Having a sad face after being rejected for what I thought would be a perfect role for me at HubSpot

HubSpot is launching a new role - Manager, RAMP acceleration. It’s a 50/50 mix management & enablement. The goal is to build a program and coach reps to improve their time to ramp. Main KPI: reps attainment first 12 months in the role and PPR (productivity per rep). I was genuinely excited to be the one who would build a foundation for new hires what “success” looks like at HubSpot. However, I failed miserably during my final interview bc I didn’t prep to present the specifics and HOW I am going to program the whole thing. I knew “the what”, the “why” but missed the “how”. I thought I needed to learn more how the onboarding currently works, identify where the gaps are etc before creating a curriculum …eh, sadly it's “me” with all my overthinking.

Program management was the weakest skill I was scored for and It was hard to look past this as it was the core of the job. Obviously another candidate has put together an initial plan and deserves the role (just being nice here… obviously I hate it haha)

General advice for interviews:
- don’t hide the “best” for later. Try to show at least some version of what “best” looks like during the interview.

- think how to structure your answers: Problem - Solution - Result (I am bad at this but it’s important skill to master if you want to do well at interviews)

- prepare 2 good questions to ask during every interview meeting. Write down their answers and mention those at the final interview (“When I met Becky last week, she mentioned X…”). This will show you’re genuinely interested and you try to have a good understanding about the role / business or their expectations

- ask for feedback, during and after interview. Request your scorecards after you hear the decision, all organisations have those and you are entitled to see them if you want (you can see a short version of mine below)

-speak slowly!! even if you are not saying anything useful but your pace, demeanour is calming, you will give a good impression. When you are asked a question, slow down… take a minute to think ….and then reply

- whatever you do at your job, any initiatives you run, RECORD THE RESULT. Questions you need to answer about any projects you’ve ever done “why did you decide to do that project specifically?”, “what was the impact?” . I’ve done lots of trainings, workshops and coaching sessions at HubSpot for different sales teams but I never really tracked a specific result so this question was hard for me to answer. “Everyone loved my training and they told me it helped them a lot!” is not a good answer?

I am fine with rejection. Lots of learnings. To be honest, I am not sure I want to be "just" a manager at HubSpot. This role specifically was something bigger, a promising opportunity to bring real impact on the whole EMEA sales org so I got interested. For now, I’ll just keep selling.

sending my scorecards below so you know how they look like. I don’t know how to attach those screenshots to the post itself, please forgive me.

friends,

I am looking for someone who can help me out a bit. I am working on a few side projects and I am having a hard time to catch up with things.

All I ask you for:
- have a bit of experience as SDR/BDR/ AE
- you have an analytical mind

I’ll pay 600£ / month (2/3 months)
You’ll spend up to 10 hours a week.

You can totally have a main job, we can connect after hours / weekends.

Connect with me here to chat about it @katyakladkova

Had a session with Chris Orlob today. Chris was employee number 13 or something at Gong and helped to grow Gong from from $200k to $200M+ (that’s what his linkedin says)

I actually believe Chris is strong in sales bc he is the first one in years who has managed to sell his training to HubSpot. We had Sandler before, but Sandler is huge, Chris is a one-man company.

Any way, we’ve covered discovery framework today, great for the basics and so I wanted to share a few things.

Now…Chris talks, not me:

The way you run a discovery call depends whether you’re on a meeting with an inbound prospect or outbound.

INBOUND: they already know they want to purchase something, either your solution or a competition. The mistake sales reps do is they start with “tell me about your company & challenges you are trying to solve”. The customer doesn’t want to talk challenges, they want to hear why * you *. The easiest way to get to the pain is to start with the following questions:

- Tell me about what motivated you to look into [HubSpot]
- What are you aiming to accomplish with something like this?
- Interesting. Can I go back in time with you for a sec? What was the original challenge going on in the business that caused you to prioritise looking into a solution like this? [and here you talk pains & quantify the impact and bla bla bla]

OUTBOUND: they don’t know yet why they should consider to purchase your solution. Before asking questions, you need to earn the right to do so otherwise the customer will be annoyed with you. A great discovery prompter will help here. Chris says - start with the story, ideally a story that will resonate with a person who is on the call with you. Example:

- One of the customers we worked with was dealing with [insert pain statement]
- Before working with us, they were struggling with [expand on the pain]
- In fact, it was such a struggle that [describe negative ramifications]
- The short story is we helped them bla bla

AND perfect transition “But enough about us. Tell me about the key challenges you’re experiencing [in X-area] that would be problematic if you didn’t solve them 6-12 months out?”. I love this transition because you open up a customer to talk about immediate priorities but not something they won’t care about any time soon.

