Page 62 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

like to be in their customer's shoes. What do they do all day? What is easy about
the job? What is hard? What causes stress? What do individuals in this role like
to do? What do their bosses want them to do? How is success measured?

Once the salesperson truly understands the day-to-day job of the buyer, the
salesperson can then effectively relate to the buyer. The salesperson can connect
with the buyer, earn the buyer's trust, and appreciate the buyer's unique
perspectives. The salesperson can understand where the buyer wants to go
because the salesperson has been at both the starting gate and the finish line. The
salesperson can advise the buyer. The salesperson can help the buyer.

Providing our salespeople with an in-depth understanding of our buyers' day-to-
day existence became a key goal of my sales training formula. In the pages that
follow, you'll see how I did it.

In the first few years of HubSpot, we targeted marketing professionals.
Therefore, my sales training goal was to teach our new sales hires what it was
like to be a marketer. New sales hires did not spend their first few weeks in sales
training, memorizing scripts and discussing objections. Instead, our new sales
hires spent their first few weeks at HubSpot developing their own website,
writing their own blog, and creating their own social media presence. By the
completion of training, our new sales hires would often rank at the top of Google
search results for dozens of keywords. They built social media followings of
hundreds of people for their websites. They published blog articles, set up
landing pages, ran A/B tests, segmented leads, created email nurturing
campaigns, and analyzed the conversion of website visitors to leads to
customers, all using the HubSpot software.

Sales hires felt the pain of a marketer because they lived through it.

By the time new hires made their first prospecting calls, they knew more about
inbound marketing, blogging, and social media than 90 percent of the marketers
on whom they were calling. They could genuinely understand these marketers.
They could genuinely advise them. They could genuinely help them.

The websites and blogs the new hires created did not need to be relevant to
HubSpot's business. In fact, I preferred when they were not. I wanted the blogs
to cover topics about which my salespeople were passionate. They wrote about
chinchillas, the New England Patriots, and secret eateries in Boston. Because the
websites represented authentic interests, many salespeople continued to update
their websites even after training was over. As our product and industry evolved,
salespeople often experimented with the newest features on their own websites