Myth: The Internet makes customers so well informed that they no longer need sales professionals to help them make business decisions.
Truth: The Internet frequently creates confusion and ignorance, thus producing a demand for highly-skilled sales professionals.
I realize that this truth is difficult for some folk to swallow, but it’s true nonetheless.
Please note that I’m not saying that a customer can’t learn about your product set by reading stuff that’s on the Internet. I just question whether they know what to do with all the data that they can find.
Customers doing research on the web, on any subject of complexity, are prone to fall prey to one or more of the following four pitfalls:
- PITFALL #1: Information Overload. The more information that’s available, the more important it is to have the ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff. (Or, in some cases, the needle from the haystack.) Specifically in B2B sales, there’s now so much information slopping around about many products that it could take years to sort it all out. While customers have access to plenty of information (i.e. product features, comparison pricing, customer complaints etc.), many just see all that data as an undifferentiated blur of meaningless facts. Conversely, some customers believe they can learn about a subject by reading a few articles and trolling through a forum, when in fact they’ve just swallowed whatever random information was popped up first.
- PITFALL #2: Toxic Anonymity. In the past, most people simply ignored anonymous sources. On the Internet, comments that in the past would probably have been thrown in the trash are exalted to the level of “market research.” Because anonymous people can’t be held accountable, they make comments that are off-the-wall, or full of self-serving lies. For example, John P. Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, created an anonymous online persona and posted over a thousand entries on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board, many of which criticized a competitor. Customers of that competitor (in this case investors) may have very well made decisions based upon the “data” in those anonymous posts.
- PITFALL #3: Imitation Expertise. If you read 1,000 encyclopedias and have a photographic memory, you’ve filled your mind with data, but that data is useless unless you can differentiate between what’s important and what’s not, and what’s accurate and what’s not. Expertise, which comes from experience and judgment, allows you to understand how data fits into the larger world. Customer who lacks expertise are unable to differentiate between fact and opinion, between irrelevant detail and important concepts. When customers simply seize upon whatever “makes sense,” they’re worse off than before, because they think that they are experts when in fact they’ve only lost the self-realization that they’re still basically ignorant.
- PITFALL #4: Information Pollution. It’s been repeated endlessly that the Internet is “democratizing” the media — as if that were a good thing. What democratization has really done is created a situation where any pinhead can pose as an expert — and most people can’t tell the difference. As a result, there’s a wealth of bad information available on the web. Rumors fly around with the speed of light. Fake news stories get treated as if they are real. The result can be hoaxes that cost companies billions of dollars, like the famous Y2K “disaster” scenarios. As a result, much of the information on the web is polluted with opinion masquerading as fact, content that has a hidden agenda, and downright lies.
In other words, far from making customers more informed, the Internet can make them more confused.
And that’s really good news for sales professionals. I explain why in the post “B2B Sales Pros Make Customers Smarter.”
