SaaStr 119: The Sales Mistakes That Can Kill Your Startup & How To Avoid Them with Mark Roberge, Former CRO @ Hubspot & Michele Law, Former COO @ OpenDNS

Mark Roberge is a Senior Lecturer @ Harvard Business School where he teaches entrepreneurial sales and marketing. Prior to his role with HBS, Mark was the Chief Revenue Officer @ Hubspot where he increased revenue over 6,000% and expanded the team from 1 to 450 employees. As a result, Mark has been named Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World and awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year by MIT.

Michele Law is an investor and advisor specialising in building and executing on go to market strategies, creating new revenue models and the operations to support them. Michelle has sat on both sides of the table having been a Principal at Greylock for 8 years before moving to be COO at OpenDNS where she led the sales and customer success team growing enterprise revenue from $0 to $20M ARR in 4 years, prior to the company’s acquisition by Cisco for $635m. Michele then moved to Castlight Health where she grew revenue from $13 to $75m.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• Why it is fundamentally dangerous to prematurely focus on growth? How can founders know when is the right time to focus on growth? What does the path to growth phase look like?
• How should founders assess and structure the core components: customer success, unit economics and growth? In which order should they be prioritised? What does the funnel look like?
• What should the profile of your first sales hire be? How can founders understand who and when to hire? From Hubspot days, when has Mark seen the transition from generalist to specialist?
• What should your sales compensation plan look like in the early days of the company? Why does Mark believe that churn is rooted in the sales compensation plan?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr