The ‘think’ method Professor Harold Hill employed to sell Iowa kids on marching band uniforms and instruments doesn’t cut it.  These days, whatever the product, “You gotta know the territory…”    and then some…

What’s changed, according to an article here, “is that salespeople must have a very keen sense of how to make themselves genuinely useful to clients during a deconstructed transaction process that is a lot more complicated than it once was.  ‘Going into Home Depot doesn’t let you build a house all by yourself if you haven’t done it before.’  Point is, those Home Depot clerks know how to talk up the snazziest power tools.  But you trust them because they know how to build the houses, too.”