A business owner screams, "We need more sales!" A sales person cries out, "We need more leads!" A few short years ago, the small business owner would have been justified in saying good riddance and tossing that salesperson out on his or her rear end. But times have changed(enter inbound marketing and social media), and the business owner needs to hear this plea with an open mind and not brush it off as just a complaint from a whiny sales rep.

Pause, take a deep breath and ponder...

Is my sales person truly whiny or does your small business have a marketing problem? Is the money I'm spending on marketing producing leads for the people selling?

Ponder all you want but it is marketing's function to drive the consumer from awareness to a point of decision and the salesperson's job to get them to take action. Asking the salesperson to do this greatly increases the length of the sales cycle and leads to high turnover in sales organizations because humans just aren't wired for this.  Moreover, most sales organizations place this responsibility on the sales people exclusively.

If you admit you have a marketing problem, inbound marketing can help decrease the length of your sales cycle and maximize the ROI of your sales team. An investment in inbound marketing supports your sales process.

According to HubSpot's "2010 State of Inbound Marketing Report," the trends of 2009 have been reconfirmed. Inbound marketing decreases cost per lead by 60%. I would also contend having more sales ready leads has a major impact on the length of the sales cycle for a wide variety of reasons.

If salespeople are randomly calling on prospects (whether they are existing customers or not), they are still just throwing darts in a non linear space-time continuum hoping it lands on a star. But if they're only catching roughly 3 out of a 100 people who are looking to buy, the return on investment (ROI) for their time invested in prospecting sucks.

Over half of the respondents in the study claim they will increase their inbound marketing budget in 2010. As Seth Godin said, "by the time there is a case study in your specific industry, it's going to be way too late for you to catch up." Gary Vaynerchuk also has emphasized how fast business moves and why a wait-and-see approach is dangerous.

Wake up and start creating content and enable your small business to participate in the conversations happening throughout the Web. Business are acquiring new customers by spending a portion of their marketing budget for lead generation and not just brand awareness – although you get both of these by embracing inbound marketing.

Don't set up your salespeople for failure. It's your responsibility to keep current with market trends, not just within your industry, but in how actual marketing and selling is getting done these days.