It’s a tough hiring market -- especially for SDR and AE roles. In some locations (San Francisco, New York, and Boston), it has become almost impossible.

I know from speaking with Sales Leaders (and from our research) that companies are being forced to hire younger and less experienced reps. It seems “straight out of college” has become the new “1-2 years of experience” and that “minimum of 1 year of selling” has replaced “3+ years in a sales capacity.”

By this point, if you don’t have a healthy number of “Millennials” on your team, you’re in the minority. Despite the stereotypes (social media-obsessed, marriage-delaying, selfie-addicts), Millennials actually stay longer with their employers than the previous generation.

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You’ve spent hours interviewing, training, and coaching your inside sales team to help them hit their goals. But are you truly ‘sitting’ them up for success?

While open floor-plans in offices are in vogue, we shouldn’t always succumb to every trend. (Clogs, jeggings, mullets… need I say more?)

The New Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance. While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.
  - Lindsey Kaufman, The Washington Post

Inside sales reps, in particular, need to be able to make calls in a calm, quiet and controllable environment. Can you imagine prospecting while 5, 15, or 50 of your closest colleagues hold their own conversations? This makes no sense for those of who make our livings talking and listening for 3+ hours a day.

Take a look at Glassdoor reviews posted by inside sales reps and you'll find

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For the first time in 40 years, my beloved Golden State Warriors are NBA champions!

While I might attribute this to my lucky socks and pregame ritual, many pundits credit their teamwork. And specifically, their league leading record of assists per game.

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One of the best parts of my job is talking to entrepreneurs in the sales technology space. The other day, I took a call from a stealth-mode founder with a bold vision.

Here’s his pitch:

If you’re generating inbound leads and are focused on setting introductory meetings/demos for sales reps, technology can replace your entire SDR team.

Provocative, right?

He argued that for many inbound SDR organizations, all they do is push the meeting. They send email after email and answer every question a prospects asks with “you’ll find that out if you take the meeting.”

In a way, I agree with him. Far too many teams are doing little more than identifying the guy, checking for a pulse, and closing on the meeting. There’s little-to-no vision creation or pain/consequence discovery. This approach can work beautifully when the goal is "getting more and more at bats” for the sales team.

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