Founder and President of Challenge Factory. Keynote speaker and columnist. Fortune 100 leadership. Active community leader.
Different people base their level of comfort and decision making on different factors. For some, trust in the relationship will be enough - so long as the risks are within a reasonable range. Others will always seek additional data, not because they don't value your relationship, but because they view data as a more secure way to base decisions.
It sounds like your default approach is to base your interactions on the relationship and intuition - and make adjustments as you learn more information. If you are selling to people who prefer a data-focused argument, simply Googling won't cut it. But, you can create standard templates with basic data points and tools that you can use to guide how you prepare for each sales meeting. The standard templates will ensure that you are gathering the right data, at the right level, targeted to the client's specific issue with the goal of closing the sale, rather than a collection of data points.
If you set your tools and templates up right, you can actually use the data gathering process to build on your intuition (and to identify opportunities you may not see via intuition alone). I wish you the best of luck - and hope you'll let us know how your next sales call goes!