A couple of emails hit my inbox last week back-to-back.

The first was from Glassdoor, Best Places to Work 2014, announcing their 6th annual employee choice awards. The second was from Craig Ferrara of AG Salesworks, 7 Things I Want My Inside Sales Team To Know For 2014.

Now, I love Glassdoor. It's the best way to get the inside dish on the Pros and Cons of working at a given company. So I wondered, what if I grabbed a bunch of those reviews and compared them to Craig’s list?

Experiment time!

Here is the process I used:

• Logged into Glassdoor and picked out the B2B tech companies from the Top 50
• Drilled into Sales reviews only (inside, AEs, SDRs, etc.)
• Exported the most recent 100 reviews

I got busy parsing and found something pretty interesting.

Like many of you, I attended Dreamforce last month. As is often the case, some of the most interesting conversations happen in the hallways between sessions.

During one of those conversations, I got pulled into a debate between two VPs of Inside Sales.

The question under consideration

If 40% of the reps on a sales team miss quota, who is at fault?

VP #1 argued that the team wasn't properly led - essentially failure was on the sales leader’s shoulders. VP #2 countered that it was more likely territories were uneven and many reps were assigned unrealistic quotas - failure was on the shoulders of the sales planning organization. Having made their cases, they looked at me to choose a side.

Today, we launch our 2014 research on the Sales Development / Lead Generation function -- focused on teams generating pipeline (ADRs, BDRs, MDRs, SDRs).

For some time, I’ve had a thorn in my side about a particular ‘insight’ floating around the sales punditry.

I’ve grumbled when it was repeated on conference stages, scowled reading it on blogs, and I might have exclaimed ‘for f***s sake’ when I found in Dan Pink’s (otherwise) excellent To Sell is Human.

But earlier this week, I heard it from a young Inside Sales Rep as a ‘justification’ for not picking up the phone. That did it. I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Here’s what he said: 

This essentially a parroting of the information assymetry idea: that pre-web we lived in an era of tyrrany where sales ruled over buyers mercilessly.