On one of our internal chatter groups, a member of The Bridge Group team posed this question:

45 days in, what's everyone seeing that is changing & improving in 2013?

I thought it would be interesting to share the responses from our team members (folks not often featured on this blog). Just a fun and hopefully thought provoking piece.

Note: we broke the responses into two parts, this is the first in the series.
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Voicemails are being… returned!

We all know our buyers receive dozens of sales voicemails on a daily basis. But something old has become new again: buyers returning some of those voicemails.

I’ve noticed that the voicemails that are inspiring action have the following in common: they avoid coming across as ‘white noise,’ they leave out the product puffery, and they are short and to the point. Think: sound bites that inspire.

When building messaging, most Reps will ask themselves, “What’s the big challenge my buyer is facing?” But the best Reps take it one step further. They ask, “Why aren’t they addressing it already? Where/how is their current thinking wrong or off point?”

I was digging through Evernote earlier this week and stumbled across a file titled: Killer DF12 Sessions for Sales.

I vaguely remember creating it after Dreamforce 2012 and decided to take a look at a few of the videos I'd clipped. I’m so glad I did!

Out of the dozens of sales cloud sessions now on youtube, I want to share 3 quick clips that deliver three major ideas.

#1 - Coach to Move the Needle

Mark Roberge, HubSpot’s VP of Sales, shares a bit about how he develops leaders and reps in his 250 person sales org.

To set up the clip, Mark is talking about his team of 20 (mostly 1^st-time Managers). He lays out the case that one thing newly promoted Sales Managers tend to get wrong is trying to coach too many things at once.

The big takeaway for me is that rep development doesn’t happen by serendipity. Many sales organizations have a coaching 'strategy' in place, but as the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

As we wind down 2012, I want to share a quick snippet from the single best article I read this year on what it means to be a Sales Manager.

Chris Snell, Inside Sales Manager at Care.com, wrote:

So how do you best guard their time?

One idea is to give them a place to share exactly the issues that are taking them off the phone and away from prospects.

Salesforce.com COO George Hu shared how they did exactly that: they created a chatter group for ‘Airing of Grievances’.

We just published our 2012 Inside Sales for SaaS Metrics & Compensation Report. Just under 200 technology companies participated and we compiled 26 pages of data, insight & ideas.