Three weeks ago, the Department of Labor published its final rule updating the overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Whether to classify inside sales reps as exempt or non-exempt remains a very messy issue. For those unfamiliar, non-exempt employees are:

Subject to overtime pay
Entitled to rest and meal breaks
Required to keep time records

By a stroke of luck brilliant strategic planning, I happened to be running research on how companies classify their SDRs and AEs for the purposes of overtime pay.

One hundred fifty-nine companies were kind enough to participate. Let’s first turn to what the new rule means.

What’s in the final rule

What has changed: The salary and compensation levels needed for the Executive, Administrative and Professional exemption will be raised to $47,476 on December 1^st, 2016.  The total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (HCE) will be raised to $134,004.

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For New Englanders like me, Spring means three things - golf, despair over the Red Sox’s starting rotation, and college graduation season.

A new crop of sales talent is readying to enter the market and nearly all of my clients have open headcount for Sales Development Reps. And, I can assure you, most are facing a very competitive hiring market. If you’re looking to attract the class of 2016, you have to be creative. It should come as no surprise that 90% of those under the age of 30 use social media. What you may not know is that Instagram’s usage has surpassed Twitter’s – registering 400M monthly active users.

A new channel for recruiting

If you are looking to drive candidates to your positions, you need to fish where your potential candidates swim.

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My first job in B2B technology was as a . . . get ready for it . . . telemarketing rep.

My job was to book appointments for my field reps. I had a phone, a list of names, and the #1 best-selling CRM of the late 80s and early 90s: a spiral-bound notebook.

I have to tell you I did a hell of a job with just those few resources. Fast forward to today. Telemarketing has evolved into Sales Development. No longer the red-headed stepchild, it’s now the launch pad for outstanding companies and amazing careers.

As Sales Development has grown in stature, so has it grown in complexity. If you want high growth, explosive growth, the kind of growth that weather satellites can see from space then you need to build this role into your strategy (and not bolt it on as an afterthought).

Enter the playbook

I'm extremely excited to announce the official release of The Sales Development Playbook. The book is available now on Amazon and the initial reviews are unbelievably gratifying.

I was compelled to write this book because of a major problem I’m seeing. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how to “do” sales development. Again and again, I see

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Josh Allen is a sales leadership veteran. From inside sales rep to manager to EMEA sales director to current VP of Sales at LogMeIn, Josh has a track record of leading successful teams. We recently sat down to discuss how he thinks about and measures KPIs for his sales reps.

(Note: LogMeIn is a remote access software/SaaS company with a higher-volume, lower-ASP model.)

Josh and LogMeIn have departed from traditional (one-size-fits-all) sales KPIs in favor of customized metrics for each and every sales rep.

"We've tried cookie cutter KPIs – for example, everybody has to make 60 dials a day, create 5 new opportunities a week, etc.  But when you apply KPIs broadly across different sales teams, and try to graph it, you're going to have people who are on the high end and the low end. And very few people who are actually meeting the target."

Rather than apply uniform metrics, they decided to build a formula that would be as customized as possible to the individual sales rep. Using historical sales performance, they isolate that specific individual’s metrics.

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