Page 155 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

15
HubSpot's Most Successful Sales Experiments

In an attempt to illustrate the impact of sales experiments, let me walk through
two very successful examples we ran at HubSpot. One example is a go-to-
market experiment. The other is a sales methodology experiment.

The HubSpot Value Added Reseller (VAR)
Program

In the fall of 2007, I hired Pete Caputa as HubSpot's fourth salesperson. Like me,
Pete was a nontraditional sales hire. He was an engineer by training. He was
coming from a small startup, where he'd been CEO. He had some solid sales
training under his belt.

Only a few months into the job, Pete became extraordinarily passionate about
starting a VAR program. Up to that point, we had been acquiring 100 percent of
our business through a direct sales model, calling on the inbound leads from our
website and converting them into customers. Pete envisioned a new sales
channel. He wanted to focus on all of the small marketing agencies, web design
shops, and SEO consultants that were following the HubSpot story. He believed
we could convince these organizations to resell our software.

Prior to Pete's arrival, we had considered a VAR program. In fact, we had even
experimented with the program with a large reseller. I find that most startups
consider selling through resellers as an attractive starting point. Rather than
invest in the hiring and management of a large direct sales force, wouldn't it be
great to just get someone else to do it for you?

For most early startups, this approach fails. We were fortunate to have
executives from many successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses on the
HubSpot advisory board. They advised us against starting a VAR program in the
early phases of the company. They warned that these partnerships required
significant effort to establish, especially with resellers of reasonable scale.
Furthermore, getting an agreement in place is only half the battle. You still need
to capture the mindshare of the partner's sales team. The sales team needs to be
trained on your product. Oftentimes, your product is lost in the shuffle of dozens