Episode description

Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark was the founding CRO at HubSpot, where he scaled ARR from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark was ranked #19 in Forbes' Top 30 Social Sellers in the World. He was also awarded the 2010 Salesperson of the Year at the MIT Sales Conference.

1. Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot to $100M in ARR:

• What are Mark's biggest lessons in what worked in their sales strategy in scaling to $100M in ARR?
• What elements of Hubspot's sales strategy did not work? What would he have done differently with the benefit of hindsight?
• What does Mark know now that he wishes he had known when he started at Hubspot?

2. How the Best Startups Scale into Enterprise:

• What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise?
• When is the right time? What do founders get most wrong on timing of scale into enterprise?
• What do you need to have in place both from a team and product perspective to make the transition?

3. Second Product and Second Channel:

• When is the right time to launch the second product?
• Why does Mark believe that you should be turning down customers in the early days? Why is not every customer right for your company?
• How does Mark think about channel diversification? Does Mark agree you only need one channel to scale to $50M in ARR and two to scale to $100M in ARR?

4. 99% of SaaS Founders Do Partnerships Wrong:

• What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when doing channel partnerships?
• What can and should they do to set channel partnerships up for success?
• What do the channel partners need to have to be equipped to sell the partner solution?
• What level of buy-in and from who on the channel partner side is needed for the partnership to be successful?
• What did Mark learn from Hubspot's partnership with Salesforce scaling to 10% of Hubspot's revenue?