20 Must-Join LinkedIn Groups for Inside Sales Professionals

As salespeople, the beginning of the year is a crucial time. It’s the time that we reflect on the past year and ask ourselves how we can achieve a new level of mastery over the coming year. Right now virtually all sales reps are wondering how to close more revenue then in 2016. And sales managers are wondering how to accelerate their team’s productivity to new heights.

If you have an eye toward improvement, there may be no better resource than LinkedIn. Where else can you daily exchange best practices with some of the world’s foremost sales leaders? In fact, the best salespeople we’ve met seem equally eager to share their own knowledge as they are to learn from other sales leaders.

Are you ready to reach a new level of sales mastery? LinkedIn is booming with fabulous forums for salespeople to exchange ideas and discuss best practices. In this post, we’ve outlined the 20 best LinkedIn groups for salespeople, sales leaders and sales operations professionals to join. And since it’s only natural to want to share your own or your company’s thought leadership, we’ve also tested the waters to see which groups are open to you posting your content.

Check out these 20 thriving sales communities to learn from the best and share your own wisdom with others!

For All Inside Sales Professionals

Inside Sales Experts

The Bridge Group’s Trish Bertuzzi has achieved legendary status in the world of inside sales by consistently releasing compelling reports and content. The objective of her Inside Sales Experts group is to give inside sales executives a forum to share ideas and information. While the group is strict about not accepting links to third-party articles, it is a great forum to exchange ideas with some of the world’s top inside sales leaders.

Open to blog posts? Nope! This group is for discussions and sharing knowledge only.
Owner: Trish Bertuzzi

The Sales Association

The Sales Association is one of the premier associations for sales and business development professionals from all industries worldwide. Their mission is to provide members a powerful and strategic means to connect with one another at events and online, grow professionally, and drive profits within their organizations.

Open to blog posts? Yep! Relevant blog posts welcome.
Owner: Jeff Arnold

AA-ISP (Association of Inside Sales Professionals) Group

The AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals Group) is for the AA-ISP members, affiliates, sponsors and “friends”. The objective is to provide an additional vehicle to learn, communicate, and share. Participants are encouraged to contribute, share thoughts, questions, and experiences. You can also share articles, news, and any items you feel would be important to the group.

Open to blog posts? Relevant blog posts are welcome. But don’t try to post gated content such as whitepapers.
Owner: Larry Reeves

Sales Best Practices

The Sales Best Practices group is about sharing experiences and sales and marketing best practices. Some of these topics include: sales development/prospecting, marketing, cold calls, productivity, management, sales acceleration tools, CRM, and recruitment.

Open to blog posts? Not at all! Save it for another group and use this group to discuss best practices.
Owner: Laurent J.V. Dubois

Inside Sales Acceleration

An open forum for all inside sales professionals to discuss ways to sell smarter, faster and more successfully. The goal of this community is to connect inside sales professionals so they can exchange tips, ask questions and engage in thoughtful discussions about sales strategy and sales acceleration technology.

Open to blogs? Yes! Your blog posts are welcome.
Owner: William Tyree

Sales 2.0

This group is for sales people, sales managers and business owners who want to learn about Social Selling and cutting-edge sales tactics.

Open to blog posts? Yes. But ONLY in the promotions section.
Owner: Nigel Edelshain

Sales Hacker Community

Sales Hacker hosts an awesome conference and also is a great spot to check out thought leadership leadership. This group is a forum for sales hackers to share best practices with other sales hackers. Definitely worth checking out, since some of the world’s top sales leaders post here.

Open to blog posts: From the group rules: “If you’re going to post a link to an article in the discussion section, it should be unbiased towards a product/company and should aim as a conversation starter. A human will be moderating this, so make sure it’s a valuable discussion starter.”
Owner: Max Altschuler

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing alignment is absolutely vital to inside sales success. This is a fantastic forum for sales and marketing professionals to come together to share some of the best ways to collaborate. When sales and marketing are on the same page it almost always results in way more revenue!

