For any VP of Sales, increasing a company’s run rate from $300K to $3MM over the span of six months is an impressive feat. But when Mark Roberge attempted to do that at HubSpot, he ran into a big problem:
ARR was up. Customer count was up. But churn had skyrocketed.
As Roberge outlines in his book, The Sales Acceleration Formula, his first instinct was to blame the customer success team. After all, they were the ones responsible for ensuring customer retention. If churn had increased, it had to do with their performance as a department. Or so he thought.
However, after close analysis, the sales team at HubSpot discovered something surprising: Customer success wasn’t the issue. Sales was the real problem. In an effort to ramp from $300K to $3MM, the team had gone after prospects that were unlikely to have success with their product. Put simply, it was a short-term win with a hefty long-term cost.
So then Roberge and the team at HubSpot did something unexpected: They made churn a sales rep problem. Once they did, they were able to turn the ship around and finally boost customer retention.
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