Mark Roberge
Co-Founder & Managing Director, Stage 2 Capital. On 2 shows, 5 appearances, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveoperatoracademicauthor@markroberge ↗LinkedIn ↗stage2.capital ↗
Roberge was the founding Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, scaling revenue from zero to over $100 million ARR and an IPO. He co-founded Stage 2 Capital and authored the bestselling book The Sales Acceleration Formula.
2shows
5appearances
92statements
8resolved
6supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
22said about them ↓ Everything Mark Roberge said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Roberge: Underperforming sales reps can take seven months to become top performers
“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.”
Roberge: Cut struggling sales hires only if coaching improvements decay quickly
“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.”
Roberge: Granting inflated titles early does not complicate future executive layering
“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…”
Roberge: Delegating Sales Comp Design to New Sales Leaders Is Broken
“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…”
Roberge: SMB startups need 15%+ revenue expansion for 100%+ NRR
“Now, when you are, if you do want to make your business work in SMB, You just need a really healthy up expansion motion because I just macroeconomics because of like small business bankruptcy and budget sensitivities at, if you're doing really well, you probab…”
Roberge: Brand-name logo case studies drive sales far less than founders expect
“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…”
Roberge: Inbound leads rarely drive million-dollar enterprise deals
“Inbound is probably not going to drive enterprise. Like it's really rare to get an inbound lead and be like, and then three months later, oh, we have a million dollar account.”
Roberge: AI is the first blank canvas for B2B software in 20 years
“For the first time in 20 years, it's a blank canvas. It's complete artistic freedom. Especially in our area of B to B software. We can re-imagine everything.”
Roberge: Embedding AI into existing workflows is not true disruption
“Certainly iterative technologies, just embedding an AI in the workflows we do today. That's not the answer. That's not the disruption.”
Roberge: Petitions to pause AI will let bad actors pull ahead
“This technology is coming no matter what. I appreciate petitions to sign to try to stop it, but I, I'm not sure that that's the solution. It just seems like bad actors will be able to get a head, a leg on us, and I'd rather this technology be run by the people…”
Roberge: AI startups should target areas where incumbents lack proprietary data
“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.”
Products With High Retention Will Eventually Solve Acquisition and Monetization
“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.”
Consumer Giants Spend Over 50% of Engineering on Experimentation Tools
“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.”
Best-in-Class PLG Startups House Growth Teams Inside Product, Not Marketing
“A lot of these startups I see in PLG, almost all of them actually, put their growth teams in marketing, and I think that's an opportunity because all of the best-in-class ones put their growth team in product.”
Housing Growth Teams in Marketing Prevents Startups From Hiring Engineers
“And what happens if you put your growth team in marketing is you won't have any engineers. I've never had met an engineer whose career goal was to work in marketing. Like, no offense, right? It's just, like, not what they want to do. And so, if you have your g…”
PLG Product Funnel Growth Must Outpace Sales Headcount Growth
“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.”
Paying Sales Only on Initial Revenue Ruins PLG Motions
“We are still paying our salespeople more for the first revenue from a company and less or nothing at all for expansion revenue. Beautiful comp plan design for the 19 seventies. Terrible comp plan design for PLG.”
PLG Pricing Paywalls Should Target Enterprise Security Rather Than Virality
“I personally like putting it here if we can. Because the end user is not going to care if the executives have to pay to make this secure, or to get the dashboard that they, so they can know more about their business, or to integrate it with their tech stack. I…”
HubSpot paid reps 20% more for expansion seats than new ones
“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.”
Roberge: Top sales reps usually make poor sales managers
“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.”
Roberge: Quota-carrying hybrid sales team lead roles do not work
“I hate the team lead, hybrid, carry, you know, carry your own personal quota and run a team. That doesn't work.”
Roberge: Quarterly P&Ls lag current scaling reality by nine months
“Because most companies out there deciding if we're scaling too fast or too slow are looking at the quarterly P&L at the board meeting, and the quarterly P&L is what happened nine months ago.”
Roberge: Making sales managers carry quota causes rep coaching to fail
“Can we have them still carry a quota and coach the people? Disaster, right? Because then they're constantly torn between developing the people or hitting their number, and they can't do it, and one of them suffers, and guess what it is? It's developing the peo…”
Roberge: Blending inbound and outbound duties on SDRs fails
“Salespeople will always find the path of least resistance to get to their number, and when you give someone a taste of inbound leads, and then you force them to cold call too, they're, it's, they're really gonna struggle to pick up the phone.”
The other half of the tape: Mark Roberge's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 22 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jason Lemkin 7Jeetu Mahtani 5Brian Halligan 4Tom Clayton 3Tomasz Tunguz 2Harry Stebbings 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 15
20VC 7
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- Jeetu Mahtani, Sales Leader @Hubspot: How and When to Go International and Crush It | E1207 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The State of SaaS Go-to-Market l Theory Ventures General Partner Tomasz Tunguz #saas #b2bsaas
- Jason Lemkin: Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | E1157 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2022 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mark's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Director, Stage 2 Capital | 4 +2 | 62 | 80% 4/5 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Director, Stage 2 Capital | 1 | 30 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |