The number of Inside Sales departments is projected to grow from 800K (in 2009) to over 2M (in 2013) - according to SKKU/infoUSA research (PDF).

Steve Watts from The Sales Insider argues:

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But what happens when an Inside Sales Rep is ready for something new and different? Does their career path always mean staying “inside?”

Some view Inside Sales as a stepping stone. But the days of "hungry", first job out of college-Reps pounding the phones are largely gone.

Over at For Entrepreneurs, David Skok (VC at Matrix Partners) shared a slide deck he presented at the Boston Lean Startup Circle on Building a Sales & Marketing machine.

The presentation covered:

What was most interesting for me was thinking about David’s presentation in light of a recent free trial of some SaaS software I just completed. Actually, I didn’t just complete it – I endured it.

But first to David’s points. Note: the deck is 124 slides deep – so I thought I might pick out a few and share my thoughts.
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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: