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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:

Colleen Francis of Engage Selling wrote a great blog post called 12 Ways to Get Your Prospects to Call You Back. With her permission, we have reprinted my fave 4.  Enjoy and Engage!

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No matter how persuasive, compelling or brilliant you may be, it's difficult to build a relationship with a prospect if you can't get them to call you back.

Most sales people use boring, outdated voice and email methods, which leave them sounding just like every other sales person in the world. If you want to get more return calls from your clients, then you have to do something different from everyone else out there - you have to stand out, be likeable, and actively deserve a return call.

Here are 4 of the best ideas we've found to help you stand up, stand out and make your clients want to return your calls:

This is a guest post by Henry Bruce, the founder of Rock Annand Group, a client acquisition strategy consulting firm focused on the B2B software industry. 

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Since 3 out of 4 new leads generated end up buying at some point in the next 18-24 months (according to MarketingSherpa), lead nurturing is no longer a wish-list program, but a competitive necessity. But for most B2B marketers, figuring where to start is always a daunting task.

To make matters worse, many approaches tend to over-complicate things. Marketers develop complex multi-touch campaigns that overwhelm their opt-in audience with too many communications and too many messages. Buyers become not only confused but suffer from subscriber fatigue.
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