The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

Introduction

“Scalable, predictable revenue growth.”

I jotted these four words down on a notepad. It was 11 p.m. on a Thursday night. I had just signed the paperwork to join a three-person marketing software start-up called HubSpot. I had met the cofounders, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, while we were students together at MIT. They were smart guys with a big mission: help companies transform their marketing from outbound to inbound.

My job was to build the sales team.

I was up late that night thinking about the road ahead and the mission I had chosen to accept.

“Scalable, predictable revenue growth.”

That's what I had to engineer.

Seven years later, HubSpot crossed the $100M run-rate revenue mark. During my tenure as SVP of global sales and services, I led the company to the acquisition of its first 10,000 customers across over 60 countries. I had a team of over 450 employees across the sales, services, account management, and support organizations. Few sales leaders have completed this journey end-to-end. In my case, I completed it without any prior experience building a sales team. As a matter of fact, I had never even worked in sales. I am an MIT graduate. I am an engineer by training. I started my career writing code. Somehow, I found myself in the sales leader seat. Throughout the journey, I challenged many conventional notions of sales management by utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which I'd been trained to see the world.

When people heard ...