Read Every Day To Become An Expert In Sales
In my recent interview with Brian Burns for his podcast, The Brutal Truth, I challenged salespeople to read more. We didn’t explore the content that salespeople should read, though, and this post will dig into that question.
Self-development expert Brian Tracy tells us, “If you read only one book per month, that will put you into the top 1 percent of income earners in our society.” Now, imagine if you read one book a week what will happen.
Earl Nightingale said many years ago:
One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.
If you read one hour a day in your chosen field, that translates into one book a week. One book per week translates into roughly 50 books a year. Do that for five years, and you have read 250 books in your field. You will quickly become an expert in your area.
What should you read?
I do not recommend that you focus on one thing and become an expert at it if you are in sales. I think that an expert in sales is an expert at understanding and influencing the motivations of people. To do that, you need to have a very rounded understanding of your world, the people you interact with, and your prospects’ needs and goals.
I suggest you break up your reading to cover these three topics.
- Selling – you are a salesperson, so you should read about improving your skills.
- The World – you should be knowledgeable about the world around you to relate to your prospects and customers.
- Your Industry – you should know more about your industry and the technology driving your industry than anyone you meet.
Read about selling
Your world is different from mine. I don’t know what you sell, but if you are reading this blog, you must be in sales or desire to be in sales. So let’s start there: spend every day reading five blog posts. It is a good start being here at this post, but I do not put out five articles a day.
There are two great ways to find five sales articles per day. You can subscribe to Feedly (or a similar RSS aggregator) and subscribe to the RSS feeds to some of the best sales blogs. If you don’t like RSS feeds, create a list on Twitter that gets feeds from the best sales blogs.
In my opinion, the best sales blogs today are:
- Eliminate Your Competition
- Sales Xceleration
- Sales Coach Dew
- The “Ah-Ha” Moment
- Heavy Hitter Sales
- Sales 3.0 Conference Blog
- The Sales Blog
- The Center for Sales Strategy Blog
- Close
- Sales Hacker
- CloserIQ
- You Don’t Need A CRM
- Selling Power Blog
- Sales For Life
- Jill Konrath
- Art & Science of Complex Sales
- Engage
Read about the world.
It is crucial that you understand what is going on in the world. It is especially important to understand what is happening in the business world since you are in business.
There are only two choices for reading what is happening in the business world. Pick one of the two newspapers and read five articles in it every day. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (and have for decades). It is the larger of the two in the US and has a wide readership among US business leaders.
Read about your industry.
It isn’t easy to give you great suggestions for your industry. The easiest way to provide you with assistance is to explain how I pay attention to the sectors I watch.
The method below uses Flipboard, but it would also work with other content aggregators such as Google News and Apple News.
Every day, I spend time on Flipboard and read at least five articles (and usually 15-20 articles) on the interesting industries and technologies. I will save the best of these articles in my bookmarks file and occasionally forward them to prospects and customers.
I do this by going to the Flipboard Topic listing and adding necessary technologies to this list. Once you have an account, you can go to https://flipboard.com/following/topics. However, adding topics is easier using their app, which you can download to your Android phone or your iPhone (or their tablets). Once you have your app setup, follow these steps:
- Open the app and tap the Following tab.
- Swipe across to Topics and choose Find More Topics to Follow, and you’ll see the topic picker. Select topics that interest you, or use the search feature for diving even deeper.
- Select Done when you’re finished.
Return to the topic picker from time to time to keep personalizing your Flipboard with new and exciting content.
Don’t stop learning.
I will be giving more tips on getting more content to make you a better salesperson. Subscribe to my newsletter so that you never miss my content.
Brian Tracy and Earl Nightingale talked about reading books, and I spent most of this article talking about reading articles. Reading books is essential as well, and I must recommend my book, Eliminate Your Competition.
You may purchase my book, Eliminate Your Competition, from your favorite book retailer. The ebook version is available at the most popular retailers such as Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is also widely available at such retailers as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.