I just realised that when I first joined HubSpot in 2018, we used to ALWAYS start our calls with a good story. I spent at least 30 min to find a good relevant case to present. Somehow we stopped doing it now, well, I stopped. Chris reminded the importance of it.

We will have a few more sessions, will share after.

?❤️

End of the month closing or how I usually get contracts signed last day of the month, sometimes last day of the month at midnight.

Simple change in how you ask that one question.

Instead of "can you sign it by [date]?", I usually say this "I was hoping we could get this over the line this month so I made a commitment to my manager, but I am afraid it won't be possible at all considering such a short turnaround?" There is a high chance you'll hear: "hm, it actually might be possible...".

We don't like doing what others want us to do...but we do like helping each other.

Negotiations with enterprise businesses. Here is one of the recent cases if you are curious and might see some insights for yourself

The case:
Large enterprise org but our contract size is small. Their legal team flagged a ton of points on our Terms of Service and we were detailed and transparent in our answers. However, they requested a call with legal to further negotiate on the contract. I might have run to our legal and beg them for a call, but I decided to push back and see how it goes first. Our communication:

Procurement: can we engage with your legal, say, in a f-f meeting?

Me: Unfortunately I can’t bring our legal council for a call where the contract is less then X / year. I am happy to do a call with your legal team and address their feedback/concerns. 

Procurement: We see long term upside and potential with working together even though the immediate opportunity I guess you consider small. Can we have a call with legal?

Me: Great to hear you see long term upside, but we are not in a position to lean on potential, as we have been burned a couple of times in the past.

Procurement: Not quite sure I understand "we are not in a position to lean on potential".  Since no-one can predict the future, isnt ALL business predicated on potential?  I would suggest that most (successful) companies evaluate the risks, the upsides and the downsides of entering into a relationship with a customer and make decisions based on some proprietary magic formula based on this evaluation.  Certainly we do this evaluation when deciding whether or not to do business with a Supplier. [smile face]

Me: As a procurement office I imagine you wouldn't negotiate based on the potential of a Supplier’s product, nor would we on contract value.

Procurement [one week of silence].
Then: “we’ve proceeded with internal escalations. Our legal does in fact feel that they understand the contract well enough to perform a risk assessment”

So the way this process usually works is this: the job of procurement office is mitigate contract risks. This is why the most preferred option for them is pushing vendors to work on their terms (given the choice of whether the customer absorbs the overheads or whether their suppliers absorb the overheads, naturally they prefer the latter). If vendor refuses to work on their terms, they come back with red lines trying to negotiate on contract and remove risks. If the risks cannot be mitigated by modifying the contract together with the vendor, those risks are usually escalated to Sr Management or Exec in their orgs to be accepted.

In my case above we refused to work on their terms, then we refused to modify our contract, so the procurement office reluctantly had to start working on the doc for further escalations.

To sum up, if procurement office is tough on your contracts, it does not necessarily mean the contract won’t be signed, but it does mean they have to do a bit of more work on their end.

Deal review:

Managers usually ask about compelling events, customer pains etc. IMHO one of the most powerful questions to ask a sales rep is:

What is a risk for a customer of NOT going ahead with our solution?

If a sales rep is not aligned with a customer on negative consequnces / business risks of NOT buying, sales rep has no leverage. It will cause either delays with sign off or closed-lost eventually.

If you help a customer realise and NAME a risk and then you prove that what you are selling is the best-fit solution to avoid that risk, you will get a sale. Pitching on loses (negative consequences), not gains is very powerful.

P.S. The framework above has been developed and explained by Frances Frei, Professor at Harvard Business School. She is the one who went to Uber and WeWork to fix their toxic culture - I truly admire people who are ready to take a “crazy” challenge and do what is incredibly hard so I follow her ever since.

Her book: “Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You”

Or google her Ted Talk: “Frances Frei, How to build (and rebuild) trust”.