It’s true.  Do you?  Reading this blog would apparently qualify based on Inc.com’s article To Gain Competitive Edge, Companies Turn to Blogs, Video, and Social Networks.

A study by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research found that 51 percent of Inc. 500 companies are monitoring social media, and they are doing so by various methods, including reading RSS feeds, looking at Web statistics, tracking video downloads, and watching online competitive activity.

Interesting.  The article isn’t overly descriptive of the methods, but the blog piece is certainly worth noting.

“Inc. 500 companies are saying that not only is it important for us to communicate in an outbound way, but it’s also important to listen to what is going on out there and what other companies are saying,” Mattson said. One of the popular ways to keep up with competitors, according to Mattson, is to read other companies’ blogs. “Blogs and their content have become a real market force, and provide the ability for word of mouth to spread and be around for a very long time,” Mattson added.

That’s an approach we subscribe to also.

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SellingPower.com offers a terrific how-to article regarding the sales manager’s role in developing his or her team. How to Ace Your Most Important Responsibility is a must read for any sales manager.

The article categorizes the sales manager’s approach into 5 straight-forward stages:

1. Set the schedule
2. Pre-call planning
3. During the call
4. Post-call critique
5. End of the day

A perfect breakdown of what has to happen to coach your team:

To ensure the call remains in the rep€™s hands, sit further away from the buyer than your rep does. Lean back rather than forward in your chair. If the customer directs a question to you, turn it over to the rep. And never speak to the customer €œexecutive to executive€ or do anything else to make the salesperson feel less than equal in the customer€™s presence. If you feel the need to nudge a call in the right direction, you can do so gently by using a question to make a point indirectly. For instance, if the salesperson suggests the wrong model of product, ask if the customer might also be interested in X product (the right one). Finally, remember to tune into the specific skills you want to evaluate in your rep.

And there is this suggestion at the end of the article:

On a final note, you might consider creating a checklist to help you evaluate your reps in pre-determined areas. This not only helps you focus your coaching efforts, it helps your reps to see areas of strength and weakness and track improvement over time.

We offer this checklist today – customized to your sales rep’s needs.

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No surprises here from the ManageSmarter.com article – Roundin’ Up Reps. Our clients often ask us what the employment market is like right now. For most of this year we have been telling them it is a candidate’s market right now. Some seem surprised while others seem to be familiar with this fact.

In case there were any doubts, this short article lays out the findings from a CareerBuilder.com survey (my emphasis):

The 2007 CareerBuilder.com Midyear Employment Forecast indicates that “46 percent of sales employers currently have open positions for which they cannot find qualified candidates, an increase from 39 percent heading into the first half,” reads a release on the findings. Employers are also more likely to give raises and raise base salaries for recruitment reasons.

Job opportunities opening up in the third quarter is “typical pretty much across the board for most employers,” says Tanya Flynn, corporate communications manager and career adviser for CareerBuilder. Flynn adds that particularly in the sales industry there will always be a demand for top sales recruits.

Also polled in the study were 389 sales employees. While 16 percent say are engaged in a job hunt, 50 percent admit that they passively consider a career shift but are not actively pursuing one, the results say.

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