The Sales Acceleration Formula book club questions

1. 1.

   Roberge treats sales hiring as an empirical problem. What attributes does your hiring process actually measure, and how do you know they predict performance?

2. 2.

   What is the current time-to-productivity for a new sales hire in your organization, and how systematically is it being tracked and improved?

3. 3.

   Which leading indicators in your sales funnel are you currently managing, and which ones do you only look at after the quarter closes?

4. 4.

   Roberge derived HubSpot's hiring formula from his best performers. If you did that analysis for your team, which current reps would define the baseline, and what attributes would emerge?

5. 5.

   How does your current compensation structure shape rep behavior, and where does it create incentives you didn't intend?

6. 6.

   What's in your sales playbook, and how confident are you that it reflects what your top performers actually do rather than what you believe they do?

7. 7.

   Roberge's approach requires significant measurement infrastructure. What's the minimum viable version of his data-driven approach that would work in your context?

8. 8.

   The book assumes inbound-heavy SaaS sales. Where does the formula need to be adapted for your specific market and motion?

9. 9.

   Lead scoring assumes marketing generates leads worth scoring. What does your lead quality look like, and how well does marketing and sales currently agree on what 'good' looks like?

10. 10.

    Roberge talks about coaching to early-stage funnel activity. What would change in how you run sales one-on-ones if you focused on leading rather than lagging indicators?

11. 11.

    The book frames sales as an engineering problem. What does that framing capture well, and what important aspects of sales does it miss or underemphasize?

12. 12.

    If you applied Roberge's approach to one specific part of your sales process — just hiring, or just onboarding, or just lead scoring — which would produce the biggest improvement, and why?

How to run the discussion

• Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
• Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
• Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
• Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.