Sales and Sales Management Blog

A few days ago a friend of mine, Jonathan Farrington, posted a question on a LinkedIn group’s discussion page: “Evidently, we are living in a FREE world when it comes to online sales events. Have we seen the end of ‘paid for’ webinars? In what circumstances would it be appropriate to charge for attendance?”   Jonathan’s question reminded me of a blog post by another friend, Dave Stein, from several months ago wondering if anyone would pay to read a blog.

It should be obvious to anyone skimming the internet that ‘free’ is now the one essential element of business for training and consulting companies.  In the vernacular of fashion, free is the new business black—the most basic and essential garment of business.  And free doesn’t mean just articles or blogs.  Internet users are expecting a great deal more for free than a few dozen or even a few hundred articles.  They expect white papers, webinars, blogs, videos, podcasts, eBooks, and even one-on-one coaching consultations.

From my interactions with salespeople, small business owners and professionals, there seems to be a rapidly growing segment of internet users who no longer believe they need invest a dime in order to get all of the management, sales, marketing, communication, leadership, or other training they need because everything they could ever ask for—and more– is free for the taking on the internet.

Although neither Dave or Jonathan have come to a definitive answer that I’m aware of about charging for content, their questions, along with some of the comments and questions I’ve received from readers of my books, articles, and blog, as well as attendees of my teleseminars and webinars, have me wondering if the volume of free information is not only hurting the service firms that do training and consulting, but more importantly, is it hurting the salespeople, professionals, business owners, and executives that are relying on it?

Whilea great many of the readers of the articles, viewers of the videos, and attendees of the free webinars have been convinced that they are getting the training they need, I believe they’re getting duped.  Not intentionally—at least not by most trainers and consultants.  But they are duped none the less because they have been convinced—most often by our hype when we promote our blogs, websites, free webinars, videos, and our other materials–that they’re getting the real deal, the real training.

They’re not, of course.  (Yes, I know ther are exceptions, but they are few and far between)

We’re not non-profit organizations giving our skills, knowledge, insights, and wisdom away for free.  We’re trying to give them enough information to grab their interest, to demonstrate what could be, to convince them to pop for the real deal.  Most of the time, they get an appetizer, but not an entrée.  They get enough information to spur thinking but not enough to fully implement the skill or the strategy.

That, of course is intentional on our part.  We want to impart real information but we can’t give away the store.  Even if we were willing to give it all away for free, it would be difficult to do.  For instance, my book on referrals, Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals takes 4 hours and 13 minutes to read (audio book version length).  Obviously I can’t really do justice to the whole book in a free hour webinar.  But even those 4 hours doesn’t do justice to the subject of referrals.  I have a two day, 14 hour workshop that goes into much greater depth than the book could ever think of doing.  To convert that workshop into a book would require a 900 page book.  Who is going to read the equivalent of War and Peace on referrals? And we haven’t talked about coaching the behavior; we’re just talking about the information–learning the academics of referrals.

Nevertheless, I have attendees of my free webinar thinking that after 60 minutes they’ll know all they need to know about referrals.  And from a basic point of view they do—they just can’t generate referrals because although they have the basic information, they don’t have the necessary behavior.

We have the same problem with the articles and blogs and videos and podcasts that we do.  We give tidbits and pieces of training and advice, yet we hype it as though it’s going to change their career. We give the information for free but it isn’t usable because the behavior change and the specific application doesn’t come with it, not to mention the fact that the reader or listener many not have the background to understand how to tie the information into their larger business or sales picture. It isn’t personal, it doesn’t fit, it’s not a designer fashion but a Fredericks of Hollywood one size fits all and all of us who have bought a one size fits all garment know that most of the time it really doesn’t ‘fit’ anyone.

A growing number of our target audience isn’t investing in the behavior change, the personalization, the specific application because we’ve hyped our one size fits all material to the point we’ve convinced them they don’t really need it.

In addition, there are a number of users who question what, if anything, we have left of value to sell.  Chris Brogan relates this story: “I finished a conference call a few hours ago with someone who said something that took me aback. Essentially, she said that I share so much on my website that she wonders what else I have to offer. Meaning, if everyone has access to the information I’m providing, why bother going further with me?”

This morning I spoke with a small business owner who corresponds with me via email on occasion but has never engaged my services, who when asked about the topic of this post responded that “if you guys are dumb enough to give everything away for free, I’m not stupid enough not to take it.  I may have to read more or attend more webinars to put it all together, but I can spend a few hours and get for free what you guys want to charge me thousands of dollars for.  Good luck with that.”

Reducing the amount of free content isn’t going to happen.  In fact, the amount, type, and depth of free content will continue to expand.  I doubt that reigning in the hype about the value, content and applicability of the free content will happen either. 

But I can’t help but wonder if our good intentions and desire to compete via demonstrating our value, knowledge, and wisdom is doing more damage to both ourselves and our potential clients.