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.)

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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:

Over the holiday break, I read a fantastic piece from Craig Rosenberg aka The Funnelholic called: 2011: The Year of Living Boringly (I Hope).

Craig lays out the case:

 
Here at The Bridge Group it's no secret that we love Inside Sales. 

We especially love Inside Sales Reps. We love their personalities, attitude, willingness to learn and grow and do. We decided we wanted to create something focused on helping Reps be even better.

To that end we created an Inside Sales Productivity Kit that features 10 tips that are easy to understand and implement.

The Kit includes: