The Power of Go-to-Market Experience + Capital - with Mark Roberge, Stage 2 Capital

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I feel so fortunate we are joined by Mark Roberge, the founding partner at Stage 2 Capital, author of The Sales Acceleration Formula, and early stage Senior Vice President of Sales and Services at HubSpot. So today we'll be covering three main areas with Mark. First, his book The Sales Acceleration Formula, and how the key concepts are still critical to the go-to-market success in 2023 Second, the catalyst behind founding Stage 2 Capital, and third, the exponential impact of go-to-market operators as investors. So Mark, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Mark Roberge** (1:22)
Yeah, you bet, Ray. Thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. I engineer undergrad, Accenture a couple of years, wrote code. This is right before the.com craziness. Was staffed on a startup and was like, oh my gosh, I'm never looking back. This is amazing. Maybe a lot of guests don't realize that pre-97, 98 startups weren't really a thing. I didn't have any peers in college that were like, I'm going to do a startup. The whole crazy, the late 90s, which you experience even more intensely than I did, changed all that. So I got staffed on a startup and loved it, and went to a startup in New York, and then found myself, that one failed, and found myself at business school at MIT, and that's where I met the co-founders of HubSpot, and that's how I got into sales, and as the first salesperson there and the fourth employee, and then rode that one for nine years through the IPO as CRO, and then was invited to build out the sales curriculum at Harvard Business School, which I still execute today, and then in the last four years, been doing the Stage 2 Capital, Venture Capital scene in order to try to make a big impact on the go-to-market side with entrepreneurs, which is my passion.

**Ray Rike** (2:32)
What a journey, right? From engineer to startup entrepreneur, to MIT, and now teaching sales at Harvard. I must admit, I did the early stage startup thing also early in my career, and I went to Netscape, as you and I were talking about, which was very fortunate, but I couldn't get into MIT, so I just married an MIT grad.

**Mark Roberge** (2:55)
Do you know what course she was?

**Ray Rike** (2:57)
Yeah, she was course two.

**Mark Roberge** (3:00)
I don't know that one. Must be one of the bioengineering or something like that. Like what is it?

**Ray Rike** (3:05)
Mechanical engineering.

**Mark Roberge** (3:06)
Mechanical. That's what I was undergroud. I didn't know it was course two.

**Ray Rike** (3:10)
Awesome. Then she got her master's in the corporate real estate development program in MIT.

**Mark Roberge** (3:15)
Very cool. Very cool.

**Ray Rike** (3:16)
Anyhow, that just tells our listening audience how much smarter than my wife is than I am. Let's focus on your journey. I mentioned that and you also mentioned that you were the first SVP of Sales and Services, really the first CRO at HubSpot from 7 to 13 But I wanted to start here with the Sales Acceleration Formula, the book you wrote in 2015 It's been seven years. My first question Mark is, as I reread the book this weekend, what do you think about the concepts? Are they still relevant in today's customer acquisition process?

**Mark Roberge** (3:51)
Very much so. Every year it sells about the same amount, which I'm shocked at. I think the first year was maybe 2X, but every year since then, because I donate all the funds to an awesome non-profit called build.org, B-U-I-L-D, if you want to check it out, B-U-I-L-D. It's the same check every year. I guess I have statistical evidence, Ray, that it's still relevant. I still get a lot of e-mails and LinkedIn messages from people on how they've applied things and how it's impacted their businesses. I would say I'm quite surprised about it. The writing of the book was very accidental. I never aspired to be an author or anything like that. I'm humbled to be one, but in the final couple of years at HubSpot, I was having breakfast with an amazing author named Jill Konrath, who you probably know, Ray, she's written so many bestsellers in our field of sales. We were just talking and she was listening to my story and wrote the Art and Science of Sales by Jill Konrath and Mark Roberge. She handed it to me. She's like, I want to write this book together. I was like, well, Jill, I never thought I'd write a book and I'm not a very good writer, but how can you pass down an offer like that from a best-selling author? I wrote a chapter and she wrote a chapter and she read it and she's like, you got to write your own book.