Videos
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“Who Will Win the Go-to-Market AI Race — Startups or Incumbents?” with Stage 2 Capital Mark Roberge
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Mark Roberge | Understand the Decision-Making Unit to Accelerate Platform Sales
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How Revenue Leaders at Box, Calendly, and Lattice Scaled From $0 to $100M+ and Beyond
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A Step by Step Guide to Revenue Growth with Mark Roberge, Harvard Business School
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Mark Roberge | Building a Scalable, Predictable Sales Machine
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Optimizing GTM for PLG with Stage 2 Capital Co-Founder and Managing Director Mark Roberge
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Mark Roberge: Data-driven Talent Management
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The Sales Acceleration Formula | Mark Roberge | Talks at Google
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TINYcon 2016: Harvard Business School's Mark Roberge Fireside Chat
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Mark Roberge: The work habits of a sales professional
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Sales Mistakes that Can Kill Your SaaS Business & How to Avoid Them
Learn More About Mark Roberge
The conventional methods of successfully building sales and marketing teams are no longer relevant. The internet and access to information have empowered buyers and changed the role of the salesperson, while subscription models have forced a transition of go-to-market focus from customer contract value to customer lifetime value. While the worlds of sales and marketing have been utterly transformed by new technologies and business models, Harvard Business School Professor Mark Roberge says scaling and go-to-market strategies have not kept up.
Roberge is no stranger to leveraging data and collaboration for business success. He was among the first to build a sales team in a cloud environment as HubSpot’s founding chief revenue officer – where he helped transform the startup into a unicorn valued at more than $15 billion in market value – and he successfully employed a data-driven scientific approach to building sales teams as a senior advisor for Boston Consulting Group. With emerging technology opening up new ways to leverage data on sales, marketing and customer success, Roberge recognized that the environment was primed for a disruption of the conventional wisdom on building teams.
“There was no customer relationship management (CRM) data before,” he points out. “Operating in this cloud-first environment led to tremendous opportunities to use new data to build an efficient and effective sales and marketing machine.”
As a speaker and consultant, Roberge instigates and inspires strategic change across industries. At the vanguard of a sales revolution, he illustrates for business leaders how sales can be transformed into a more predictable, scalable function through technology and data accessibility. In his enduring bestseller, “The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million,” Roberge used his experiences at HubSpot to outline his unique formula for quantifying and scaling sales. In his engaging presentations, he illuminates examples of how businesses can transform their go-to-market strategy to align with the new buyer context, including hiring, demand generation, sales playbooks, compensation, management and more.
As a leading authority on modern revenue generation, Roberge is an inspirational practitioner with proven success in building businesses from the ground up and harnessing the power of all things digital in the process. A trailblazer in analyzing and forecasting an upcoming explosion in product-led-growth (PLG) businesses, his stellar Harvard Business School course, “Decoding Growth in Silicon Valley,” spawned a powerful playbook for B2B startups that ranges from vital north star metrics to the importance of rapid, high-quality experimentation. Ultimately, the digital age has fundamentally altered the way buyers think and act. By understanding and embracing these changing B2C and B2B landscapes, Roberge helps companies build data-driven, 21st century strategies for sales, marketing, growth and human resources.
“We need to engage in the social conversation by training sellers to become known digitally,” Roberge explains. “It’s now vital for salespeople to have a robust digital presence to stand out. Customers should feel like they can seek sellers out as authorities in their areas of expertise, and the sellers must be prepared to engage and actually be those experts.”
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Founding CRO of HubSpot, Mark Roberge is a senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, the first venture capital firm run and backed by over 400+ world class go-to-market executives from the most successful technology companies in the world. He has invested in, advised, and/or been a board member at over 50 startups. He has advised dozens of Fortune 500 leaders on modernizing their sales and marketing departments as a senior advisor for Boston Consulting Group.
As a major thought leader in entrepreneurial management and sales, Roberge has been featured in leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Boston Globe, TechCrunch and Harvard Business Review. He received his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and holds a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Lehigh University.
Mark Roberge is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group®.
Tap Into Product-Led-Growth Success Stories
As both the consumer and business worlds embrace product-led-growth (PLG) startups, what lessons can businesses take from B2C successes like Facebook and Pinterest and B2B triumphs like Dropbox and Slack? In this educational presentation, Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer of Business Administration Mark Roberge reveals how the PLG startup trend of today is positioned for market domination in the coming years similar to the SaaS trend of the early 2000s. Drawing from his popular HBS course, “Decoding Growth in Silicon Valley,” Roberge enlightens participants on lessons gleaned from conversations with successful B2C and B2B PLG leaders, providing a powerful playbook for B2B startups. With a step-by-step framework ranging from vital north star metrics to the importance of rapid, high-quality experimentation, this session will empower leaders to build powerful PLG business strategies in a market that is poised for massive near-term growth.
