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Sell Like a Woman
28 January 2007


Sue has also recently started blogging (www.barrett.com.au/blogs/suebarrett/) - though hers is more of a business focus. Her blog is called 'sell like a woman' and her interest is helping businesses understand that selling is about relationships and about trust - something she says that women seem to understand more readily than men. Apparently 'trust' is becoming quite a buzz word now in the business circles she moves in. I was glad to be able to point her in the direction of 'the cluetrain manifesto' (www.cluetrain.com) with its emphasis on 'markets are conversations'.

Since the cluetrain manifesto was first published in 1999 I notice that one of its authors, 'Doc' Searls, has moved on to talking about 'markets are relationships'. One of the things he notes is that while there is a lot of software that claims to be about 'customer relationship management (CRM), this is an oxymoron because a 'customer' is actually a human being, not just a collection of financial data and other statistics. If you are interested in this sort of thing, check out Doc Searls' blog as well (doc.weblogs.com).

A while back I read Matt Ridley's book 'The Origins of Virtue'. Matt is an evolutionary biologist who has been exploring the apparent paradox of how it could be an evolutionary advantage to be unselfish when, as everybody knows

'The rain falls on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But mostly on the just
'Cos the unjust steals the just's umbrella'

Ridley's answer is that co-operation is a huge advantage, and that to cooperate well we have to know whom to trust. So we have evolved very sophisticated ways of knowing when someone is genuinely trustworthy and when someone is faking it - we get a gut feeling or an intuition about a person. And yes, we sometimes get it wrong. But the point is, we are programmed to make those judgement calls based on a relationship with a human being, not a glossy brochure or a website or a faceless corporation.





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