's partnership with Salesforce scaling to 10% of Hubspot's revenue?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I was consulting to HubSpot when it was like one or two people and eventually joined the company as the fourth employee.
0:05.9	The skill necessary to get a million dollar deal done, there's so much in there in terms of like, how do I identify and build a good champion?
0:13.1	How do I understand the political dynamics?
0:15.2	How do I differentiate between an economic buyer, a technical buyer, an end user, a coach, and a champion?
0:22.5	How do I like deal with procurement? How do I deal with legal? My million dollar seller has all those skills. You are listening
0:27.7	to 20 sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the
0:32.2	best sales leaders in the world to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies to scaling the best sales teams.
0:38.3	And there is no one better than today's guest.
0:40.3	HubSpot is one of the generational defining companies of this era of SaaS companies.
0:45.3	And our guest today was the fourth employee and their first sales hire.
0:50.3	So as the founding CRO at HubSpot, Mark Rabech scaled ARR from zero to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees.
1:01.8	In this episode, we unpack the biggest lessons from scaling HubSpot from zero to $100 million in ARR.
1:08.8	But before we dive in, we need to talk about our sponsor for the day,
1:12.1	Clary. Clary is an industry-leading AI-powered revenue platform that is purpose-built to help
1:17.8	companies optimize their end-to-end revenue process. With over $4 trillion in revenue under
1:23.1	management, Clary's customers have a material advantage to optimize their enterprise revenue process across all teams, from rep to the boardroom, by leveraging the world's largest and fastest growing AI reservoir of enterprise revenue expertise.
1:36.3	More than 1,500 organizations, including Octa, Adobe, Workday, Zoom and Finastra, run revenue on Clary to improve win rates, prevent
1:45.6	slip deals, forecasts with accuracy, and boost the productivity of all revenue-critical
1:50.7	employees.
1:51.7	To learn more about how you can create, convert, and close revenue with Clary, visit Clary.com.
1:57.5	You have now arrived at your destination.
2:00.0	Mark, I am so excited for this. I just mentioned, I've loved your content for a while now. So this is really exciting. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh yeah, sure, Harry. I'm honored. Thank you for saying that. Now, I would love to start. How did you first make your way into the world of sales? And when did you know that sales was really one of your loves? Like a lot of
	...

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