Page 156 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

or even hundreds of other products they are expected to resell.

The other major issue with a partner strategy is the lack of a feedback cycle from
the partner's front line to your product team and executives. It is rare that a
startup nails its product-market fit right out of the gate. As a startup initially
develops its own sales muscle, the most valuable outputs of that muscle are not
necessarily the early customers and revenue that is generated. Instead, the most
valuable output is the learnings from the prospective buyers. The more effective
the team is at understanding the needs and preferences of its addressable market
and communicating that information back to the company to iterate on the
product, pricing, and packaging, the more likely the startup is to achieve
product-market fit and accelerate. When sales is run through an outside partner
channel, a lot of that feedback is lost. Often these partner salespeople are not
physically or emotionally connected to your company. They have little incentive
to capture feedback from prospective buyers and communicate it back to the
team.

I agreed wholeheartedly with this insight and appreciated the advice from our
advisors, but Pete was both passionate and persistent about starting a partner
program at HubSpot. Furthermore, there was our desire to foster an “innovation”
culture where great ideas from our smart employees were valued and evaluated.
I told Pete that if he hit 120 percent of his quarterly goal, he could start
experimenting with VAR.

Needless to say, Pete did it.

The next quarter, we set up the experiment. We agreed that Pete would continue
to be held responsible for his quota responsibilities, but we would give him a bit
of funding for the VAR experiment, which he would run as a nights and
weekends effort. The goal of the experiment was to explore whether we could
leverage VARs to acquire new customers at an attractive cost and who would be
successful using the HubSpot software. Success of the experiment was defined
as five new customers acquired through one or more VARs. All five customers
needed to have the HubSpot software set up and log in to the platform at least
once per week for the first month.

Pete did it again.

The next quarter, we made the VAR program Pete's full-time job. We gave him a
marketing budget and set him off with a new set of goals. He hit the next set of
goals. We increased the marketing budget and gave him budget to hire two
dedicated salespeople. The program was ready to scale.