It's more than an old adage: people like to buy, but they resist (even loath) being sold to.

That changes when you build a personal relationship with your customers, but before you can get to that point, there's always a lack of trust to overcome. Suspiciously  thinking, even the best salespeople can come off as shills, charlatans and naturally biased.

Wouldn't it be better to simply educate customers and let them sell themselves? That's easier today than ever before, because so many people turn almost instantly to the Internet to research important products and make their buying decisions.

So flip the elearning coin over and look at it as customer education. Don't think LMS, think marketing microsite. Give your prospects the information they need to pre-qualify themselves. Don't force it, and they may even sell themselves. Let them come to you for the order!

Most marketing pros agree that the salesperson has the most impact on a sale. Not advertising, not PR, not even pricing--but the salesperson.

However, with the right approach, the customer can be the most important piece in the equation. Consumers are smarter than ever before, and with more information at their finger tips than they can use. So control this information! Let them do what they do naturally...seek out and research solutions that work best for them. Help them come into your store or sales channel and ask with certainty for the product they want.

Give them the stats. Help them compare products. Provide third party reference and support. Help them discover what works best for their situation. And one more thing, facilitate this discovery with the help of an online character (we call them avatars) that they can relate to. Make the avatar someone who has walked in the customer's shoes. That's the start of building trust, and it makes the journey very social, and not just an exercise in Googling their way around the internet.

In short, consider mirroring your sales elearning and creating a component that's customer education. It can be some pretty hot marketing. And in the end, you've got a good chance of making your customers brand advocates. Because once they've sold themselves, that's the natural outcome.

From my desk, three different stakeholders in the social learning arena: learners, training managers, and designer/developers.

It seems as designers, we are always excited about what's new (ahead of the curve). Understandably cautious, I usually read managers as somewhat behind the curve. And in the case of social learning,  you could argue that learners are the curve.

One of our large clients that's been holding back on social learning for a couple of years has just decided to move ahead for 2010. Looks like we'll be combining blogs with some YouTube-like submissions from users, where the submissions are focused on quarterly topics. Ratings on the submissions will tie to the e-learning reward system that's already in place (these are non-employee learners).

Because of this, as part of our annual learner survey, we decided to ask learners what resources they already use for personal and/or professional learning. LIVE results are posted in the widget above.

These results are from a real mix of ages from the 20-somethings to the 50-somethings, and unfortunately we don't have specific age or gender demographics. Still, I was pretty encouraged by the response we got.

Now's the time for you to add more depth to our survey. Are you already involved in using social learning tools? How's it going? And if you aren't doing any social learning yet, do you think your learners already have a head start on you?