Inbound Selling

Chapter 4ConnectHow to Engage Active—and Not So Active—Buyers

At the end of my second week in training at HubSpot, we started to have a good deal of free time. I remember asking my manager, Dannie, what I should be doing. She recommended I read a lot of our customer case studies, listen to recorded calls from other sales reps, read the sales playbook, and watch training videos on our sales process.

I completed that work in an afternoon, taking copious notes the way a good researcher would. The next day I explained to her that I had completed the task at hand and, in the back of my mind, expected praise for it. Instead, I got the opposite. Maybe not the opposite of praise, but perhaps some tough love.

I proudly walked over to Dannie's desk, announced that I had finished my homework assignment, and asked, “So what else can I be doing?” Her response was perfect, but scared the hell out of me: “Sig, I recommend you get on the phone and start calling people who expressed interest in HubSpot, or our content. That's what we hired you to do, isn't it?”

Now take what I'm about to tell you with a grain of salt. I went back to my desk, sat down, opened our CRM, and pulled up my lead view, titled “My New Leads.”

At HubSpot, we're spoiled. Especially in 2012, we were very spoiled. I asked for leads and the marketing gods just provided. There were literally tens of thousands of leads for us to call because our marketing team relentlessly created high-quality content to attract visitors to ...