Mark Roberge, best known for his 2015 bestseller The Sales Acceleration Formula and former Sales Director at Hubspot, shares his invaluable techniques for speeding up a sales process. Here's a look at the key points from his book.

Speed up recruitment: identify the type of profiles you want to recruit

Recruiting the best people for your team is an essential key to success.

Action to be taken :

• List the skills of your top talents to identify your current strengths and those you lack.
• Evaluate these skills during interviews and track candidates' performance. This will enable you to compare their results 6 months after their arrival and adjust your interview process accordingly.

For example, Mark observed that the ideal choice was someone with the following characteristics: coachability, intelligence (ability to synthesize complex information), proven experience, curiosity and work ethic.

Most talent is passive on the market, so actively seek it out and create your own talent pool. List your team's best LinkedIn contacts, organize a meeting and ask everyone to contact these people.

Actions to stop :

• Referral programs : if you wait for candidates to apply to your job offers, you'll never attract the best talent.

Speeding up training: it's all about consumer needs

According to Mark, "standardized training is neither scalable nor predictable". The strength of a sales team lies in the diversity of its profiles.

Action to be taken :

To enable everyone to identify their own strengths, adopt a systematized process:

• The buyer's journey : "Start by understanding the consumer's journey to ensure that their needs remain central to all stages of the sales process."
• The sales process: "Once the customer journey is understood, the sales process can be defined. The sales process accompanies the customer through the entire buying process..."
• The qualification matrix: "The qualification matrix defines the information needed from a potential buyer to determine whether we can help the prospect and whether he wants help. This information is collected at different stages of the sales process, but rarely in the same order for different transactions."

Actions to stop :

• Standardized training that leaves no room for the new employee to identify his or her own strengths and weaknesses.

Boosting sales: focus on coaching 

Coaching is essential for developing your team's skills and performance.

Action to be taken :

• Identify an area for improvement and work on it until you reach the desired level.

• Foster a coaching culture: organize a monthly meeting dedicated to the skills that each member of your team wants or needs to develop. This way, everyone comes to the meeting with areas for improvement, and you can devote that time to developing a plan.
• Organize competitions to improve short-term performance. Form teams to encourage not only competition but also team spirit.
• Test, learn and iterate: assess his or her potential by allowing him or her to supervise a salesperson while taking care of his or her own operational tasks. Excellent contributors are not necessarily excellent managers.

Actions to stop :

• Overload team members with a long list of skills to develop, when some skills are more important than others. To identify which skills need improvement, pinpoint where failure is occurring in the sales process.

Accelerating demand: going inbound 

According to Mark, canvassing is obsolete and sales depend on creating value for customers rather than "pestering" them with your product.

Action to be taken :

Before transferring prospects to the sales team, determine where they are in their buying process. For example, Mark has identified 3 recurring patterns for Hubspot prospects:

• Large companies require in-depth education upstream of the sales process, as they tend to have longer decision cycles.
• SMEs generally have shorter, less complex purchasing processes. The sales team contacts them during this research phase.
• The sales team waits for a single potential buyer to select a solution before contacting them.

Tip: the larger the company, the more important it is to get in touch with prospects quickly to make them aware of the problem, encourage them to look for solutions and, finally, do your best to convince them to choose your solution.