In this roundup of the most shared stories from the ClearFit Blog, 2014, you’ll discover the surprising strategies some of the world’s best entrepreneurs have used to scale their sales teams, how some of our customers faced down some tough business challenges, and more…
Read on below for these and other enlightening business stories…divided by category, and in no particular order.
Scaling a Sales Team — Lessons From Top Entrepreneurs
We asked several top entrepreneurs how they managed to scale their world-class sales teams. Here are four unique stories of success, with lots of lessons for anyone who wants to build a successful business.
Mark Roberge: How an Engineer Scaled HubSpot’s World-Class Sales Team
Before joining HubSpot, Mark Roberge had no experience running a sales team, but he had something in his background that he would use to scale a world-class sales team and help make HubSpot one of the fastest growing companies in the US.
Mike McDerment: Great Service as an Unstoppable, Scalable Sales Strategy
FreshBooks founder Mike McDerment shares how he turned outstanding customer service into a powerful sales tool to become the world’s #1 cloud-based accounting solution designed exclusively for small service-based business owners.
Paul Jackson: Why Agility Is the Key to Method’s Sales Success
When Method Founder and CEO, Paul Jackson, set out to build a sales team, he made a costly assumption. Turning his software solution into a top-rated app would require Paul to turn that assumption on its head.
Mark Organ: Building a Better Sales Team
Mark Organ co-founded Eloqua and eventually sold it to Oracle for $871 million. That experience taught him a lot about building a sales team. Discover how he’s applying what he learned to his new venture, Influitive, to do it even better this time.
Customer Stories — Hiring for Growth
The junk pile of resumes, hiring people who don’t even show up, missing out on top candidates… these are just a few of the challenges most businesses face when it comes to hiring. Here are a couple of stories from our customers about how they solved some of these thorny challenges to break through to new growth.
Steven Wieske, Operations Manager for a Wisconsin Manufacturing Company, used to be drowned in resumes, and his office was a revolving door of applicants. Discover how Steven closed that revolving door and maintained a 95% success rate.
The Star Employee Jeff Greenberg Never Would Have Hired
“I never would have hired one of my star employees,” Jeff said. “That actually has me a little rattled. It’s also taught me something I’m going to use to help me build a great business.” Read on to discover what Jeff learned.
Hard-Fought Business Lessons
Not everybody is willing to share the mistakes they’ve made and learned from, which is why we recently launched the first in a new type of story-based post where we explore some hard lessons, while protecting the innocent.
The Halo Effect: The Trap That Makes You Hire the Wrong Person
The halo effect is a common psychological trap that causes you to hire the wrong person. We are all susceptible to it. Learn three keys ways to avoid this trap.
Breaking News
Okay, it’s not a story post, but one of the other things we do on the blog is announce new ways you can use ClearFit to help you find and hire employees that succeed. This year, many of our customers enjoyed learning how to read a ClearFit Profile like a pro so they could discover insights about their applicants that they can’t get from reading a resume. We ran a couple of popular webinars on the topic and published this post.