I recently discovered a blog that I really enjoy - Pam Moore’s The Marketing Nut.

With her permission I’ve excerpted parts of her Social Media: A Little Less Talk and a Little More Action Please. The full post is well worth the read, but I want to focus on her “Too Much Yappin’” Test. 

To set the stage Pam asks:

 
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?