This week I had the pleasure of attending the AA-ISP Leadership Summit. Roughly 400 inside sales execs from a diverse group of industries were in attendance.

A few weeks back, I came across this scenario on LinkedIn (slightly anonymized to protect identities).

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the AA-ISP Senior Exec Retreat and spending time with 50+ Execs, VPs and Directors sharing & discussing issues relevant to inside sales.

One of the workshops focused on Employee Lifecycle. Well, let me tell you that I learned a ton from the other attendees – Inside Sales leaders from companies like IBM, Mentor Graphics, Staples, & Henkle to name a few.

I thought I’d share a few takeaways from that session – specifically focused on the front end of the employee lifecycle: Sourcing.

For the better part of the last 15 years we’ve all used a combination of the following to source candidates:

• Internal and external referrals
• External or in-house recruiters
• Online postings: corporate sites, Monster, LinkedIn, etc.

But we know that finding top talent is tougher than ever before. Our hiring infographic notes that:

• The demand for inside sales talent increased 124% from 2009 to 2011
• The demand for lead generation talent increased 59% in the same time period
• 59% of all reqs are filled in under 45 days

Yikes… Since filling open reqs dramatically impact our ability to achieve revenue goals, what can we do about it?

I wanted to call out 2 examples of companies that are using creative methods to recruit top talent.

It’s 2012 and high time to revisit 9 predictions that Laurie Page and I made early in 2011. I thought it might be interesting to see how well we did.

We’ll be scoring our predictions like a 9-hole round using this point system:

1. No longer will the Inside Sales Rep be a “jack of all trades”. Roles will be clearly defined and measured based on specific desired outcomes.

   Segmentation/specialization is still a hot topic. We are seeing some hesitance on the part of smaller organizations to specialize but, for those that have adopted the strategy, specialization often leads to dramatically increased productivity.
   Score: Birdie

2. Data will become an integral component for predicting the likelihood of Inside Sales success. No longer will companies buy data from one vendor but rather they will create a network of data providers to deliver to them the specific information in their target markets.

   I actually think this problem got worse last year. People will invest in everything but data. If you got something wrong 30% every time you tried it, wouldn’t you look for a better way? Well, at least 30% of your database is bad and your sales and marketing teams have to work with it … not good!
   Score: Snowman