I spent the day at the Boston Sales 2.0 Conference  last week. What follows are the pearls of wisdom I was lucky enough to pick up.

Enjoy! (Note: you'll find some of my comments in italics)
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Customers

"An IBM study reports that 80% of CEOs say getting closer to the customer is a major priority."
- Keith Hontz, VP Sales Line of Business Solutions - SAP America
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"Don’t interact with your customers without preparation. Three drivers: 1) access to contact specific customer info, 2) analytics to anticipate trends and 3) integration into one place."
- Chuck Penfield, VP CRM on Demand - Oracle
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"Are all your customers created equally, and if not, shouldn't that dictate compensation?" 
- Chris Cabrera, Founder, President & CEO - Xactly
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I recently had the pleasure of doing a podcast with the team at OpenView Venture Partners on “pitfalls to avoid when building an inside sales team.”  It was a great conversation with Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director at OpenView, led by Devon Warwick (@devwarwick).

(Note: You can read through a transcript of the conversation, you can listen to the podcast, or you can view a brief slideshare presentation of the highlights below.)
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Inside Sales is Strategic

 
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:

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.