Technology has a habit of making our personal interactions less intimate, less meaningful, more uniform. The volumes of people we can connect with now via email, Twitter, other social networks is great at scale, but superficial in creating the kind of bonds and relationships that have historically driven preference and decisions in the business world.
And despite the proliferation of electronic networking channels, we still make decisions based on decidedly offline and personal criteria. We prefer to do business with people we like, people we trust. And although relationships can be fostered and extended via online means, they are created and converted most typically in far more traditional fashion.
So it's interesting to me that we see so many new technologies being built to help us better tap into and "reconnect" with the deeply personal and offline nature of relationship-building and sales acceleration.
LinkedIn can only go so far. It fails to effectively differentiate a strong connection from a weak one. It doesn't say anything about offline bonds, family and social connections, let alone relationships that haven't been proactively entered and documented in the channel.
New technologies such as IntroRocket are working hard to better approximate and identify where the true offline leverage and relationship-building can happen. By looking at a combination of LinkedIn, Facebook, email habits and more, IntroRocket is able to paint a far more accurate picture of where the most valuable relationships lie.
It's still incomplete, but getting closer. And it's interesting to me that what we're using technology to try and reach, is what our parents and past generations did so well without any of this.
Five hours on the golf course may be inefficient. It may not scale. But it worked then, and it works now.
Relationships, as well as sales, are personal. We can use technology to more effectively identify and leverage opportunities, but consummation will always be more about what's happening in our hearts and minds.