Designing Systems That Scale with Mark Roberge, Founding CRO of HubSpot

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Jan 15, 2026

Mark Roberge, the founding Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, dives into the critical art of scaling systems. He reveals common pitfalls of premature hiring and emphasizes the importance of a well-defined ideal customer profile. Roberge introduces his Science of Scaling framework, stressing that product-market fit is reflected through customer retention rather than just revenue. He advocates for a strategic approach to hiring and growth, ensuring companies adapt their go-to-market strategies as they evolve.

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ADVICE

Hire Sales Capacity Deliberately

Do not hire large numbers of sales reps immediately after receiving capital; hire and ramp intentionally over time.
Plan recruiting, interviews, and hiring funnels to preserve quality and avoid mass churn.

INSIGHT

ICP Is Who You Actually Close

Your ICP is defined by who your sellers actually close, not what's in the pitch deck.
Chasing revenue from non-ICP customers can destroy product positioning and long-term health.

ANECDOTE

HubSpot Turned Down Giant Revenue

Mark shared HubSpot's decision to rip up a Meta contract that would have doubled revenue but harmed product positioning.
That preserved the ICP and prevented a customer from destroying their nascent business.

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Scaling often looks like momentum on the surface: more pipeline, more headcount, more pressure from boards and capital. But underneath? Many leaders feel the strain of decisions moving faster than their systems can support. In this conversation, Mark Roberge sits down to unpack why scaling is not a milestone, but a system that must be intentionally designed and continuously recalibrated. Drawing on his experience as HubSpot’s founding CRO, a Harvard Business School lecturer, and the author of The Science of Scaling, Mark offers a clear, data-driven perspective on how leaders can move beyond reactive growth and build systems that scale with intention.

Mark Roberge is the founding Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, and the author of The Science of Scaling and The Sales Acceleration Formula. He is widely known for helping companies design go-to-market systems that scale sustainably.

Connect with Mark:

Stage 2 Capital

Resources mentioned:

Force Management resources on scaling predictably:

The Predictable Revenue Framework: Guide for Leaders

Key takeaways from this episode:

04:45 Why scaling too early, often triggered by capital of board pressure, creates more downstream problems than it solves
09:20 Why your ideal customer profile is defined by who your sellers actually close, not what’s written in your pitch deck
12:43 Why revenue is a misleading indicator of product-market fit (and what leaders should pay attention to instead)
13:58 The critical difference between product-market fit and go-to-market fit, and why skipping the latter derails scale
19:36 How using leading indicators of retention removes guesswork from growth decisions
40:02 Why top-down revenue targets fail, and how bottoms-up capacity planning creates sustainable scale
53:55 Why Mark chose to donate all book proceeds to mental health, and why leadership conversations must make room for humanity

Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results.

This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale.

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