Inside Sales hiring is up. Way, way up.

I was lucky enough to sit in on a preview call for CSO Insights’ 2011 Telemarketing Inside Sales Optimization Report the other day. This chart really hit me between the eyes.

Said another way, over 70% of surveyed organizations are hiring sales people this year. Nearly 1/4 are bumping their sales force size by 20% +. In case there was any doubt, 

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Anecdotally, I can testify that folks with 2-3 years sales experience are in white hot demand right now. Doing a little research, I crunched through about 100 LinkedIn jobs looking for “inside sales” reps. Here’s what I found for desired experience:

The height of the curve reflects the proportion of job postings requiring that level of sales experience. You can see that:

 
Since conference season is in full swing, we thought it would be fun to play a word association game with some Inside Sales thinkers, writers & doers we met along the way.

We asked them to respond to the following: Sales, Marketing, inbound leads & outbound prospecting. Here is what they had to say.
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Pretty interesting stuff, no? I also found it really fascinating to hear the responses grouped together. So I edited another cut here:

Having Sales Reps prospect me is one of the most eye opening parts of my job.

Being a quant type of guy (nerd might fit too), I decided to track & categorize the sales processes that Reps have put me through over the last few weeks.

Here’s what I saw:

By my math, that's a less than 9% of Reps doing something more than drive-by prospecting. This left me wondering, what is it that drives 1 Rep to commit to a process – where 9 others fall short?

Did you ever run across an organization that you want to model your business against because they just get it? Well, I have and for me that organization is OpenView Venture Partners.

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We find them to be open, sharing, knowledgeable and some of the best networkers around. Since we have a love fest going with them, we wondered if their portfolio companies feel the same way. So I asked if we could interview one.

What follows is a conversation I had with Isaac Garcia, Co-Founder & CEO of Central Desktop.
Central Desktop delivers a cloud-based social collaboration platform that allows people to connect and share information to drive profitable business results.

Heads up all you technology companies considering funding…. you may want to keep reading and add OpenView to your list!