With all the buzz around sales and marketing alignment we thought it was time for a sanity check. Analysts, consultants and technology providers have all thrown their weight behind the requirement for sales & marketing to be on the same page. But, having said that, how are we doing in moving towards that goal?

Rather than ivory tower it, we decided to take the question to the people in the trenches. We partnered with VorsightBP (a great sales training company) and surveyed 1,150+ B2B Sales Reps. The results were so interesting, we wrote an ebook:

Sales Speaks: Perceptions and Ponderings on Marketing Leads

(Note: this wasn't a witch hunt or a slamming Marketing/Sales session. We took a look at what the Reps had to say and tried to make actionable suggestions for moving the ball forward.)

Steve led off with this question:

How many dials does it take your Reps to get 1 connect?

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He then shared the following metric from the folks at ConnectAndSell: 22

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Steve laid out a series of factors that are contributing to 21 of 22 dials resulting in non-connects. Here are 3 points that really stood out for me:

 
Not a day goes by that I don’t see numerous bloggers, tweeters, etc. arguing passionately that cold calling is dead.

The problem is that people are confusing cold calling with outbound calling. Picking up the phone still works as part of a Sales & Marketing approach that integrates inbound marketing, social media, great content, lead nurturing, etc.

The part that has fallen by the wayside is the “cold” not the “calling.”

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InsideView recently shared Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel, here’s an excerpt:

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Earlier this week I was lucky enough to listen in on a Focus.com roundtable billed Bigger, Better, Faster: Inside Sales in 2011. Moderated by Chris Snell who lead the panel through a range of topics around Inside Sales & Inside Sales Management. (The recording [MP3 file] has been made available, so you can give it a listen when you have some time.)

I thought it would be interesting to highlight three questions that the panel addressed: