Yesterday, I read an article that was very consistent with what I was complaining about last week when I wrote The One Thing Missing From the New Way of Selling.  I have tremendous respect for the article's author, Mark Roberge, who has built a great sales force over at Hubspot.  They use Objective Management Group's (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessments to identify the new kind of salespeople who will succeed there.  

Mark and I go back a long way.  I worked for his dad back in 1973 and his dad worked for me earlier in the current century.  OMG became one of Hubspot's very first customers in 2006 and all of my articles are hosted on their terrific platform.  

I loved Mark's article about the 4 Habits of a New Generation of Salespeople.  You should read the article!  It's a great description of how their salespeople and many inside salespeople operate. It describes mostly young, social salespeople, who sell inside and to marketers who are also mostly social sellers.  

On the other hand, while many inside sales experts are writing terrific articles, they are at the same time attempting to get the entire sales population to do what works so well for inside/inbound sales (and sell their inside/inbound services).  And it does work if you have a suitable product, price range, technology, target market and sales cycle.  It works if you have a dedicated team of top-of-the-funnel inbound marketers.  However, for every company and product where this makes sense, I can name three where it doesn't.  I love the new way of selling.  Just don't proclaim that the new way is the only way.  That's like saying, now that we have developed a spaceship that can take private citizens to outer space, everyone shall commute to work that way.  When commercial airlines made flying affordable enough for everyone, it didn't eliminate buses, trains and cars.  It simply became a better choice for long-distance trips.  We still use our cars to drive 120 miles!

While we are on the subject of old and new, I wrote an article that appears in the new issue of Top Sales Magazine.  You can download the magazine here.  The article, What is the Big Secret That Powers Baseline Selling? includes some video and some terrific explanations of what continues to make the process and methodology work so well for so many salespeople, 10 years after it was written.  And guess which book their salespeople read over at Hubspot?  Yeah, once they have a prospect, they still have to sell...

Selling is still selling and while a lot has changed in the last 10 years, a lot of it hasn't.  I'm a social seller.  Social sellers get found, find prospects and connect using a myriad of social selling tools.  But once a meeting has been scheduled, the social must be dropped in favor of the selling.   A prospect should only be aware of a terrific conversation, but process and methodology must be hidden backstage.

I wrote an article for the Sales Blog over at Hubspot on how Inbound Marketing has really been around, like, forever.  

Mark Roberge, the Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot, wrote an article there this week that has elicted one of the best discussions I've seen in the Sales Blogoshere - and not a single attack on any of the contributors (as of the last time I checked).  The article was about who should be your first sales hire.  I wrote my own article on the topic 3 years ago called Startups and the Dilemma of the First Sales Hire.  The inbound audience loves to engage in discussions, but not so much the CEO's, Presidents and Sales VP's who read these articles.  Chime in!

The February Issue of Top Sales Magazine was published yesterday and it includes an article with my latest thinking about using the phone for prospecting.  You can download the issue here.  This issue also announces a Top Sales Contest for Salespeople.  If there is a salesperson who you would like to nominate, instructions and guidelines are here.  

My article Tips for Great Keynotes and Better Sales Presentations was named a Top 10 Sales Article for the week over at TopSalesWorld.com.

I'll be speaking near you over the next two months:

WEBINAR: Leading the Ideal Sales Force Part 1
Wednesday, February 5, 11 AM ET
Register: http://hub.am/1jLizo2 

Mark Roberge, Sales VP at Hubspot, is responsible for building one of those kick-ass sales forces and he contributed a guest post to Software Advice on Building a Sales Team the Hubspot Way. 

When I read the article, I noted a couple of things that I really liked:

1. They learn very little about sales in the first 30 days.  Mark said, "Instead, they start a blog, create a website, open a Twitter account and begin email marketing campaigns.  By the time training is over, they will rank in Google for a few dozen keywords in their market, have a few dozen followers on Twitter and have written a few dozen blog articles.  HubSpot’s content marketing strategy allows the rep to establish online credibility before even getting on the phone with his or her first prospect."  Cool.
    
2. A steady flow of inbound leads.  That sure helps new salespeople get started, doesn't it?