Understanding the Sales Force

I don’t write about Inside Sales as often as I should. After all, everyone else is writing about it, some bloggers are devoted to it, and if you read what the inside sales bloggers are writing, you would think that inside sales is king. Of course, it is the king of the top of the funnel where everything begins, but with few exceptions, selling rarely ends in that department.

Yesterday I was in the office, preparing for the formal introduction of Objective Management Group’s (OMG) award-winning, new and improved, fourth generation, Sales Candidate Assessment (view the 25-minute Webinar here) when the phone rang and I answered.

The May issue of Top Sales Magazine is now available and in addition to my monthly article, this month’s issue is loaded with important reading on sales and selling.

Earlier this week, I wrote the “Get Your Butt Out of Your Head” article. At that same tournament, I heard an even funnier story from its director. He told us about a team who went 0-7, losing each game by the mercy rule. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, if a team is losing by 12 runs or more after 4 full innings, the game is stopped, showing mercy to the team who was getting slaughtered.

Yeah, just in case you didn’t get that, I’ll lay it out for you.

In a recent mining of Objective Management Group’s data from June of 2013, there was a huge increase in the number of salespeople using social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Spoke, Plaxo and Reachable for selling.

The battle that I inadvertently started with this post moved here where it took on a life of its own. As of this writing, there were 36 comments, some more pointed than others. Gerhard Gschwandtner added this post to the ongoing discussion. Earlier this week, I wrote this post to address most of the confusion that’s out there. Yesterday, this post appeared on the Sales Thought Leaders Blog to add fuel to the fire.

Well, it’s really happened now.

I was following a discussion in the Hubspot VAR Group on LinkedIn, where the question posed to the group was whether or not the first sales hire should be a sales or a marketing person.

Yesterday I read a White Paper about structuring sales forces and it got my blood boiling. It wasn’t that it was a study about sales forces, and it wasn’t that it was a study using large companies. I got upset because of the conclusion – that you should structure your sales force like the big companies.

Objective Management Group has evaluated nearly 10,000 sales forces. Each time, we must ignore titles and focus on roles of each individual in the evaluation. After all, a sales manager without salespeople reporting to him is really a salesperson. A VP without sales managers reporting to her is really a sales manager.

Selling has changed more in the past 5 years than ever before.

With all that, shouldn’t the quality of sales, sales management and sales leadership candidates be on the rise?  Yes, it should.

But there’s a problem.  The quality has not risen.  It seems to have worsened!