Building Your Market Compass
A farmer has to know the soil and the weather patterns to survive. A salesperson needs that same awareness of market currents. You can’t just rely on a "gut feeling" anymore. You need specific data and outside perspective.
Following a curated list of sharp sales blogs gives you a reference point for the challenges you’re actually seeing in the field. When your pipeline slows down, you don't have to guess why; you can see what current leaders are doing to fix it. When a prospect goes silent, you can look for modern social selling techniques to find a way back in without being a nuisance.
Consistently reading up on prospecting, leadership, and deal strategy keeps you from getting stuck. It prevents you from becoming a "one-trick pony" who only knows how to hammer the phone or send generic follow-up emails that get deleted instantly.
Earning the Right to Advise
Most buyers are 70% of the way through their decision-making process before they ever pick up the phone. They’ve done the research. If you show up knowing less than they do, you’re a hurdle, not a resource.
Consistently reading industry analysis and new methodologies changes how you handle a call. You stop asking basic qualification questions and start asking the kind of "second-order" questions that make a prospect stop and think.
This is the line between an order-taker and a trusted advisor. An order-taker waits for a request; an advisor shapes the request based on what’s happening in the broader market. When you actually know your stuff, you can say, "I’ve noticed other leaders in your space are moving away from X because of Y," and mean it. That creates value that has nothing to do with your product’s feature list.
Pairing Insight with Action
Knowledge is just trivia if your timing is off. You might have the perfect script for reaching out to an old contact, but it’s useless if you don't know they just moved to a new company with a fresh budget.
This is where education meets intelligence tools. You can use resources like Flux.report to track the "when"—identifying the exact moment a key contact lands a new role—and then use your training to handle the "how." It allows you to craft a message that is context-aware and actually welcome.
Sales is a game of timing and technique. Keep your technique sharp by learning from people who are doing it well right now, and keep your timing tight by watching the data.