© Aleksan | Dreamstime.com

Introducing the newest challenge for 21st Century reps, customers who say: “Someday I may need information about your product. But don’t even try to leave a catalog here; I don’t have room to store catalogs. As a matter of fact, I don’t even want to see your information until the moment I need it, and then I only want the exact information I need delivered immediately and nothing more. And if you can’t do this for me, I will find someone who can.”

It’s a paradigm shift that reps must embrace: customers no longer want reps to deliver libraries of comprehensive information from our principals about every possible product they ever might use. That comprehensive information, whether delivered in three-ring binders or on websites, is more and more being perceived as a burden rather than a resource as customers balk at receiving data dumps of everything we do in favor of receiving only the data they need to address the problem or application directly at hand.

It’s a natural outgrowth of the information overload that comes from having vast amounts of data available on the web. The more information you can access, the more you discover that the information you need is hiding at the bottom of a pile of information you don’t care about. So customers don’t value reps who bury them in information and leave them to search for a needle in an informational haystack. More and more, reps add value not by adding more information but instead by curating the information and helping customers find exactly the data they need.

The latest challenge for 21st Century reps, then, is to become so intimately familiar with your customers’ applications and your principals’ products that you have a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs and provide them not with every possible solution from your line card, but instead with the best possible solution from your line card.

With customers’ time constraints tight and skeleton crews in engineering and purchasing, today’s customers increasingly value a trusted rep consultant who can provide exactly the information they need, not more and not less; on a just-in-time, not-early, not-late basis. Become that concise, on-time trusted consultant and you will become an indispensable, highly valued asset to both your customers and your principals.