Recently I got an email inquiry from a buddy of mine at Lucidera asking what publications salespeople read. Even though I was in sales for years, Jigsaw’s main community target is salespeople, I talk to them all day long and Jigsaw is partnered with several content providers for sales, I nonetheless was about as useless as a pre- dotcom bust business development manager in answering the question.
The simple reason is this: I honestly don’t think that there is a much of a noticeable overlap in what sales professionals read as it correlates to their job function. I asked our salespeople and got answers like “Maxim, Sports Illustrated, J Crew, People, Car Magazine, Travel and Leisure and Men’s Health” but all those are read based on personal interests (or because they are sophomoric knuckle-scrapers). Unlike marketers, who read the DMA, etc., and IT folks that keep Ziff Davis in business, there really isn’t a sales publication that I feel can really keep the sustained interest of your basic bag carrying rep.
I like Gerhard Gschwandtner, the Editor of Selling Power magazine, a ton but I’ve never heard of anyone who actually sits down and reads the thing from cover to cover. Everyone and their brother has tools and tactics type pubs, but how much real new ground is being broken on this topic? Salespeople read the business sections of local papers, the Wall Street Journal, etc., but that is more to keep up with happenings of their target companies, not to consume sales-type content. When they read industry trade rags it is always according to what vertical they happen to sell into- not because they have sales as a job function. That is why Hoovers(and Jigsaw very soon) get such high CPMs; they bring together a general business audience that is hard to deliver.
Pretty much the only thing I could think of was airplane mags that get read by road warriors- and that will dry up when all the airlines finally implement wifi and you can send email and surf the web.
Truth be told, I bet a lot of salespeople don’t read anything. This for two reasons
1- it gets in the way of sitting by the fax machine waiting for orders (time constraints)
2- sales guys as a group don’t read that much
In fact, one of the best salesguys I know is basically illiterate. He graduated from a second tier liberal arts college, he is extraordinarily adept at simplifying complex software into business value presentations, but the guy writes in a Cro-Magnon dialect made up of ill formed contractions and tech acronym run-on fragment jargon. (“Your smart so its a nobrainor to do are deal”) With very few exceptions, I always took over the job of editing important communications from my Sales VP’s to customers so they wouldn’t recoil in horror at the pure absurdity of the message.
I’m sure this post will be controversial to my readers that are actually purveyors of fine print publications geared toward salespeople. So I invite you to write in and tell me I’m wrong- if you were even able to read all the way to the end of this post…
PS- Check out my look for this week…
