Mark Roberge

“At that point now we've acquired between Brian and I, we've probably acquired like 40 customers. We're probably at like a couple 100,000 in ARR”

“I have strong conviction that deal size has a higher weight. In correlation to success. Let's just say we sell million dollar deals to banks. And I have two candidates. One candidate sells 10,000 dollar deals to banks. And one candidate sells million dollar de…”

“I have a lot of situations where I had a rep that was in there for three or four months, and we weren't sure, and they weren't hitting it, but we gave it a shot, and seven months in, they were toward the top, and they stayed there.”

“If they're going up for a week and go down, yeah, we probably need to make a cut. But if they're staying there, this is taking a little while, let's hang in there. I think we're going to get there.”

“It's probably a red flag if they're over obsessed with it. A little bit of ego stroking, and that's not going to be great for culture, especially early on when it has to be like, let's roll up our sleeves and do whatever it takes.”

“I don't think it does. You know, I, to your point, I think it's a red flag for the candidate, but if I have a star and I have to give them a VP of sales title instead of director, Or a CRO title instead of VP to get them to do the job I see for them for the ne…”

“What most people do, which is, I think a big mistake is they hire a sales person or leader and sort of delegate it to them because they sort of like are the functional expertise. Expert on it. And then that person uses the sales comp model from their last comp…”

“I don't like commission plan salespeople in the journey to product market fit. Like I just want pure equity people.”

“I'm gonna give you half of the commission when the customer pays, and half the commission when they hit their leading indicator of retention, which usually happens in the first 30 days.”

“At the IPO less than 12 months is excellent. 12 to 15 is good. 15 to 20 gets concerning above 20, it's gonna be a real problem.”

“At the Series A, less than 12 is a, it's almost like you're probably being too efficient. Like, we could probably, like, try to grow faster. 12 to 15 is really good. 15 to 20 is fine. It's kind of like, that's fine for now. We'll have to work on it later. Abov…”

“I will say that it is extremely rare that you want to go into enterprise south of a couple million in revenue.”

“Not as much as people think. You know, like, they're always gonna say, just case studies in general. You throw a case study, well, that's a bank and I'm in healthcare. Okay. Well, here's one from healthcare. Well, that's in oncology and I'm a dermatologist. Ok…”

“Cause we just don't know, but like there's some folks I like to do like a green, yellow, red. I have different attributes. Like, you know, how many employees were they located in the world? What sectors are they in these types of things? Right. And the green i…”

“It was, I think a hundred percent of our customers came inbound for the first two or three years.”

“If you want to stack the deck in your favor, choose use cases as an entrepreneur where the big company incumbents don't have the data. That'll stack the deck in your favor.”

“Don't wait till January to build your bottoms up plan. Cause you'll realize that you should have hired four reps in Q four to hit your 20, 24 plan. Please start your annual planning process on October first so you can hit your 20, 24 number.”

“I personally believe the number one failure reason for startups is they choose the wrong time to scale and they choose to scale at the wrong pace.”

“I might argue that if you can get people to stick and continue to use your product, you will figure out the scalable user acquisition model, and you will figure out the monetization model.”

“Some of them say that over half of their engineering resources are not spent developing features that a consumer will ever experience. They're spent making experimentation easy.”

“They don't put, like, marketing in charge of free user acquisition and product in charge of monetization and retention. They put them all working on the North Star metric today because if you don't, you're gonna end up with local maximums.”

“The growth rate of your growth funnel, whether you measure that as users or M or MAUs or PQLs, product qualified leads, that has to grow faster than your sales headcount.”

“When I rolled this out at HubSpot, when we were doing the CRM, I told the reps, I said, hey folks, ah, I'm gonna pay you 20% more for expansion seats than for new seats.”

“The sales cycles go up, the close rates go down, and the one that we don't pick up on is our disruption risk goes way up.”

“It works for a couple quarters because you're the only player in the category, but you are a ripe target for a bunch of hotshot engineers here in Silicon Valley to rebuild your product and charge half the price. So be careful about raising your prices unless y…”

“The better they are on the team, the higher rank they are as a sales rep, the worse manager they are. We've known this forever. Your top rep does not make your top manager. It does not always make a good manager. In fact, the stats show it mostly fails.”

“I hate the team lead, hybrid, carry, you know, carry your own personal quota and run a team. That doesn't work.”

“He led the first ever accelerator from stage two capital this summer. 700 companies were applying. We didn't apply. They just actually asked us to be a part of it, which is great.”

“So we've, we raised a three million seed round with stage two capital, which is co-founded, co-founded by Mark Roberge. And JPO who used to work at Bessemer.”

“I like 10 to 20 I feel good about. 10%, lower than 10% I'm probably being too soft. I'm just not that good at hiring. Just not that good at hiring. And I can push my folks more. 20 to 25, I'm like, my business still works. North of 25, I'm like, my culture's g…”

“Because if they continued to perform, but the business was falling apart, that's gonna rule out you know mark shifts in the market, probably shifts in the product, shifts in the competitive landscape, and it's gonna tell me, and probably even lead quality, and…”

“We were just as data oriented with how we measured the product team. And so, in the same way that we had the analysis of how our sales reps were performing and their leads and their opportunity creation and their closes, We had the 17 features in the HubSpot p…”

“On a monthly basis, we had a full day meeting where each one of those leadership teams came in for an hour and presented to the mini board. And the mini board was our CEO, our CFO, our head of sales, our CMO, you know, and we were the ones asking them, hey, wh…”

“The great coaches and sales managers can see the 20 things, but isolate it down to the one or two that will make the biggest difference in that sales person's development and actually start to make some traction, right?”

“I called her two weeks ago, and I said, let's make a list of the 10 mistakes that we've made separately, and compare notes, and both of us had the same number one.”

“When you're two engineering-based founders bringing in that first salesperson, geez, that guy showed up at Oracle or Salesforce or wherever it was. He went through a month of training how to handle the top 20 objections. That process is not built. And if you d…”

“And as we grew to this stage, I found that the definition of an ideal customer was changing Depending on the group that you are in. Like the marketing team, like, oh yeah, the people we love to sell to, they're the people that are easy to get to fill out a lan…”

“So what we essentially did was reorganize the company by our buyer persona. So we destroyed the marketing team, sales team, services team seating, and sat people by small businesses, mid-market, and enterprise.”