“Today's buyer is empowered by the Internet. A modern demand generation strategy means less focus on interruptive outbound marketing and more focus on inbound marketing.”

As we have discussed in this chapter, selling to an inbound lead requires a new set of skills. For this reason, specializing the members of your sales team by the types of leads they cover (inbound versus outbound) is a good idea.

Curiosity: the ability to understand a potential customer's context through effective questioning and listening.

salespeople need to be equipped with access to the details of each prospect's engagement so they can act on the information.

Flip the Demand Generation Formula—Get Buyers to Find You

This dysfunctional relationship between Sales and Marketing is the kiss of death in a buyer-driven world. Buyers begin their journey online, conducting research on the problems they are experiencing or the opportunities they would like to pursue. Marketing needs to own this initial stage of engagement, nurture buyers through the initial phases of

Somebody out there holds the most important element of the sales acceleration formula: improving the underlying global perception of sales itself. Perhaps it is you.

Contests can be aligned with desired behaviors and, unlike commission plans, can be temporary and short-term focused. Contests can even be used to build team culture.

Don't hire a recruiting agency. Don't build a corporate recruiting team. Build a recruiting agency within your corporation.