The best sales book I've read in years was written by a guy who had never sold anything before taking over HubSpot's Sales business. My bar for a business book is low. Give me one or two ideas I can use to drive revenue, cut costs, or delight a customer. Two is a win. Most of them give me half of one and a long story I will soon forget. I filled a notebook with this one. Mark Roberge was an MIT engineer. Employee number four at HubSpot. No prior sales experience. So he did what engineers do and built a formula for it and tested it rigorously. It worked quite well. Ten thousand customers, 450 people, $100M run rate, seven years. Here are a few. There's a carousel with more. Hire the second try. Role-play a sales call, give one piece of coaching, make them run it again. He later regressed his own hires against performance. Coachability predicted success best. Aggressiveness predicted it the worst. I like how he removed most of the subjectivity from the interview scoring system. Role-play might be the most underused tool in business. When is the last time you sat your leasing team down, ran a live phone lead, and walked a real tour with them? I did it less than a month ago. I already need to do it again. Pay for the behavior you want. HubSpot paid reps up front with a clawback if the customer quit inside four months. Cancellations spiked in month five. Reps are not villains. They just read the comp plan more carefully than management does. He tied pay to customer success and churn fell 70% in six months. That one sent me down a hole on our own structure. Sometimes the fix isn't the clawback. It's the number. Double the commission and leases go up. Shocking, I know. Count dollars, not leads. Marketing was paid on lead volume, so marketing delivered brochure downloads. Free trials closed at many times the rate. So he priced every lead at close rate times deal size and handed marketing a revenue quota. Worth reading if you own a business or run one and want to sell more. So, everybody. :)