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.”
