Recommend This!: Delivering Digital Experiences that People Want to Share

Chapter 10

Recognizing Faces

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

—Paulo Coelho

Commerce has always been personal, people doing business with each other face-to-face. Think about those old vacuum and encyclopedia salespeople knocking on doors. Think about a local farmer’s market. Think about Ogilvie’s hardware store. Face-to-face is the way we form relationships in the real world. And, as we have said, every sale forms a relationship of some kind. In small towns across the country, we might make a purchase at the corner store, and not be surprised to see the proprietor again at the school board meeting that night.

Behaviors in buying and selling products have evolved over time. What began as a very chaotic process (i.e., the marketplace) morphed into an industry (i.e., cold-calling, door-to-door sales, and retail) and eventually became mechanical (i.e., e-commerce). You can see what happened here—the personal nature of sales has disappeared. There may be lots of reasons for that. Ultimately, though, we believe that as consumers became more savvy and informed and salespeople continued trying to “force” them into the mysterious “sales funnel,” consumers simply stopped wanting to deal with them. It makes the whole process simpler for the consumer if they can meet all of their own needs.

This is why, more than ever before, organizations need to rehumanize buying and selling. If the buying and selling processes are so mechanical, what ...