Using Data to Decode the Science of Scaling
Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer of Business Administration Mark Roberge has been a leading voice on how to use data to hire, train and manage talent for years. Now, he’s taking a data-driven approach to successful business scaling. According to Roberge, companies are failing because they are choosing the wrong time and pace to scale. In this illuminating presentation, Roberge elaborates on his popular e-book, “The Science of Scaling,” to reveal how organizations can use their own internal data to calculate how to scale, and more importantly, when to scale. By learning how to harness data that organizations already have, Roberge provides leaders with a potent plan for scaling success that will better position organizations for rewarding growth potential.
The Data-Driven Way to Hire, Train and Manage Talent
Companies have access to exponentially greater amounts of data than ever before – and yet they are not sufficiently making use of it. Seeing the opportunity for companies to harness this data, Roberge developed a data-driven approach to hiring, training and managing talent for HR executives and functional leaders. Using this approach, Roberge hired more than 500 employees, scaling HubSpot from a startup out of MIT to a publicly traded company. In this presentation, Roberge illustrates the detailed tactics he used in sourcing, hiring, training and onboarding talent, as well as the linkages between these talent management stages. He also explains how these concepts are applicable to roles beyond sales, including engineering, marketing and customer service.
Winning the New Frontier of Sales: How to Master “Social Selling”
It is a cliché to discuss the power and opportunity of social media platforms in generating interest in and demand for products and services. And yet, most salespeople fail to understand how to use those platforms in a methodological and consistently successful way. According to Mark Roberge, “social selling” is often merely substituting internet spamming for cold calls. Now, Roberge has utilized his experience in developing successful sales formulas to fashion a new methodology used by 65,000 sales people daily for social selling, one that turns a digital crapshoot into a precise science. In this presentation, Roberge reveals how you can end digital cold calling and start building your own demand. Social selling is how businesses, especially startups, are going to generate success in years to come. It’s essential to understand how to harness the opportunities afforded by these platforms rather than merely becoming another irrelevant and ignored voice among millions of others.
Transforming Sales and Marketing in Large Organizations
Sales and marketing have been transformed by the internet, but established organizations have not always adapted. Today’s startups are disrupting incumbents because they reach customers where they are – online – rather than at trade shows, through traditional media or with travelling salespeople. As dynamism is the key to survival in the digital era, sales teams need to be able to disrupt their own companies before a competitor does. Sales and marketing expert Mark Roberge shows your company how to experiment with new capabilities and develop high-velocity, cross-functional internal sales teams at minimum risk to the broader organization. Roberge draws on his background with HubSpot and as a consultant with Boston Consulting Group to reorient firms’ sales teams from the comfortable (but unsustainable) to engaging in constant testing of new ways of reaching and converting customers.
“A new breed of disciplined, data-driven leaders are re-shaping the field of sales. The Sales Acceleration Formula explains why.”
“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.”
“The Sales Acceleration Formula provides the most powerful, practical approach yet to the total marketing and selling process from lead generation to close. It helps senior sales and marketing executives understand how to work in concert to satisfy customers, quickly close sales, and grow revenue exponentially.”
“In The Sales Acceleration Formula, Roberge provides a prescriptive blueprint for scaling a modern sales team. It should be on every sales leader’s reading list.”
“Mark has been at the forefront in figuring out the new sales methodologies around inside sales, leveraging metrics for insights, and web technologies for increased rep productivity. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone running a sales organization.”
“Predictable scale is on every CEO and sales executives’ mind. However, it is rarely achieved. Roberge provides a great tactical approach toward reaching this goal.”
“Early in my career, I worked as a sales representative at a Wall Street economic consultancy. Back then the salesperson had the information and therefore the power in the relationship. Now, because of the wealth of content on the web, traditional selling doesn’t work so well. In this important book, Mark shares his radically successful formulas for how sales needs to change in order to be successful in our new buyer-driven world.”
“It’s time to rev up the revenue engines! The Sales Acceleration Formula transforms the mystique of selling into a scalable methodology that savvy leaders can implement.”
“Mark Roberge and Hubspot are one of the few places I go myself to study up on what’s new and working in sales, as a legend in the making.”
“An engineering mindset arms the modern sales leader with an unfair advantage. The Sales Acceleration Formula explains why.”
