I opened my email this morning and was bombarded by advice on how to end the year with a bang.

For most of us, those with longer sales cycles, that horse has left the barn. Trying to course correct now is too little, too late.

I'm sure you've spent countless hours on strategy and planning for next year. I'm asking you to spend 5 more minutes. As inside sales leaders, the next few days and weeks are the perfect time to assess your readiness for 2015.

I've created a 2015 Readiness Scorecard to make it easy for you.

With the scorecard you can assess your team's readiness for 2015 against:

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Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends. I want to share 3 quick changes to CRM that will most certainly make your reps thankful.

None of these are my original ideas and I'm thankful to the amazing Salesforce community for sharing them with me.

1) Display the timezone of a phone number

This one comes from my good friend and Salesforce mentor, Becka Dente.

You can add this formula field to accounts, contacts, and/or leads. Reps can then build and sort lists based on timezone. It's unbelievably useful for bunching calls together.

if( ISBLANK(Phone),"--",  if( CONTAINS( "206: 209: 213: 253: 310: 323: 360: 408: 415: 425: 503: 509: 510: 530: 559: 562: 604: 619: 626: 650: 661: 702: 707: 714: 760: 775: 778: 805: 818: 831: 858: 867: 909: 916: 925: 949: 951: 971: 424: 442: 541: 657", left( SUBSTITUTE( Phone , "(", ""),3)),"Pacific", 

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ISRs, AMs, AEs - whatever you call them, the metrics that drive the closing function are always in demand. 

Every eighteen months we conduct this research project, I'm asking for your help as we begin our 5th round.

The key themes we hope to uncover and share include:

• SaaS versus On-Premise: where are groups similar, where do they differ
• Compensation: base + ote, pay on what/how/when, accelerators and decelerators
• Quotas: $ quotas, other components, % attainment
• Rep Profiles: experience, tenure, ramp, career path

We worked hard to make this year’s survey easier and it should only take 6-8 minutes to complete.

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For every 1000 accounts prospected in a given quarter, how many opportunities should an SDR group generate?

That question can mean only one thing, it's time for the latest release of the Outbound Index.

For those unfamiliar, the Index is a collaboration between Pete Gracey, CEO of QuotaFactory, and I into the metrics of outbound prospecting. With each release, we provide an 'outbound snapshot' powered by actual, transactional CRM data.

In other words, we don’t ask ‘Hey, how’s the prospecting going?,’ we dig into the data and find out the truth.

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