The Sales Framework Every Founder Needs | Mark Roberge

**Mark Roberge** (0:00)
You go out and ask like 20 entrepreneurs, what is product market fit? You get 20 different answers. You read the Wikipedia pages, five pages long, and half the answers are it's a feeling. That makes me uncomfortable. Hey, CFO, how's our cash flow?
Feels good. When you ask them to quantify it, most of the answers are ex-customers, ex-revenue, tons of inbound demand. My opinion, wrong, wrong, wrong. First principle is product market fit. If you base it on revenues or customers, it just means you can sell it. Most people think the retention causes product deficiencies or customer onboarding deficiencies. That's the minority. It's mostly a sales issue. The structure to keep sellers disciplined in going after ICP customers and setting good expectation.

**Joubin** (0:56)
Welcome to Grit, I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we have Mark Roberge, dear friend and someone who just wrote a new book. He's a professor at Harvard teaching sales.
He's the man. And we had a fun conversation about Roadrunner, Return the Tables on Me. Enjoy. I remember thinking the first time I met you when you...

**Mark Roberge** (1:27)
I took the students out, I think.

**Joubin** (1:29)
You showed me the Harvard classroom that you were lecturing in. And I was like...

**Mark Roberge** (1:37)
And we didn't shoot that day?

**Joubin** (1:39)
No, no, we did.
We recorded and then... And I remember thinking, oh man, this guy's making sales cool to people that don't think sales, that think sales is like for...

**Mark Roberge** (1:52)
Yeah, dude, the class is so popular now.

**Joubin** (1:55)
Are you still teaching it?

**Mark Roberge** (1:56)
Yeah. So, I've got my role there down to... It's basically a two-thirds post as opposed to full-time, but I, all the other professors are so jealous of how I've structured this thing. Because when you teach a class, it's 28 classes a semester. That's what a credit is, and you're supposed to do that three times.
I have this sales course down, where I only teach once a week, and I have these role plays they do that are recorded on Gong, and I convinced the dean to hire 70 sales coaches, so each student gets a sales coach, and they do all the grading. So, I literally teach this class five times, 450 students a year go through the sales course, founder selling. It's like, it might be the most popular class on campus, from like a bidding and like whatever standpoint, so.

**Joubin** (2:50)
Congratulations.

**Mark Roberge** (2:50)
Thanks, man.

**Joubin** (2:51)
And is that, is it mostly like engineers and technical folks that want to be a founder?

**Mark Roberge** (2:57)
All ex-Google, ex-Databricks, starting a company, realizing they have to bring in their first 10 customers, no clue how to sell.

**Joubin** (3:04)
But they're an undergrad.

**Mark Roberge** (3:05)
No, these are MBAs.

**Joubin** (3:06)
All MBAs.

**Mark Roberge** (3:07)
So like, yeah, and there's mixed bags. Some went to McKinsey, Goldman, whatever. There's mostly, it's mostly product founders or people who are trying to go into founding.

**Joubin** (3:17)
Are you self-selecting for a certain type of founder who is going to business school?

**Mark Roberge** (3:23)
In terms of who I, I don't get to pick who's in the class.

**Joubin** (3:26)
No, but they're in business school.

**Mark Roberge** (3:28)
Oh. Oh, in terms of the content I produce.

**Joubin** (3:31)
No, no, in terms of like, you know, I'm just trying to think of how many founders, great founders, do I know? Like.

**Mark Roberge** (3:41)
Came out HBS MBA? Yes, yes.

**Joubin** (3:44)
HBS. Or any MBA?

**Mark Roberge** (3:47)
Brian Halligan, Dharma Shah.

**Joubin** (3:48)
Okay, okay, like, there's not that many.

**Mark Roberge** (3:52)
Yeah, probably. We should do, yeah, we should do, it definitely is more tech-oriented, which it should be.

**Joubin** (3:59)
Yeah.

**Mark Roberge** (4:00)
And but if you err toward, like, you start drawing the line at, like, Series B plus, which you're still doing entrepreneurship. Yeah. It gets a little heavier.

**Joubin** (4:10)
Yeah.

**Mark Roberge** (4:11)
But yeah, it's fair. Yeah, no, it's not. I always try to convince my MBA students not to start. Like, they're like, hey, professor, like, what should I do? I'm thinking about starting a company. I'm like, okay, tell me about your background. Do you code or have you ever made apparel before? Like, are you a builder?
No, don't start anything. Early join, because like the zero to one is building.

**Joubin** (4:35)
Yeah.

**Mark Roberge** (4:35)
You got to write, it's just like, go, what do you want to do, a tech company? Cool, go over to MIT, hang out in the like, whatever AI media club and just find frigging three genius 22 year olds and say, you'll do everything except all the other stuff about the business, about code. And they're going to look at you and say, oh, great, this person is going to run payroll.