Over the last few months, we've really cut back on inviting guests to write for the PersistIQ sales blog. It was an experiment, and you voted with your views. The results: you read, shared and found more value from articles by PersistIQ team members.

Now, more than ever, Sales Enablement is coming out of the woodwork as a full-fledged industry, rather than a byproduct of the work sales (and marketing) was already doing.

Metrics are what modern sales teams are made of. But at a time when technology grants us access to everything from our reps’ number of monthly connects, to talk time, to email opens, to conversation, to social selling activity and everything in between, how are we supposed to identify what’s most important for us as sales leaders, and for our reps, to focus on?

A big obstacle facing outbound sales reps is making sure they’re talking to the right person, especially if you’re doing targeted account selling/account based selling. If you have the perfect pitch and deliver it to your ideal company but you’re talking to the someone who has zero buying power, you’ve just wasted your time and theirs. That’s why it’s important to spend some extra time finding the right person to get in front of in the first place.