Selling in the 21st Century is my eleventh most popular post of the 168 that I've posted on this blog over the last 16 months. 5 of the top 10 were published a year ago. 5 were published 2-6 months ago. So, what? Maybe sales executives, business owners and true sales professionals are wondering if they're really ready for the 21st Century. Your customers and prospects have more information at their fingertips than ever before in history. When they find you, what will they see? Will you qualify or be disqualified before you even know they found you?

Let's get down to it. You have a website and post to your blog. You're active on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You've got 100's or 1,000's of pages on the Internet. How many clicks or page views did they generate yesterday? How many of those clicks and page views filled out a form, sent you an email, called you on the phone or otherwise raised their hand to say, "I'm interested."? How about the other side?

Forget the ones that will be back because they're still shopping. Forget the ones that went away because they found somebody closer, cheaper, or the right color. How many of them went away forever because you don't pay attention to detail? How do they know that? I wrote Selling Spelling almost four years ago and was reminded of it yesterday when I spoke with Conni Eversull of ProofreadNOW.com.

I remember looking at someone's profile on LinkedIn, noticing that they misspelled their company name (different spelling than on their business card) and closed their profile.

You've probably noticed misspellings on websites and in blog posts.

How about the things that spell check doesn't catch, like there, their, they're or to, too, two?

What if that mistake is the thing that makes a potential customer go away forever and buy from a competitor that pays closer attention to detail. How much do you lose if you lose one customer? Does it cost more than having a professional proof read before you publish or click "send"?

As an aside and an example, I corrected spelling, typo and fat finger errors as I typed. Then I used spell check. The four black bolded and italicized words were caught by spell check. (Did you know that Internet was supposed to be capitalized?) So, yes you're smart. Yes, you're careful. You may even be very close to perfect and maybe if you talk to Conni, more people will think you are.