Welcome to our 3 Links Not To Miss “will/they won’t they - NBA season” edition. This is going to be a semi-regular feature on the blog where we’ll be sharing 3 recent links we found particularly interesting.
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Conversational: Sales as a Noble Profession

Trish & I were fortunate to sit down with Don Perkins and chat about trends in sales & marketing. In this segment, we spoke about the selling profession and how Reps can become better sellers.

Actionable: Are your Sales Reps Invisible?

Paul Castain argues Reps need to understand that buyers aren’t shy about searching for them online. Like Jill Konrath says, buyers are crazy busy. And what they find (or don’t find) on Google, LinkedIn, etc. might go far in answering “Is taking a meeting with this person worth my time?”

I recently ran across this question on a group on LinkedIn:

Judging by the 162 (to date) responses, this is a hot topic. So I asked around and put together some interesting Inside Sales interview questions. A few folks were kind enough to share their favorite questions and the rationale behind them:

What do you know about us? What do you know about me?

This is a twist on the standard, did they do their homework question. It lets you see how well prepared they are & how confortable they are using publically available data. Did they do the research on you as well as the company or did they just show up and throw up?

This is a guest post from Steve Gershik, Chief Marketer at 28Marketing. Steve has been a VP of Marketing & demand generation leader for over 16 years. He's a very funny guy to boot.
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A drinking game, if you can remember back to college, is where you watch a movie or television show and you take a drink every time some key term is mentioned.  Usually it's the utterance of some cliche, character tag line (imagine Seinfeld saying "Newman") or a ridiculous, abstract, content-free term.

The Marketing Automation space is rife with the latter, which prompted me, during a Focus teleconference with Craig Rosenberg, Carlos Hidalgo, Justin Grey and Adam Needles, to propose whether there ought to be a demand generation drinking game.

So here are a proposed few rules for the game.  Feel free to add your suggestions and modifications in the comments:

I've been a bit obsessed with sales presentations lately. Not so much on construction of attractive slides, but on the requirement to tell a compelling story via the world's most torturous medium: PowerPoint.

In the Inside Sales world, Reps work incredibly hard to earn 10, 20 or 30 minute discovery/needs analysis calls. At presentation time, we’ve got (at least in theory) guaranteed prospect attention.

But far too often, we squander all that preceding effort by confusing, boring or annoying prospects while generally failing to move the sales process forward.

I just came across this eBook from the folks over at SalesCrunch called "Designing Presentations That Sell." And let me tell you, it rocks. (Note: I wouldn't normally link to registration required content - but it is that good.)

In the eBook, presentation designer Jan Schultink goes through 3 acts: Images, Stories & Content. I thought I’d share the bits that most impacted me.