Recent neurological research debunks the long-held belief that the human brain functions according to left and right hemispheres. This is great news for those of us who can't remember which half is creative and which half is analytical. It's not so great news for management and training consultants who have built their careers referencing charts and diagrams of the hemispheric human brain, much the way the earliest explorers charted the regions of a flattened world complete with dragons at the periphery.
Neuroscience makes understanding human behavior, including purchasing decisions and the buying cycles of organizations, all the more constructive and myth busting. Take for example, the growing notion that complex industrial buying decisions can be entirely guided nowadays online. This is the implication Global Spec makes in their reference to a recent a Frost and Sullivan study about the buying habits of engineers. The study conveys how online content aggregators, such as Global Spec, can guide a buyer at every step of the buying cycle, leading a prospect and an organization to select both product and supplier; the only exception being (according to the study), that for industrial products, "procurement" is made face-to-face at the end of the buying process, ostensibly to confirm that there is a trusted human at the end of this otherwise virtual transaction.
This new charting of the engineering mind sure sounds simple. It's not much more evolved than prevailing notions of the hemispheric brain or the long-ago representations of a flattened earth, except to make the logical observation that highly cultivated online content, supporting a prospect's buying cycle, is important. It certainly is. But ultimately, your relationships with your best customers are built face-to-face, not just email-to-email.
You can spend tens of thousands of dollars building a website, and the content for an online aggregator site, but the human side of business relationship development teaches that if you don't build your company's brand identity with a human touch along the way, it's a wrong-headed approach.
jb
www.centrifuge-now.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment