Our featured author today is Manny Alamwala, Business Development Associate at Vision Critical. He joins us for the latest in our Inside Sales Practioner Series.

 
As an SDR, I’ve become more aware of the reality behind the saying “time is money.” Not being time-wise leads to fewer meetings booked, fewer opps generated,  lower income, and (at worst) being moved out of the role.

I've observed that high achievers are disciplined with their time and focus on what's most important at any given moment. They know what they have to do and when they have to do it before they start their days.

Recently, I went to a bookstore to find a journal to help me focus. As I looked at the different types available, I came up with an idea of a role-specific journal to be used for inside sales. At the heart of it, all inside sales professionals are doing the same type of tasks: research, prospecting, calling, emailing, social media, qualifying, etc.

Read More

This morning, I ran a LinkedIn search for open SDR, AE, and Customer Success jobs in greater Boston. I found 1,506 active job posts—with 600+ posted within the last week alone. With every social post, in every recruiter InMail, and on every career page, companies are screaming for sales talent.

There are two problems though. One, the unemployment rate (for the typical candidate profile) is nearing a natural floor.

Two, the era of sloppy growth is coming to an end (see here, here, and here). When times are fat, companies can ignore slack in their hiring process. Heads for headsets, paying signing bonuses, and “hire-fast + fire-fast” mentalities will put butts in seats when growth trumps profitability.

As the pendulum swings toward efficient growth, hiring momentum becomes what matters. And for high-growth companies, it becomes a strategic competitive advantage.

What is hiring momentum?

According to my good friend Google, momentum is the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity. In sales, you can increase hiring momentum in three ways:

Read More

Kevin Dorsey is a fantastic sales leader. As Head of Sales for SnackNation, he leads a team of 12 Sales Development Reps and 30 Account Executives. SnackNation offers office delivery of healthy snacks that create happier and more productive teams.

In just one year, Kevin grew the teams from a handful of reps to over 40. Along the way, he decided that the best avenue for reinforcing and scaling critical sales competencies was to build a Sales Playbook.

And over the next 3.5 months, he did just that.

Lesson #1: He immersed himself in his SDRs' process

"I knew that if I wrote the Playbook from behind my desk exclusively, it probably wouldn't be very good."

Kevin got his hands dirty, getting in the seat with the SDRs and really seeing what that day-to-day felt and sounded like. He was looking to combine emergent best practices (identified by his team) with industry and thought leaders learnings.

 The playbook is broken into three sections:

Read More

Three weeks ago, the Department of Labor published its final rule updating the overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Whether to classify inside sales reps as exempt or non-exempt remains a very messy issue. For those unfamiliar, non-exempt employees are:

Subject to overtime pay
Entitled to rest and meal breaks
Required to keep time records

By a stroke of luck brilliant strategic planning, I happened to be running research on how companies classify their SDRs and AEs for the purposes of overtime pay.

One hundred fifty-nine companies were kind enough to participate. Let’s first turn to what the new rule means.

What’s in the final rule

What has changed: The salary and compensation levels needed for the Executive, Administrative and Professional exemption will be raised to $47,476 on December 1^st, 2016.  The total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (HCE) will be raised to $134,004.

Read More