The bottom line is in today’s world, you better have a deep understanding of your customer, their issues, and how you are relevant to solving their problems. If you come into a sales call with a canned PowerPoint presentation, you better be able to compete on lowest price because most likely, that’s where you’ll end up. However, if you understand your customer and provide relevant solutions, you have the opportunity to become a valued business partner.

The good news is, with today’s search resources, it is easy to find information on just about any company, industry, and/or person. You do, however, have to have the skill and the will to conduct the research. You have to know what to do and how, and you have to be willing to expend some time and effort.

Successful salespeople don’s “sell” anything rather, they create buyers. This occurs when you’re listening. And you can get your prospect to do a lot of talking if you ask pointed and very relevant questions. How do you know what kinds of questions to ask: you do the homework on the front end.

Great post and I also (another surprise!) appreciate what Selling Power is doing to move selling into the 21st Century. Yesterday, I posted an article on How Focused Sales Efforts Can Improve Sales Competencies. What I didn’t mention in that article was how we conducted the single day of lead generation for the blitz. We used my Network at Gazelles.IntroNetworks.com; my LinkedIn network, my SelfGrowth.com expert network, my Work.com network of experts and my Inc. 5000 network. We also used my enewsletter, Baseline Selling Tips and my Blog, Understanding the Sales Force. Finally, we used Google Search to find the targeted experts we might have missed using the other networks. Impressed Michael? I sure was! In the old days we not only wouldn’t have been able to find all of these very targeted but diverse experts, but it would have taken weeks to generate a fraction of the leads.

I suppose anyone who has a topic niche thinks people should learn more about theirs. We’re no different. We do, however, have some back up. Sam Richter, who happens to have a brand new book on the topic, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, certainly thinks that Internet search skills are crucial to the sales person. He calls these skills “the Fourth R.” Reading, writing and arithmetic no longer cover the game – you’ve got to add “research.” He’s the former president of the James J. Hill Library, so his pedigree on the topic is pretty solid.

On the other hand, our high schools and colleges are not teaching this subject. Chambers of commerce, small business development classes and other entrepreneurial organizations are ignoring the topic. Companies are not teaching their employees…. we could go on.

That’s why we shouldn’t have been so tough on Gerhard the first time around – and we’re so pleased to see a “sales magazine” actually paying attention to the online world this time around.

Gerhard, Clayton, Derrick – you guys are doing great things with sales education – so you can help. And, you are. So, thanks again for the comments.

On the other side of the coin, we see some salespeople who get lost in the swamp of unrefined searches. Inefficient search skills are a time waster of the highest order in selling.

Hidden Business Treasures and Gerhard appear aligned on this thinking when it comes to the importance and necessity of navigating efficiently around the web. Hey if Selling Power got a nudge in this direction from your post of a year ago, good for both of you!