Are You In Sales? 8 Ways RSS Can Make You Better

If there is one thing I am not, is technical. I am a geek, but not that kind of geek. That said, my RSS reader is one of my most important sales + marketing tools.

If you are looking for a technically detailed post about the inner workings of what RSS is, you won’t find it here. But what I can tell you is that when you see the orange radio signal icon seen above, that is generally code for “click here to subscribe to the RSS feed.”

You then are given the option to add the RSS feed to your reader of choice, and then you are off to the races…

So here are 8 ways that you can leverage your RSS reader to gain some competitive advantage over your competition:

1. Capture feeds from industry experts and market leaders websites and blogs, so that you can aggregate thought leadership in one place. A strong salesman is a learned salesman, or at least up on the latest trends and stats. There is no better way to collect all this valuable learning in one place.

2. Monitor the blogs of your customers. Keep an eye on what your customers are doing so you can help them get better, or deal with a challenge.

3. Monitor the blogs of your prospects. Monitor what your prospects are doing, so that you can find opportunities to help them, which will help build trust, which will lead to sales.

4. Monitor the blog of your competition. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer (or something like that…).

5. Pull the status feed from your LinkedIn connections. This makes LinkedIn far easier to monitor. And when you can monitor all this data in one place, you can spot trends and opportunities much faster, and speed is good for any salesman.

6. Set up twitter searches on people, ideas, products – and then pull the feed to your RSS reader – so that you can monitor the conversation on Twitter about those topics, and then respond and engage if appropriate. If you sell widgets, you WANT to know when anyone is talking about widgets on Twitter. This allows you to react to opportunities fast.

7. Set up Google Alerts for people, ideas, products you care about – and then pull the feed to your RSS reader – so that you can monitor internet mentions about those topics, and then respond and engage if appropriate. I mean, kinda hard to monitor everything going on in the world about the things you care about. But Google alerts comes close…

8. Based on the topics and blogs you subscribe to in your RSS reader, they provide recommendations on other sources of information. This is powerful, because it exposes you to other sources of learning and people, people that might make meaningful new connections for you and your business…

So these are just a few ideas. There are more. Share if you will.

My world changed when I learned to leverage my RSS reader to my advantage. I hope you find the same success with it…