AllBusiness.com’s Sales Advisor Keith Rosen interviews Stu Schmidt, vice president at Cisco Webex.

Keith Rosen: In what ways is selling easier or harder today than before the internet?

Stu Schmidt: Well the internet has made so many changes and I mean even since the early days of the internet. One of the first big things--I like to tell a story, I used to sell Vaxes for Digital Equipment Corporation. You know, I was the source of knowledge. I carried around these two big, massive 10-pound Vax configuration manuals. And the only way you could buy Vax or know anything about a Vax was to talk to me. So that went away in the ’90s. So that was the first change when the internet came out. People can now understand about you without talking to you. The biggest change, though, about Web 2.0 and how it affects Sales 2.0 is they’re now learning that not just from what you want to say about yourself but what your prospect’s peers are saying about you. So they’re learning about you from communities, from blogs, etcetera, not just from your website, not just from your marketing material but from what other people are saying about you. That is a massive change. It gives you the prospect a much wider view. You know, you may think that your product or your differentiation is X. If everybody out there in the market says it’s, you know, X minus whatever or Y, you should be listening to that because you have the opportunity now to really hear what your prospects really think about you, not just what you and your engineers and your marketing department think about you.