This blog post contains a list of experts in the Inside Sales space. This list is incomplete, is missing people, and in general is not ready for prime-time, this I admit.  Please play along:  My goal is to create a fairly complete list of experts in the inside sales space. My hope is that if I post the “World’s Most Incomplete List of Inside Sales Experts”, readers of this blog will recommend experts to complete my list. I actually tweeted out this request and didn’t get anything, so I feel like I am doing a service to the world. There you have it.

Here is how I am thinking about this list:

1.  Inside Sales is defined as people who make their living using the phone as their primarily vehicle for selling.  This can mean lead qualification or closing revenue over the phone.
2.  An expert for the sake of this exercise fits the following criteria:

a.  Tweets and Followers (sorry, welcome to 2010)
b.  Blogging (once every two weeks is all I was looking for here)
c.   Inside Sales as expertise…there is a lot of REALLY good sales bloggers out there that I read regularly that I purposely left off the list.  The key here is that these people actually care about inside sales, the profession.
d.   There is one guy I have to leave on even though he continues to ignore letters a and b above and that is Stu Silverman who was my mentor and gets a pass.

3. Who I missed is as important as who i have….either send me people I missed in the comments (keep the rules above in your head), tweet it to me, or email me at craig AT funnelholic DOT com.

Experts:

1. Mike Damphousse
2. Trish Bertuzzi
3. Josianne Feigon
4. Stu Silverman
5. Anneke Seley
6. Matt Bertuzzi
7. Ken Krogue
8. Kara Blalock
9. Aaron Ross
10. Chris Snell
11. Steve Richard
12. Geoff Alexander
13. Art Sobczak

Remember, I want more…send, tweet, whatever, but hurry, I want to get this list to 30 in a week.

Ahh, marketing automation, thank you for coming along. Not just because marketers need you, but the technology market needs you. We don’t have as many dirty, bare-knuckled technology wars as we used to or at least any new ones. Especially for a guy like me who loves a good battle. Whenever I’m out with the marketing automation guys, I tell them: “I love standing on the sidelines watching you go at it.” I love it.

That being said, there’s been some recent amazingness in the blogosphere with marketing-automation-exec-on-marketing-automation-exec violence. We can derive some important lessons from it.

So, first, with joy, I present to you the last couple weeks in the war for marketing automation dominance:

1. Lead Sloth’s Genius.com article: This was a fairly innocuous article, with Jep getting the scoop from Scott Mersy at Genius and writing about the two freemium offerings in the marketing automation market. Innocent, right? Check out the war that broke out — particularly between David Thompson, CEO of Genius, and Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo — in the comments.
2. The Eloqua Blog “callout” of Marketo VP of Sales Bill Binch: Bill sent a LinkedIn message to some Eloqua sales reps. Alex Shootman, SVP of Sales at Eloqua, in a brilliant chess counter-move, then posted the message on his blog and, in his tone and message, took the high road. Many will debate whether posting the message on the blog in the first place really constitutes taking the “high road,” but who cares? This is war! How about Bill’s comment: “Old school or not, it got me 6 interviews.”  CLASSIC.

My perspective:

1. “A party isn’t a party without a good fight” — A really mean guy in high school who got in fights every weekend used this as his graduation quote. I’ll never forget being horrified by it, but now I get to use it. The key here, as I mentioned above, is that there is nothing better for a market than a good all-out fight. SAP v. ORCL, ORCL v. MSFT, MSFT v. GOOG. Bring on the trash-talk, lawsuits, gamesmanship, and — sorry Alex — recruiting, which is a big part of this.
2. “Its not a battle unless you are recruiting each others soldiers” —  Sorry, again, Alex, but it’s true. You should be excited that Marketo is going after your guys. Eloqua is the market leader, the king of the hill, so expect your competitors to pull out all the stops and try to beat you in deals, take your clients, and recruit your guys. Sending in recruiters to steal your people is fair game, and you need to fight back with a strong employee retention strategy. That’s war, guys. Embrace it, dig your heals in, and fight.
3. “Everyone needs an enemy” — Lightspeed Venture Partners’ John Luongo was an adviser on our board, and one of his first tips was to declare an enemy. This great tip gives your team focus, direction, motivation, and a common enemy.  The marketing automation war is a perfect example of how enemies only make you better. Lets face it, the current marketing automation market was built around everyone declaring Eloqua the enemy. Now, more and more, people are adding Marketo to this list. But the point is, the winner of the competition will be end users as (hopefully) companies work to make themselves better.
4. “The battlefield has changed, and it’s kinda fun” — Let’s go over what happened here again: EXECUTIVES from these companies went to war in the blog comment fields. I love the age of new media. Instigating your rival can be done in seconds in today’s world. Imagine what that would have taken 10 years ago.
5. “Predicting that a market with 36 companies in it will consolidate is not really a prediction” — With the Market2Lead-Oracle “deal” and IBM’s recent purchase of Unica, bloggers have been “predicting” that the marketing automation market will consolidate. Dude, come on. Even I know that. I can’t even think of an analogy, but of course there is no room for all these marketing automation companies. Thanks for that really insightful comment.

