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I am a few thousand miles away from the Sales 2.0 conference but it hasn’t kept me from following the events through the Twitter feeds and through the last two days there have been a number of events and presentations which echo a lot of what we believe at ReadyContacts. Right now as I’m blogging, there are some updates coming through from the Sales 2.0 conference where Tom Barrieau of IDC is speaking. One of the points that Tom makes (read from Mike Dampmhoux’s tweet) links back to the post I wrote yesterday titled Outsourcing Inside Sales – How Much Can You Save? which highlights how you can leverage vendors to optimize what your inside sales team delivers. Tom advises companies

We agree completely! Activities such as lead list building and lead qualification can easily be contracted on a pay for delivery model which is far more cost effective needless to say also helps ensure your sales rep’s focus is on converting leads into sales and not diverted to other areas.

The second interesting point IDC made is that they are seeing the largest segment of budgets towards demand generation and lead qualification. This reflects not just the need to generate more leads to meet growing quotas on lower budgets but also the need to deliver higher quality and better qualified leads to sales to make the process efficient. IDC stressed the importance of getting the right information to sales at the right time to push closure. It simply re iterates the need to have marketing, sales enablement (including lead data management and lead qualification), inside sales and field sales working seamlessly together to meet the pressing need to sell more by tuning your sales machine.

So if you have your inside sales force working on finding or qualifying leads remember, it may not be the most cost effective strategy or use of their skills. Uncovering opportunities and bringing home the sales is what inside sales does. Have them do what they do the best.