To those that know me well, I’m not making news when I confess my love for Salesforce.com. Add in metrics, reports and dashboards and we have a perfect weekday afternoon.

That being shared, I recently stumbled upon a recorded Dreamforce session on "Sales Prospecting Secrets: How Salesforce.com Fills the Funnel with Hot Leads." Needless to say, that’s right up my alley.

Since the full session clocks in at 52 minutes, I thought I'd share some of the highlights here. The first part of the talk is given by Erik Nierenberg,VP of Sales Business Development, and covers his outbound-focused team.

Point 1: Build Career Path into your Sales Roles

Judging by the constant stream of job postings in the Inside Sales Experts LinkedIn group, the market for Inside Sales talent in Europe is hot.

Recruiting a German-Speaking Inside Sales Specialist in (Reading, UK)
Looking for Dutch-Speaking Business Development Agents for an IT Co. (Barcelona, Spain)
Hiring Multilingual Inside Sales Reps Based in Dublin (Ireland)

Through numerous conversations with clients, we've been hearing anecdotal feedback about the challenges US & Canadian companies are facing when building inside teams targeting the European market: the more active role of resellers, hiring for sales/language skills, list & data sources, acceptance of phone & web selling, etc.

Recruiting, motivating & retaining great Reps is a critical component of any Inside Sales strategy. One thing that has largely been absent in the process is feedback from the Reps themselves.

With that in mind, I am very excited to announce the launch of a new research project with our good friends at Vorsight:
Inside Sales Motivation Research Survey.

We are asking Inside Reps (& reps only) to share 3-minutes on a web survey about what motivates them professionally and how their current role is stacking up. In exchange, participants will be entered into a drawing where one winner will receive an Apple iPad2 and another a Kindle Fire. For the full who, what, where & how please see this.