I’m sorting through the thousands of blogs I follow on a weekly basis and I come across this blog posting in the sales arena for the top 50 sales blogs based on Hubspot’s Grading Tool. Sean Black at the SalesCrunch Blog pulled this list together and here’s a short summary:

Here at SalesCrunch we follow well over 200 of the best sales blogs each day! This is obviously far too many for any normal human to filter and process. So when we saw Hubspot post their Top 100 Marketing Blogs using the new groups feature in Blog Grader last week we were super excited. We immediately decided to feed our list of 200+ blogs into the tool to generate  the SalesCrunch Top 50 Sales Blogs. The list is generated according to the “Grade” in Blog Grader and is updated daily so the list is always accurate and up to date.

It started me thinking about your sales leadership and sales staff.

What is your sales team reading, researching, and studying to become more adept at selling, sales management, negotiation, prospecting, leveraging social media to generate leads and referrals? If your sales management and sales team is a lot like the thousands of sales professionals I’ve interviewed over the years, then they are probably doing NOTHING on their own unless you force-feed it to them.

One of the differences between average/mediocre sales management-sales professionals and top talent is that top talent never stops learning. They are like sponges. They cannot get enough new information to become better at their craft. The best part is that they don’t wait for you to teach them or provide learning opportunities. They seek it out on their own.

Do you agree with this statement – top talent never stops learning?

What type of people do you have in your sales organization – average/mediocre staff waiting for you to give them learning opportunities OR are they top talent sales professionals reaching and grabbing for every ounce of information they can find that will help them become more effective?

In our Sales Recruiting Division of our Executive Search Practice, we’ve started to require our recruiters to ask questions about continuous learning to separate out the top talent.

Some of these questions might include:

• What are 3-5 books you’ve read recently on a sales related topic?
• What are your favorite sales learning/education blogs that you follow regularly?
• What sales learning/education forums-groups do you belong to on LinkedIn or other platforms?
• Where have you found recently a great idea or tip on sales that has improved your capability or skill?
• Walk me through the learning you’ve proactively sought out over the last year or two to become better in sales – learning that your company didn’t provide or give to you.

These are just a few of the questions we probe to try and validate is this sales candidate a top talent individual and are they a continuous life-long learner. Are they growing and expanding their capability at a rapid pace?

Is it time to look at your sales team and score them along a learning/personal growth matrix? How about changing your sales interviews?

I’d love to hear your feedback from your next sales interview when you pose these questions to a potential candidate. Would you be comfortable asking these questions? Do you believe they start to get at important traits of success for top talent sales professionals and sales managers?

To read the full blog post by Sean Black, click the link below:

SalesCrunch Top 50 Sales Blogs 2011

Barry Deutsch

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