Many thanks to Peter Shankman for inspiring this post (see his Things I’d Like to See Happen in 2012). Here's a list of things I’m wishing 2012 will deliver.

1. May 2012 be the year we embrace social media for sharing - not endless self-promotion. I’m bored with hearing how busy and wonderful we all are. Aren’t we boring ourselves too? We can learn so much more from what didn’t go perfectly and how we adapted, improvised & overcame.
2. May 2012 be the year that Inside Sales Reps embrace the fact that they are “the new black” and show us what they can really do. Dazzle us – you have the skills, the knowledge and the support!!
3. May 2012 be the year of the least amount of public information about any of the Kardashians. (Copied verbatim from Peter’s list – because it’s my wish too.)
4. May 2012 be the year I figure out how to keep my business partner, Laurie Page, off a plane. If I don’t she is going to kill me…I know she is. Goodbye cruel world.
5. May 2012 be the year that Executives realize that to get the most out of your sales team you need to invest in them. That means training, tools, technology … and, oh yeah, you might want to pay attention to them once in awhile. (PS – forecast reviews don’t count. That’s torture – not mentoring.)

 
This is a guest post from Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing a Seattle based marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. I saw this piece he had written on how to use Twitter asked if we could share it. I hope you find it interesting and useful.  Enjoy!

PS – I’ll save you some time… if your buyers are not on Twitter (and many of them are not) you can sally forth and do meaningful work or read on for future reference.  

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Twitter will never be confused with a direct response channel, but it’s still a proven and measurable tool for finding and engaging more prospects. Below are five specific tips to start finding more opportunities via Twitter. 

1. Follow your prospects

Create private lists of your prospects in Twitter, and follow them via segmented columns in HootSuite, Tweetdeck or some other tool. If you want to stay more “stealth” until you're ready to reach out and engage, you can add prospects to a Twitter list without actually following them but either way, knowing what your prospects are thinking and saying will help you: get to know them better, learn quickly what their priorities are and give you plenty of opportunities to engage at the beginning of their buying cycle.

 
I recently participated in a conversation over at Focus.com: How can you create a culture where your employees feel comfortable creating content? The idea being, that the creation of content is now an organizational responsibility as opposed to just being Marketing’s.

At one point in the dialogue, I was sick of hearing what all the pundits think (myself included) so I threw down the glove and asked a Sales Exec to chime in. Well, Alex Shootman the Chief Revenue Officer of Eloqua did. His excellent response follows:

18 short months ago I was presenting to a room full of 200 or so Inside Sales Executives at the AA-ISP Leadership Summit.  I asked them the following:

The more I thought about it, the more unfair my final question seemed to me.