Salespeople nee to stop doing the same old, same old so that they can differentiate themselves from their competition or even differentiate themselves from other salespeople in their own firm.

One of the suggestions is to hold a webinar. Webinars are a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition.

In order to help you out with this suggestion, here is some information on how to put on a webinar:

Content: Make sure that your content for your webinar is specific to your industry or product/service. If you are creating content on your industry, as a suggestion, you can address an industry problem and show a solution. If you are talking about a product of service, make sure that your audience realizes this, but don't try to make it a hard sell, just show how your product or service can solve problems and provide benefits.

Give away value: Webinars are designed to inform people how to solve problems. Make sure that you give some sort of value away on your webinar. For example, I offer a free consultation valued up to $300 at the end of my webinar. What can you offer to entice people to become clients?

Pick a day and time: Best times show that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday's work best around the lunch hour EST or New York time. Sorry for any readers outside of North America, you will have to figure this out yourself, but try to pick it near a lunch hour.

Invites: If you own a website or a blog, DimDim makes a great widget for invites that you can post on your site. This will draw people in to sign up. One trick that works well is to mail invitations or targeted prospects or email them if you have their email address. If you email, make sure that you know the person so that you are not spamming them.

Promote: Find ways that you can promote the event, like Craigslist or on Twitter or where ever it makes sense.

Repeat over and over: You may not get a lot of people for your first event and don't be discouraged. Keep at it, the goal is to inform people and if you promote your webinars, eventually those one and two participants add up.

Add more content: Once you have one webinar in place, why not try another that addresses another issue or product or service.

The services I use for my webinars is DimDim, which is free for up to 20 participants. There are other services like Go To Meeting or Webex (just Google Webinar Services).

My suggestions is that you try a test run first or several test runs to make sure that you are comfortable with running a webinar, that way you will be prepared in advance.

I hope that you will see Webinars are a way to differentiate yourself from your competition. In most industries, if you are not providing webinars, chances are that your competition is or will be, so this is no longer just a nice to do, it is becoming a need to do.

Chris Hamilton is a sales and marketing consultant helping small and medium sized business take their sales to the next level. Chris provides useful sales and marketing tips daily on his website Sales Tip a Day which is located at http://www.salestipaday.com. Sign up for the Sales Tip A Day Newsletter at http://www.salestipaday.com/p/email-newsletter.html and receive the "25 Must Have Sales and Marketing Tips"