When I was a kid growing up, whenever you needed to buy something and you didn’t know where to buy it, you grabbed your yellow pages… you let your fingers do the walking… and you found out where to go.

We still get Yellow Pages dropped off at our house once-a-year, but for the most part, the much-smaller than in the old days book, immediately gets put on a shelf in the garage somewhere.  And inevitably, it gets thrown out as soon as we need that shelf space for something else more important.

Most people look at Google as the modern-day yellow pages, but this isn’t exactly correct.

See, whenever you opened the yellow pages, there were three things you could bank on:

1.  You wanted to buy something.  No one every opened the yellow pages and said to themselves, “You know what?  I’d LOVE to know how many pediatricians there are in my town.”  If you opened the Yellow Pages, it was because you needed something.

2.  You were ready to buy it now.  There was no “information” in the Yellow Pages, other than “names and addresses.”  Pre-purchase research was much harder to do back then.  And…

3.  You just weren’t exactly sure where to buy what you wanted to buy.

But see, Google is dramatically different from this, in many ways.

For starters, people search on Google for information first, and then to buy, second — it’s a research tool more than anything else.

Want to know how Brett Michaels is feeling?

Google it.

Want to know how to connect your DVD player to your new HDTV and what cables to use?

Google it.

Want to know the latest information on Arizona’s new immigration laws?

No problem, just Google “Arizona’s new immigration law,” and you’re off and running.

And see, this infinite access to information has conditioned consumers to get information first, prior to buying something.

And since buying, in and of itself, no longer involves getting in the car and driving anywhere, purchases are made much more casually.  This is a very important concept to understand.

You see, the more effort it takes to get something, the more invested you are in that purchase.  The more skin you have in the game, the more meaningful the outcome.

But since purchasing online is so easy, people now purchase more stuff they don’t need, and it has less value to them because their is virtually no “skin” in the purchasing game.

However, what HAS changed dramatically, and has caused the need for information to almost always precede the purchase, is the now virtually unlimited number of vendors you can purchase from, and the glut of pre-purchase information readily available.

Where I’m going with all this is, the one thing Google still does have in common with the Yellow Pages is when people are trying to make buying decisions, and they do a Google search, for the most part, they still aren’t “exactly sure where to buy.”

And the greatest opportunity you have to give your customer a reason to make you their vendor of choice, is to educate and inform them so they are much more educated consumers when it comes to whatever it is you’re selling.

As I say in my book, “Be a problem-solver first, and then a sales person,” and your marketplace will beat a path to your door.

That’s why there are over 1,000 pages of marketing information between this little site of mine and my blog, and that’s why… your favorite marketing guru… ain’t exactly crying to the bank.

This is actually the most important concept of selling.  Yet few people focus on it because they are instead pre-occupied with their “need for cash.”

But you’ve got to realize, that’s your problem, not your customer’s problem.  Eliminate this and you’ll be much freer to sell.  And since your customers will be much more eager and excited about working with a problem-solver than a sales person… everybody wins.

Now go sell something, Craig Garber

P.S.  “One student of Garber’s, a trainer in the overcrowded real estate space, just completed his best year ever, grossing over 7 figures in one month alone, during an extremely successful online ‘launch.’  Mr. Garber was not only instrumental in designing the strategy for this launch, he also helped this entrepreneur, from Apollo Beach, Florida, create multiple ongoing streams of income from several different sources.  And yes, this was all done smack dab in the middle of the recession, using the techniques in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.”

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