Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the AA-ISP Senior Exec Retreat and spending time with 50+ Execs, VPs and Directors sharing & discussing issues relevant to inside sales.

One of the workshops focused on Employee Lifecycle. Well, let me tell you that I learned a ton from the other attendees – Inside Sales leaders from companies like IBM, Mentor Graphics, Staples, & Henkle to name a few.

I thought I’d share a few takeaways from that session – specifically focused on the front end of the employee lifecycle: Sourcing.

For the better part of the last 15 years we’ve all used a combination of the following to source candidates:

• Internal and external referrals
• External or in-house recruiters
• Online postings: corporate sites, Monster, LinkedIn, etc.

But we know that finding top talent is tougher than ever before. Our hiring infographic notes that:

• The demand for inside sales talent increased 124% from 2009 to 2011
• The demand for lead generation talent increased 59% in the same time period
• 59% of all reqs are filled in under 45 days

Yikes… Since filling open reqs dramatically impact our ability to achieve revenue goals, what can we do about it?

I wanted to call out 2 examples of companies that are using creative methods to recruit top talent.

Recruiting, motivating & retaining great Reps is a critical component of any Inside Sales strategy. One thing that has largely been absent in the process is feedback from the Reps themselves.

With that in mind, I am very excited to announce the launch of a new research project with our good friends at Vorsight:
Inside Sales Motivation Research Survey.

We are asking Inside Reps (& reps only) to share 3-minutes on a web survey about what motivates them professionally and how their current role is stacking up. In exchange, participants will be entered into a drawing where one winner will receive an Apple iPad2 and another a Kindle Fire. For the full who, what, where & how please see this.

18 short months ago I was presenting to a room full of 200 or so Inside Sales Executives at the AA-ISP Leadership Summit.  I asked them the following:

The more I thought about it, the more unfair my final question seemed to me.

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?