A Funny Thing Happened After HubSpot Hired Me
My HubSpot career started on December 9th 2013. I had just gotten married and worked it out so that I accepted the job offer over the phone the last day before my wedding at my old job, and then I faxed in my signed offer letter the morning after my wedding night from the hotel fax machine. I could not wait to get in and start working in the exciting start-up culture that HubSpot boasted. That was a great time to get started at HubSpot — we would go public about a year later so it was still ‘start-up,’ we still had under 1,000 employees and there weren’t too many dogs that we had to have a strict dog policy. The training was excellent and fun, we had our Christmas party not too long after I started and I loved my team and my manager.
Some unexpected things happened though soon after I started. I struggled… badly and recruiters started reaching out to me like crazy. The struggle was unexpected because when I started at HubSpot I came in with a big head and thought I could figure it out by myself. I didn’t ask for help, I thought I was a big shot rep coming from a bigger company with longer sales cycles and that HubSpot would be easy. I had done really well at my previous companies. I had excelled at selling. It wasn't very much fun and it turns out that I was excelling despite not being a great sales rep . It turned out that it was a really different sale and that I had to learn a whole new muscle and it took time to figure out. I quickly got onto a performance plan in my first six month and was put on plan two more times in the first 18ish months of working here.
At the same time I was getting at least two recruiting requests on LinkedIn pretty much right after I started at HubSpot. I couldn’t believe it. All of these people saw that I added HubSpot to my profile and immediately gave me a kind of street cred. They figured that if I could get hired at HubSpot that I mist have some level of ability since it’s hard to stand out enough to get hired at HubSpot. I felt like the coolest kid in school, which I never was, so that was nice. How I felt when I was at work was different.
That I was being recruited so heavily while also being at the bottom of the leader board every month made me feel like a fraud. It also prompted my responding to some of these recruiters and hearing them out. I took several phone interviews and even some in person interviews. While I was on a performance plan and the threat of losing my job was real I was sitting across the table from someone who was telling me they thought I would be a good fit for their sales culture.
The fact that I was struggling led me to panic in a sense. My wife and I soon found out that we were going to have a baby. Which also can make a person panic. I doubted in my career choice and in myself, which is the absolute worst place you can be as a sales rep. I started doing research on how to get better at sales, reading more and more sales books and listening to self help podcasts and audio books. This is so cheesy but I did a lot of soul searching during this time. All the while taking a longer look at other jobs.
I wasn’t alone either. There were other reps who came and went during my time at HubSpot. Besides my first performance plan I never really feared that I could not right the ship, but I was seeing people who were thriving at HubSpot and I was jealous and wanted to feel that same success and pride. I was struggling to stay above water. Despite this my managers at HubSpot always supported me throughout and actually believed in me and spent time trying to help me. I never doubted in their support either, even though I doubted myself at times.
After our son was born I took some time off (HubSpot gives a month for paternity leave, unlike a lot of other companies) and went on an interview while I was out. I was sitting in the office of another company listening to their VP of sales tell me about their product. He was explaining their offering to me on a whiteboard and I interrupted him to ask a question. He became noticeably miffed and a little flustered and gave me a short answer and I realized that he was giving me a pitch, probably the same pitch he trains his sales team on. I immediately thought, that’s not how we do things at HubSpot. We approach sales from a consultative manner, we encourage questions and curiosity and we use that to help our prospects make decisions and our customers thrive. I felt a sense of pride sitting there knowing that a. I wasn’t going to work for this person and b. I was proud of where I worked. Proud to be a HubSpotter.
That experience left me feeling a resolve to work for the company that challenged me, the company that supported me and my family. In the following years I put my ego aside and asked for help. I sought out my peers who were doing well and applied their process to my own sales cycle. I started to turn things around. It’s taken some time but now I am seen as a leader in my segment and am a top performer. All the while HubSpot has had my back. I still get notes from recruiters regularly. I occasionally respond, often just to remind myself how awesome I have it at HubSpot. But I haven’t taken any of them seriously in a long time.