Why Sales Development and Market Response Should Be Separated In companies where incoming lead volume justifies having a dedicated market response function, separate the Market Response from Sales Development to make both teams more focused and productive. The roles are very different (inbound reps receive leads to work to qualify, while outbound reps initiate calls and emails), and it’s very challenging for a rep to switch between the two mindsets throughout the day. The Market Response Reps become experts at efficiently qualifying inbound and marketing-generated leads, and the Sales Development team only prospects for incremental business at accounts that need to be pursued, where there is no active or pre-existing interest. How We Learned This The Hard Way At Salesforce.com Salesforce.com learned this the hard way in 2004, when we changed from having separate Sales Development teams doing inbound and outbound roles, to having the same team handle both inbound and outbound responsibilities. Within a week, productivity had dropped by 30%. Within three weeks, it was clear that the productivity drop was caused by the mixing of the responsibilities and was not going to improve with time. Salesforce.com quickly changed the structure back to separate teams doing Sales Development and Market Response functions, and productivity rose back to prior levels. It was this kind of specialization that was important to helping achieve massive breakthroughs in results. Through 2008, the Cold Calling 2.0 team at Salesforce.com (the“EnterpriseBusiness RepresentativeTeam”)had sourced about $100 million in recurring annual revenue for Salesforce.com. Year after year, return on investment on each person in the role was about 3000%.