Open to blog posts? Nope. Just discussions and questions.
Owner: Rod Sloane

Sales Gravy

Started by quarterback turned sales leader Jeb Blount, Sales Gravy helps sales professionals, sales leaders, and sales recruiters gain the winning edge. Join this forum to discuss sales techniques, sales training, sales jobs, sales careers, sales tips, sales recruiting and sales processes.

Open to blog posts? Go for it!
Owner: Jeb Blount

The IT Sales Global Community

The IT Sales Global Community is exclusively for information technology sales professionals including: account managers, sales managers, business managers, channel managers and all sales executives around the world.

Open to blog posts? Sure are.
Owner: Lucas Stiefel

B2B Sales, Marketing, Social Media & Lead Generation

Tips and content from the world of B2B appointment setting, B2B lead generation, and general sales & marketing. A place to share, discuss and network about all things B2B.

Open to blog posts? Relevant blogs are welcome!
Owner: Garrett Hollander

B2B Sales Connections

B2B Sales Connections is an online sales training website with free sales resources, a specialized job board & free resume listing services dedicated only to business to business sales professionals. This group is a great place to network and discuss sales secrets.

Open to blog posts? Yes. But they better be used to start a real discussion.
Owner: Susan A Enns

Enterprise Software Sales Professionals

This group has been created to advance collaboration and lead sharing among the software sales community. Join this community if you want to learn and benefit from discussions, relationships and opportunities available for software sales professionals around the globe.

Open to blog posts? Go for it!
Owner: Stephen Gilkenson

Sales 2.0 Best Practices

According to Wikipedia, Sales 2.0 is defined as: describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications that aim to improve the speed, collaboration, customer engagement and accountability of the sales process. This group is aimed toward giving salespeople a forum to explore next-generation sales techniques.

Open to blog posts? Very much so.
Owner: Stephen Gilkenson

LinkedIn Groups For Sales Operations/Enablement

Sales Enablement Gurus

The Sales Enablement Guru group is open to those who are focused on the collection of disciplines and best practices that give sales people the power to more effectively communicate with prospective clients. This is a group for those that facilitate the communication and interaction between your sales team and experts (or gurus) within your organization to deliver the best message in the field.

Open to blog posts: Only contribute content that is relevant to group discussions
Owner: Jillian Eyl

Sales Enablement Leader Exchange

This is an awesome LinkedIn group for sales operations leaders! It’s designed to help sales enablement leaders exchange ideas and best practices around sales operation, sales team development, sales and marketing alignment and sales tech effectiveness.

Open to blog posts? Only share content relevant to the group.
Owner: Brian Lambert

Sales Operations Group

For professionals focused on sales operations. This group is for like minded professionals who support the sales organization – building quota’s, designing territories, communicating sales plans, or otherwise handling sales operations.

Open to blog posts: Yep!
Owner: Paul Turner

LinkedIn Groups For Inside Sales Leaders

Sales and Marketing Leaders

This is a fantastic group for sales and marketing leaders (or ambitious sales professionals). The group covers a wide range of topics including: sales performance improvement, outbound sales, inbound marketing, social media, social sales, sales acceleration, lead generation, closing business and more. It’s also a great stop to share blog posts since it doesn’t have a narrow focus.

Open to blog posts? Sure is!
Owner: Doyle Slayton

Sales Management Executives

This is a massive LinkedIn Group dedicated to sales management. Companies throw their best sales people into the role of sales manager, but fail to train, develop, and mentor them. This group is dedicated to bridging the knowledge gap allowing sales management executives to thrive. If you are a sales leader, join to share great ideas with colleagues.

Open to blog posts? Yes indeed.
Owner: Lee Salz

Sales/Marketing Executives (CSO/CMO)

While this group has a strict policy about not posting third-party articles, it is a good group to demonstrate that you are a thought leader by sharing helpful advice in other people’s posts. This is definitely a great group to network with successful sales and marketing leaders.

Open to blog posts? No way. Keep it to discussions.
Owner: Eric Blumthal

Looking to exchange inside sales best practices? Join our Inside Sales Acceleration LinkedIn Group!