At long last, we are publishing our  SDR Metrics & Compensation Report. I want to thank the 222 technology companies that participated. In this report, we compiled 37 pages of data, insight & trends.

For those of you who don’t have the time or energy to read the full report (and I hope you find both at some point), I thought I’d share a few snippets with you.

For the last few months, I've been running a little experiment.

A pool of Inside Sales Rep volunteers & I have been sending sales job posts to one another. Each person would rate the posts with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down against this question, "Do you find this position and company interesting?"

The team reviewed posts for sales positions at 97 different companies.

And the results weren't pretty.

Less than 22% were deemed 'interesting' by at least one rep. Only 9% received two or more thumbs up.

Said another way, 91% of the job descriptions were so buzzword, boilerplate, and boring as not to warrant a second look. I've pulled together some of the highlights with comments from the reps themselves. Take a look below:

Late last year, Steve Richard and I had an idea for new research. This would be the third collaboration between The Bridge Group and VorsightBP (after Sales Speaks and Mythbusting Millennials).

Our intent was to survey sales reps, front-line managers, and directors to understand the current state of sales management. By asking similar questions and capturing the variations between their perspectives, we knew there was a story to be told.

As a measuring stick, we decided to include a Net Promoter Score question in the individual sales rep variant.

What we found shocked us.

Every so often, someone I don't know will message me on LinkedIn asking for advice on interviewing for a sales position.

The questions are generally ‘What should I expect?’ ‘What might they ask?’ ‘What are they looking to hear?’ Much less frequently, they’ll ask ‘What can I do to stand out?’

Over the past year or so I've been working and reworking a response to that last one. I thought I'd share it here and get the community's feedback. Here goes:

A Sales Interview is a Sales Call