Why do we need another sales blog?

I follow 28 blogs in my Google Reader and read many more on an ad hoc basis. This is obviously just a tiny subset of the thousands of blogs that are out there somewhere. There are a number of sales and business development blogs as well. So, this begs the question, why do I want to start another one. Here is my answer:

1) Sales is hard and getting harder given the current economic environment and the more information, benchmarking, networking and available help the better. I hope to add value in some small way and will continue to read, participate in and link to relevant resources around the world.

2) In addition to being hard, sales, how we sell and what tools we use to sell are changing rapidly. We now talk more and more about inbound marketing and social media then we talk about cold calling and the sales cycle. I think that there is a lot of opportunity to use these new tools to ramp up sales for your company but at the same time we need to continue to block and tackle and execute close to the ground just like the old days. All of these online tools also create an unprecedented amount of visibility for customers and prospects into our companies and products. Therefore we need to spend even more time ensuring that we have great products and great customer service because if we don't, word will travel fast.

3) Virtual Sales are different. While there is a lot of information on sales, Sales 2.0, lead generation, marketing and etc available online, I didn't find much if any specifically focused on how to maximize sales for B2B products and services in a virtual environment with little to no in-person customer contact. If you know of some great content in this area, please let me know. Given the tight budgets and the potential return to high oil prices, we have to assume that direct in-person prospect and customer contact is going to be reduced. I also didn't find much about how to best manage, motivate and report on a virtual sales force that sit in multiple global corporate or home offices.

4) Different point view. Most of the blogs, white papers and information, that I have found on sales have been created by sales and marketing consultants who want you to hire them to either train your team, organize it or replace it. While many of these people are very knowledgeable and I believe outsourcing your lead gen or sales in certain cases works, I thought I could offer a point of view of someone actively selling and managing a sales force for a B2B product company who is interested in creating a discussion and learning as much as possible as opposed to looking to find customers for my consulting practice. (Full disclosure: If this blog becomes wildly successful, I reserve the right to leave my current job to start my own sales and marketing consulting company in order to leverage my new personal brand.)

5) Most of all, I want to create a discussion that will hopefully help me learn more about my craft and help me better create leads and sales for my company while exploring and keeping up with the new tools and sensibilities.

6) And, finally, football season is almost over and the Patriots didn't even make the playoffs so I needed something else to do. The Celtics are doing well and the Red Sox are getting ready to go to spring training but they never caught my attention as much as football.

7-10) I wanted to have enough to call this a Top Ten List.