9/5/2023-On This Day

Spending hours researching your prospect’s business is only intelligent to the extent that your findings help you. Think quality versus quantity when gobbling up all that Google offers you.

On this day in 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page filed incorporation papers for that little search engine company known as Google.

Why is this important to you, killer sales pro?

With Google as your research partner, there are no limits to your ability to learn about your customers.

Google means you no longer need to ask prospects questions like "Tell me about your business?" and "What are your main objectives?"

Google has raised the bar for everyone…including your competitors.

Bring it!

Today, honor Google’s incorporation anniversary by using the tool to supercharge your knowledge of your clients.

For your client meetings today, dig deeper on Google than you usually would: go further to understand your client’s market, competitors, and challenges. Think of "the Google" to help you have a more sophisticated business conversation with your customers.

You’re not doing all this Googling to show off to your customers, you’re doing it because a smarter you earns trust and credibility.

Let’s start with knowledge is power and proceed from there.

Ahhh yes, knowledge…but that’s just table stakes, right? It’s how knowledge is used that makes all the difference in the selling game.

The celebration of Google’s incorporation anniversary – which is actually September 4, but yesterday was devoted to Labor Day – shouldn’t focus entirely on the mightly search engine. Instead, Google is the proxy that represents how you can use knowledge strategically to establish trust with your buyers.

If your top targeted prospect is a public company, learn about their stock price history. How do earnings look? What is the CEO talking about regarding "what’s next?" What does the CMO say lately through social media?

Those types of threads are the tip of the iceberg.

You’re not burying your head in Google just to learn a few tidbits you can drop on your client in their hallway as you walk to the meeting room, it’s to learn about their business so you can be a better solution provider.

This fast-paced 5-minute video tells the tale of how Google came to be.

Everyone knows Google was born out of a school project by Brin and Page while at Stanford, but details of its early years are fun to know and might even provide you with good cocktail party chatter at your next networking event with customers.