Knowledgable
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| Knowledgeable--"Think of your brain as a piggy bank. Smart people fill it up with all they learn until they posses a formidable wealth of knowledge." Love Is The Killer App The first step in cultivating value is to make sure that you possess knowledge. The easiest way to obtain knowledge is by reading books. Experience is the slowest way to obtain knowledge. It can also be the most painful. Read books like your career depends on it, because it does. The books you read today will fuel your earning power tomorrow. When you think about reading as an investment in your future you start to look forward to tomorrow, knowing that you are building up a warehouse of value. The book Love Is The Killer App virtually changed my life. It's a short, simple to read book and not very expensive. One of the many skills that I learned from this book is HOW to read a book. I wrote about it in my blog on Dec. 29th, 2006 (see http://hectorcadena.com/blog/?s=clif&submit=). There's a term that the author,Tim Sanders calls Cliffing and Tagging that launched me on my way to a love affair with books. Things are changing so fast that if you aren't reading on a regular basis to keep up with the world, you will get passed up by someone else who is reading. I got into my current industry when I was 40 years old. It a highly technical industry that is dominated by either young kids half my age who know it all or old IT dinosaurs who think they know it all. I remember when I first started in this industry thinking how intimidating it was trying to sell technology products to IT gurus that had been working with computers for ten and sometimes twenty years. But I dove into researching with a zeal and I soon found out that since the technology was changing so rapidly, if I continued to devote at least one or two hours a day to studying, it wouldn't take me too long to catch up and eventually surpass all but those that were also devoting the same amount of time studying that I was. It didn't take me long to build up my knowledge, and as my knowledge increased, my confidence grew along with it. Today I am considered an expert in my industry. Having said all that, if you are new to your industry, don't use your lack of product knowledge as an excuse for a lack of sales productivity. Although I do believe that the more product knowledge that you possess, the better salesman you can be, I also believe that technical knowledge is way over rated when it comes to the sales process. |
