Read Read and Read!

I remember when I was young and my parents telling me how important reading is. I thought they were nuts. Read? That is boring I would tell them. Or I am never going to use reading as a means to make money. I would try to get my hands on the "cliff notes" but that was a suicide mission. If my father every found out that I used "cliff notes" that would be a bad day in the Reilly household with no TV and no hockey for weeks. So nonetheless, I did read quite a bit but never really liked it at all. I don't think many young people liked reading anyway. As I got older, got through college and entered into my professional career, you guessed it I still did not like to read. LOL. But when I was forced to make a career change about 11 years ago a change happened. I did not have a choice but to learn a new career and learn it fast. Going from the Finance Sales Market to Technology was not easy but I attribute my easy transition and success to the tremendous amount of reading I have done over the years. If I heard a new term or a comment or something that I just did not understand I would look it up and study it for hours. In addition, I would ask all of my peers and engineers to let me know what they were reading and studying to enable them to make recommendations on technology solutions and I did the same. And you can probably understand by now that I now LOVE to read and read as much as I possibly can. Mostly industry publications and motivational books. Read, Read and Read. It will benefit you in spades!!

PS: You can also gain some good conversational content from reading. ;)


Shawn

A salesman's most powerful tool

There are many reasons why sales people have gotten into sales. It could be because we love money or love people but most of us love to talk. Being able to talk and talk a lot with confidence and conviction is very important in sales. But it's not the most important piece of the puzzle. Did anyone ever tell you talk too much? I know I've been told that. Our mouth is important but a lot of times it's counterproductive in sales. In my opinion our most powerful tool is our ears. My most productive meetings are meetings where I asked questions most likely open-ended questions and listen to the answers my prospects and customers give me. This will allow you to uncover where their real needs are and how to best provide and present your solution to them. If you are constantly talking and not giving the customer time to think about how they want the solution to be solved you might never get to the end result. Try in your next meeting to talk as little as possible. Go against the grain on giving a ppt presentation right off the bat. Ask them a bunch of questions prior to the presentation and I will guarantee the meeting will be much more productive.