You’ve spent hours interviewing, training, and coaching your inside sales team to help them hit their goals. But are you truly ‘sitting’ them up for success?

While open floor-plans in offices are in vogue, we shouldn’t always succumb to every trend. (Clogs, jeggings, mullets… need I say more?)

The New Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance. While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.
  - Lindsey Kaufman, The Washington Post

Inside sales reps, in particular, need to be able to make calls in a calm, quiet and controllable environment. Can you imagine prospecting while 5, 15, or 50 of your closest colleagues hold their own conversations? This makes no sense for those of who make our livings talking and listening for 3+ hours a day.

Take a look at Glassdoor reviews posted by inside sales reps and you'll find

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Our featured author today is Seth M. List, Director Market Development at Umbel. He joins us for the latest installment of the Inside Sales Practioner Series.

Over in the Sales Development Rep Forum on LinkedIn, Trish Bertuzzi recently posed this question:

What are your most effective SDR productivity hacks?

While my hack isn’t explicitly for sales development. It is wonderful nonetheless for Chrome users.

Chrome is awesome for quite a few reasons. As it relates to sales development, sales and/or sales management, this one is my favorite.

In a nutshell, what I’m going to teach you to do is perform Salesforce,
LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google Drive, Hoovers, and more searches directly
from Chrome’s URL bar using custom keywords.

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Dreamforce is big. Very big.

Like 68 different sessions before 10AM on Day 1 big.

After a dozen hours of bookmarking, whiteboarding, and calendaring, I've built my agenda. I've also put together a short list of the sessions I'm most looking forward to.

Based on your role, I've created three slideshares:

• Top 7 Sessions for Sales Leaders
• Top 9 Sessions for Sales Operations 
• Top 10 Sessions for Admins

I've embedded the first two below.

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For anyone who works in a subscription-based business, where customers pay on a month-to-month basis and can cancel at any time, you know how critical customer retention is.

Through experience, I’ve learned that the ability to regain a customer once they’ve already decided to cancel is extremely difficult. You can throw incentives at them, beg and plead for them to stay, but they’ve likely already moved on.

Here are 3 ways to make sure you minimize the dreaded “I'm canceling” notice:

Get everyone involved

Your customers interact with many areas of your business (sales, support, billing, marketing, etc.) What I’ve found is that many times, your front line staff aren't always attuned to the signs of customer dissatisfaction.

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