Four sales lessons from a Harvard Business School sales class

Executive overview

Most salespeople give up on outreach far too early. Research shows 17 attempts is the norm for booking meetings — yet most reps stop at four.

Winning in sales requires persistence in outreach, tight scripting on cold calls, and hiring for coachability above all other traits.

The single biggest predictor of sales success is coachability, not curiosity or intelligence.

How many outreach attempts before you give up

• Research from thousands of companies: 17 attempts is the standard for booking a meeting
• Most salespeople stop at four — uncomfortable with seeming annoying
• Cold calling is a game of seconds; every word counts in the first 5–10 seconds
• Scripts are usually avoided in sales, but cold calls are the exception — use one
• A good cold caller books one meeting per day and gets hung up on 80–90% of the time
• Handle objections by reframing: budget concern → savings; too busy → time saved

Why role plays are non-negotiable in interviews

• Never hire a salesperson without a role play — like trying out for a team without playing
• Role plays test how candidates handle objections under pressure
• After the role play, ask the candidate to self-assess — inability to self-criticise is a red flag
• Give one positive and one improvement point before coaching; jumping straight to criticism distorts the feedback dynamic
• Track improvement across multiple role plays over the interview sequence
• Progressive improvement is the top hiring signal

Building a hiring scorecard

• Define 5–10 attributes hypothesised to correlate with success in your specific context
• Context includes: what you sell, who you sell to, company stage, geography
• Define what high, medium, and low scores look like for each attribute before hiring
• Hire 2–3 reps per quarter and validate within 6–8 months who performs and why
• Use a flywheel: analyse top performers and failures to continuously refine the scorecard
• At HubSpot, coachability outranked curiosity and intelligence as the top correlated attribute