So, there and I didn’t even use “All’s fair in love and war.” Fight on marketing automation people, fight on.

It’s amazing. I’m still talking to marketers who are living in the “10 years ago”. Until everyone is on-board, we have to continue to educate and discuss the most fundamental change in sales and marketing’s life, which is the buyer.

The internet has changed a lot of things in our life (e.g., airport check-in, communication), but the one that effects every B2B and B2C marketer is how people buy. The access to information has changed the buyer we are trying to target forever. In sum, the buyer is in charge. What that means is that you have to change the way you market in order to succeed.

There are a couple of events that I’m really excited about. Focus has joined forces with Marketo and InsideView to hit the road to not only talk to you but talk WITH you about what we can do differently to survive.

It’s starts today:

This morning at 10AM PDT, I’m joining Carlos Hidalgo from Annuitas Group, Maria Pergolino from Marketo, and James Hong from InsideView for a free live webinar on the new customer.  We’re going to talk about the data and share anecdotal stories about the new buyer and how sales AND marketers should handle their approach.  It’s not too late to join, sign up now for the webinar:  Customer 2.0: Why and How You Must Respond to the Changing B2B Buyer or Risk Irrelevance

Then we are taking our conversation to the road on the Customer 2.0 Roadshow, where we can all sit in a room and figure this out. Marketing and sales is invited to join and you should.

Where we’ll be:

• New York - Marriot Marquis, August 4
• Boston Area - Westin Waltham, August 5
• Atlanta - Gordon Biersch, August 17
• Austin - The Belmont, August 19
• Chicago - Hotel Sax, September 16
• San Francisco - Harlot Lounge, September 23

Here is the agenda which will run from 3pm - 7pm:

• Introduction from Focus.com about the changing B2B buyer, followed by Customer 2.0 best practices from the American Association of Inside-Sales Professionals
• Case Studies about marketing to Customer 2.0
• Panel discussion about lessons learned from local marketers doing it best
• Networking & Libations (starts 5:30pm)

It’s going to be a lot of fun and educational, plus it’s free, so check out the details and sign up today.

I recently collaborated on Manticore’s Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook with a number of experts.  All in all, this was a successful ebook creation that I definitely recommend reading it.  It’s why, by the way, I wrote this post.  I just read the other collaborators work and wanted to comment on the chapter by Ardath Albee.  As many of you know, I collaborate once in awhile with Ardath and respect her and her work highly.  Her chapter in the ebook: Use content Intelligence to Drive Pipeline Momentum is pretty much classic Ardath.  First let me say, Ardath is not just writing about content, she is trying to help marketers put into perspective the value of marketing automation.  That’s important as the success of your marketing automation roll-out often times fails for reasons other than the actual system. The reality is that marketing automation gives you the platform to strategically leverage content to move buyers down their purchasing cycle.

There are some key points she makes that compelled me to write:

1. Right message, right time – This is key.  Two things to remember about today’s buyers: they will do their research online without you and they have tons of choices in what they choose to research. That makes content really one of the most important ways to engage this new buyer who doesn’t want/need to contact you/your sales team until they are absolutely ready. In order to break through this issue, marketers must leverage content, but not just any content – they must deliver the right message at the right time.  Here’s a quick snippet:“A content strategy is not just about developing an editorial calendar based on a theme. It’s about designing content to help you gather intelligence about prospects based on which information they engage with and what you can learn by their patterns of their activity over time.”  Boom, perfectly said.
2. Ardath tip on how to map content – One flaw a lot of us who write/talk all the time about the marketing business have is that we sometimes fail to provide actionable advice on how to execute on our ideas and concepts.  In this case, Ardath has a simple way to begin to map your buyers journey, list out all the questions your buyers have from the beginning of the process until they buy.  Leverage those questions into your content map:“Make a list of all the questions your prospects will need to answer in order to build a business case and justify return on investment. Think about this in steps. Their initial questions are not about which companies or solutions to consider. Your prospects are concerned about why they should care, what they need to know and how the issue is impacting their industry and their competitors. Every question you come up with in regards to those areas of concern has an answer that can become a content resource. String them together appropriately and you have a content map.”
3. Now, to tie it together: Use the content to gain visibility into the prospect, an opportunity provided by marketing automation.  So you created all this great content, how does it manifest itself into leads, opportunities, sales ready leads, etc.?  The buyer’s consumption of your content will tell you whether the timing is right to engage, thus the reason for marketing automation.:

“But content without the visibility provided by marketing automation lacks the intelligence to enable you to demonstrate measurable impact to revenue generation. Maximizing the value of content intelligence requires that content be designed to tell you as much about prospects as it tells prospects about how to solve their problems.”

There you have it — content intelligence from Ardath, great stuff to check out when you get the chance.