If your Outbound Prospectors target 1000 accounts this quarter, how many opportunities will they put into your Sales organization's pipeline?

Ask me that questions three months ago and I would have said, "It depends." Today, I'm confident with a response of 32.

Last December, Pete Gracey from AG Salesworks approached me with a crazy idea. His pitch was roughly, I have 35+ BDRs prospecting for three dozen technologies and generating mountains of Salesforce.com data. Any interest in digging into it and seeing what we find?

My reply: Let's do this.
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So after 3 months of whiteboarding, triple-checking of arithmetic, a few shouting matches, and 3.1 gallons of coffee - Pete & I are ready to release the results.

We just published our 2012 Inside Sales for SaaS Metrics & Compensation Report. Just under 200 technology companies participated and we compiled 26 pages of data, insight & ideas.

For those of you who don’t have the time or energy to read the full report (and I hope you find both at some point), I thought I’d put together a few highlights.

• Marketing delivers a higher percentage of pipeline for SaaS (57%) vs. non-SaaS (38%) companies.
  SaaS Marketing groups contributed 50% more pipeline than their non-SaaS counterparts. This suggests, and anecdotal evidence supports, that strong and consistent “air cover” from the marketing organization is a critical success factor in the SaaS world. (pg. 6) 
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• A third of SaaS sales groups either do not assign territories or use round-robin assignment. 
  Combined, Round-robin and No Territories accounted for 33% of responses - not an insignificant share. We took a closer look and noticed that, almost exclusively, those particular groups have the vast majority of their pipeline sourced by Marketing. (pg. 7) 
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It's official! Our 2012 Lead Generation Metrics & Compensation Report is now available.

This year's study is based on a survey of 197 B2B companies with inside sales groups. This report is focused on the lead generation (sourcing pipeline) model.

Our fouth report since 2007, we are attempting to not only share where we are now, but also where we've been and what it all means. This year we tried something a little diferrent. We asked survey participants:

How has managing lead generation changed in recent years?

I've shared a few respones that really resonated with me.

Lead Gen Has Grown Up

• The role has been elevated from being viewed as a low-skill phone resource to being viewed as an important element of a sales strategy.
• Today, quality is key and lead generation is becoming a proper part of the sales cycle. It is about identifying REAL opportunities which match with the model/strategy. For us, the group reports to Marketing and that is in question. At some point, it might have to be moved to sales.
• Lead generation used to be volume based; it was mostly about a pure appointment setting activity. Now it’s about quality and not quantity. It’s a more critical part of the pipeline generation/overall sales process than most people give it credit for.

I'm very excited to announce the launch of our 2012 Inside Sales Metrics Research. This will be our third research project in the metrics & compensation series - where we collect, analyze & share the numbers that drive B2B Inside Sales for tech companies. 

If you are one of the 8,960+ Sales & Marketing Leaders who've download or participated in these reports over the last few years, thank you!

What's the ask

We are looking for Execs running inside sales at B2B technology companies to participate in our 6-minute web survey.

Who can participate

We are asking for aggregate, team-level metrics and compensation information. Only Managers, Directors & VPs are asked to participate.

 
Is Inside Sales in a SaaS environment really all that different from Inside Sales in traditional / licensed sales model? Turns out - yes it is.

I'm very excited to announce the release of the 2010 Lead Generation Metrics & Compensation Report focusing on the “pipeline development" Inside Sales function.

I recently read an excellent post by Eloqua’s Steve Woods: Trust, Reputation, and Inside Sales. He argues that:

[The following is an excerpt from the 2010 Inside Sales Metrics & Compensation Report survey of 115+ technology companies located in North America.]
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I'm very excited to announce the release of the 2010 Inside Sales Metrics & Compensation Report focusing on the “quota carrying"  Inside Sales function.

I'm very excited to announce the launch of our 2010 Inside Sales Metrics & Comp Surveys for Technology Companies. We will be using this data to produce our 2010 research reports.