Sales Acceleration Formula: Summary, Takeaways, and Tactics

Chances are, your team doesn’t need more leads, but it needs a better path on how to move forward with the ones you already have.

The Sales Acceleration Formula focuses on moving leads through the sales cycle faster and more predictably, and it's built on 3 essentials: data, technology, and an inbound selling approach.

Created by Mark Roberge, former Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, the formula focuses less on innovation and outgunning competitors and more on developing a predictable, scalable path to generate massive revenue growth.

In this article, we'll share a clear summary of the sales acceleration formula, along with takeaways and tactics you can use to move leads through your sales cycle faster.

Sales Acceleration Formula Summary

The Sales Acceleration Formula focuses on creating a more efficient sales process by utilizing the right combination of sales tools and fostering winning behaviors in sales representatives. It replaces intuition with a process that relies on data and consistent execution.

There are 5 key elements that go into the sales acceleration formula:

1. The Sales Hiring Formula: hire the same successful salesperson every time.
2. The Sales Training Formula: train every salesperson in the same manner.
3. The Sales Management Formula: hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process.
4. The Demand Generation Formula: provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month.
5. Technology : leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople.

How the Sales Acceleration Formula Works

Let’s take a closer look at the main takeaways and tactics you can implement into your own sales process.

1. The Sales Hiring Formula

First, you need to define what makes a successful sales rep. This definition can vary significantly from company to company, depending on factors such as industry, size, customer demographics, and so on.

Here’s a chart that Mark Roberge uses: 

To find the best hire for your roles, use a 1 to 5 scale for the necessary traits and stock to the same rubric across candidates. According to Mark Roberge, the 5 traits that consistently predict performance in modern B2B sales are:

1. Coachability 
2. Curiosity
3. Prior success
4. Problem solving ability
5. Work ethic

As for finding these rockstars, Roberge makes a great point that taking conventional hiring routes like going through a recruiting agency or using job boards isn’t usually the best way to go about it.

You could use LinkedIn to find qualified candidates in your industry. With more than 1 billion members, LinkedIn is one of the best sources to find top talent.

2. The Sales Training Formula

The sales training formula highlights how top performers win in different ways, so training shouldn’t follow a single rep’s “superpower”.

​For example, one rep named Adam was an “activity hound” and was all about volume, where his success largely boiled down to his ability to multitask and call a ton of prospects.

​In fact, he had about 40% higher volume than other sales reps on his team.

​And another rep named Jen was an amazing rapport builder, where her ability to build trust and make prospects legitimately like her was the key ingredient to her success.

​One of the main mistakes many companies make with sales training is pairing reps with different strengths, which makes results unpredictable and harder to scale.

​The solution?

​Build a training program that’s designed around your company’s unique buyer journey and sales process. Start by creating detailed buyer personas to guide the skills and tactics your reps need at each stage.

​To ensure progress, take the time to analyze your sales leaders against your current training program. Then, make continuous adjustment so your training program matches the needs of your team, and get consistent feedback to identify areas of improvement.

​In other words, get your reps in on the action and keep it collaborative.

3. The Sales Management Formula

The idea behind the sales acceleration formula is having a system that helps the entire team, not just a few stars. In sales management, the system comes down to 3 main ideas.

First, use quantifiable metrics to track the performance of each rep throughout each stage of the sales funnel. Note their strengths, as well as what their weaknesses are.

For example, a rep does a great job during their product demo and paints a clear picture of how your product will simplify a prospect’s life. So they perform well through the early and middle stages of the sales funnel.

But when the customer brings up the concerns and objections they have, your rep struggles and ends up squandering a large percentage of leads.

This would be the obvious area where you would want to help your rep improve.

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Next, come up with a framework for offering the right incentives to boost the performance of sales reps. ​Say, for example, a rep is solid at making the initial sale, but experiences a higher-than-average churn rate.

​You could offer them half of the commission when they make the sale and the other half a few months later.

Finally, Roberge talks about the importance of promoting from within.

​According to research, internally promoted employees perform better than external hires and are less likely to leave their jobs on their own accord.

4. The Demand Generation Formula

Coming from HubSpot, Mark Roberge prefers inbound over cold calling.

And who can blame him?

It just makes more sense to use “pull” techniques like SEO, blogging, social media, and content marketing rather than traditional “push” techniques where you’re trying to shove annoying advertising down someone’s throat.

The other main part of the demand generation formula is giving your reps the same quality and quantity of leads, as this helps greatly in establishing a systematic, repeatable process.

And that’s something that can easily be done with Chili Piper via round robin routing.

This ensures fair lead distribution, where everyone gets the same level of opportunity because Chili Piper automatically cycles through a group of sales reps every time a new meeting is booked

5. Technology

The last component of the sales acceleration formula is using technology designed to equip your sales team for success.

​The tools you need depend on your industry and how you get, qualify, and convert your leads. To build a strong tool stack, start with lead scoring, lead routing, marketing automation software, email tracking, and predictive analytics.

​For lead management, lead scoring provides you with quantitative data based on specific actions, like viewing a pricing page or watching a demo, that can be used to prioritize leads.

Lead routing is great because you can efficiently get hot leads to the right reps without any drama or friction.

Building a Metrics-Driven Sales Culture

Consistent sales come from a company culture that tracks only what matters.  

If a rep falls behind, don’t just ask for “more effort”. Identify where progress stalls, analyze your data, and help them improve the skill or stage that blocks the deal.

Use data to make decisions instead of relying on your feelings. Track a set of leading indicators, review them constantly, and let the numbers show what you should test, change, or scale. This keeps your approach objective, makes results more predictable, and helps your team improve over time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the sales acceleration formula?

The sales acceleration formula is a data-driven framework designed to make sales predictable and scalable. It focuses on improving hiring, training, management, demand degeneration, and tech so leads move through the pipeline faster.

Who created the sales acceleration formula?

Mark Roberge, former chief revenue officer of HubSpot.

What’s the sales acceleration formula’s core approach?

Using data to design a more systematic sales process that moves leads through the sales cycle more quickly.