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3 Ways to Effectively Consume Content Faster, Smarter And Better

Sales for Life Admin
Sales for Life Admin

Consume content

As a modern business professional—particularly a sales professional, you need to constantly consume content. Consuming content allows you to remain current and stay on top of industry trends so you can have insightful conversations with your buyers that will help them solve their challenges. You’ll be their expert and guide them in a consultative way to help them towards the best solution for them. All of this equals results!

But reading content is time-consuming. And if you’re relying solely on reading, it will slow down your progress. So how can you massively increase your content consumption in an efficient and effective way?

The key is to maximize your idle time. During your commute to work, while you’re walking your dog, working out or engaging in other activities, you can listen to audiobooks or consume content on your mobile device on the go.

Three of my favourite tools to help you massively increase your content consumption:

1. Audible.com

Audible.com is the audiobook wing of Amazon. Full disclosure: People told me I needed to start listening to audiobooks, but it took me two or three years before I actually started doing it. Finally, there was a book I really wanted to read, but I didn’t have time to read it all, so I thought ‘why not give audiobooks a try?’

I’ve never looked back. I immediately loved audiobooks. I can consume them while I’m commuting, travelling, or walking—I can listen to an audiobook and consume content while still getting from Point A to Point B safely (don’t try reading and driving).

Audible.com is also available as a mobile app, so it’s ready to go anywhere with you.

Some of my favourite books from Audible.com:

1. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone.

10x rule

This is an entertaining book that discusses the keys to success through taking “massive action.” The audiobook is boisterous and energetic, and I highly recommend it.

2. Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

Personal SuccessThis book discusses the science and psychology behind behavioral change. It says you can change any habit by understanding the six influencing factors that either work for you or against you. Whatever your goal—from becoming more successful at work to kicking a smoking addiction, this book can help you achieve it.

2. Blinkist

This is also a mobile app that is available with a monthly subscription. In a nutshell, it’s the Coles notes version of books. You can choose to read the text or listen to the audio version. I love Blinkist because it saves so much time. To listen to a typical audiobook on Audible.com, it can take you six to 10 hours. But Blinkist takes some of the most popular books, including sales and marketing, entrepreneurship, technology, science, and psychology, and condenses them into 10 to 20 “blinks,” which are summaries of the key points. Each “blink” is about two minutes long, and the entire book takes about 15 to 20 minutes to consume. So now you can consume the key points of a book in 15-20 minutes!

As a sales professional, you know that there are so many sales and marketing books that are considered a rite of passage in the industry. You need to be able to speak to them intelligently, but who’s got time to read all these books?

With Blinkist, you can consume these key books quickly. Blinkist sums everything up, cuts out the noise, and drives at those key points, which will be the only things you’ll remember in six months anyway.

Here are a couple of my favourite Blinkist books:

Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

Greg Mckeown

This book is all about scheduling. Its premise is that you need to look at what is most essential in your day, and focus your time on the high-value, high-revenue generating tasks. Instead of getting lost in emails or social messages that won’t produce a lot for you, you should spend time on the $20000 an hour tasks, not the $20 an hour tasks.

The Art of Influencing Anyone by Niall Cassidy.

Niall Cassidy

The key message of this book is that we all have the ability to persuade others by using effective strategies in how to interact. With the right strategies, we can influence others in the products we have to sell. The premise of this book is “be surprising, be controversial.”

3. Feed.ly

My third content consumption solution is for reading, but it’s so great that it had to make the list. Feed.ly is a content aggregator that helps you get the exact content you want delivered right to your mobile phone. Here’s how it works. You can set Feed.ly up on your computer or mobile phone, and it will send you a plethora of content from many different sources, divided into topics. For example, if I want content on Social Selling or B2B sales strategies, I can do a search, and Feed.ly will compile the best content on those topics and conveniently deliver them to me. 

Several favourites from Feed.ly

1. Hubspot: Hubspot really takes the most modern approach to the buyer’s journey, helping you understand all different components of it and showing you how to interact with the buyer’s journey from start to finish.

2. Business2Community: B2C is one of the most frequent content publishers. They have a number of different feeds that publish very valuable actionable tips and tricks to make your sales and marketing more effective, including how to optimize your website and improve SEO, how to be a better content marketer, how to get more out of LinkedIn, and more.

These three tools will help you to massively increase your content consumption, add value to your buyers, and increase your success. From audiobooks to blogs, consume content on a daily basis will help you develop your expertise and stay on top of key trends in sales. You’ll be able to leverage specific insights to further conversations with buyers. Most importantly there are resources available like audiobooks, Blinklist and Feed.ly that will help you reduce the time it takes to consume content.

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