More on Inside Sales – Compensation and Survey Insights

Isaac Garcia, CEO of CentralDesktop, sent us a few good resources on inside sales…

2009InsideSalesReport.pdf 2009 Inside Sales Metrics and Compensation is all about how expansion stage software companies are leveraging inside sales. Interesting tid bits I got out of it:
– Survey data indicates that inside sales is typically adopted post the start-up phase and in targeting early majority technology buyers and beyond. I may be biased by our heavy SaaS based portfolio… but we see inside sales as the starting point for any distribution model, including the start-up and early adopter phases.
– Average team size is 12 reps. I suspect that is highly correlated to the revenue size of the companies in the group. We believe that the smallest team size should be 4 reps, with a recruiting ramp in classes of 4-5.

2009LeadGenerationReport.pdf 2009 Inside Sales Lead Generation Metrics and Compensation is all about how expansion stage software companies are leveraging inside sales for lead generation.
– Companies with lead generation specialization within the sales team are ones that have passed the start-up phase into the expansion stage… which is when tiering a sales team starts making sense.
– Marketing evolves from being responsible for generating leads… to being responsible for fostering leads until the leads turn into qualified leads (see my post on Lead Management Science Not Art)
– Only 26% of companies puts the lead gen team in marketing… Unfortunate reflection of the fact that typical marketing managers are not process oriented enough to run a process-intensive lead gen team. On the other hand, lead gen and qualification is the responsibility of marketing… and human based lead qualification is an essential component of that function.
– I agree with the Bridge Group that a ratio of 1:3 for lead gen to sales rep is the right ratio. 1:2 makes the sales team resource heavy… 1:4 makes it cost heavy.

Isaac also pointed us to Phone Works a services firm that specializes in building inside sales teams. In particular, the Q4 2009 VP Sales Compensation Report and Q4 2009 Inside Sales Compensation Report.

Another reference point is a recent post I wrote about inside sales in general… Inside Sales – Science not Art

Give us a call if you’re looking for investors that provide sales support and marketing strategy implementation. Why did I just say that? Ask Compendium.