Creating Skepticism Through Relationship Building

There’s an awful lot of selling going on around the web these days. It seems like everyone pitches something. You’ll find pitches for books, for courses, for membership sites… Sales strategies and buy-now encouragements are splattered around the web.

There’s no easy way to tell if people are helping you or selling you, either. Everyone seems to have a hidden agenda. Everyone seems to want to make money off you. Everyone wants something from you. You’re just another targeted potential customer.

That’s sad, really.

Who Can You Trust?

“Trust is everything,” the experts say. You’ll hear that a lot around the web these days. Authorities are telling you to build relationships and build trust. Why? To get sales.

They’re right, too. If you don’t feel like you can trust someone, you’re not going to buy from that person. You need confidence that the money you’re shelling out is going to be well spent on something valuable that benefits you.

But it’s getting tough. Everyone’s pushing you. Everyone’s trying to be your friend. You’re probably starting to feel it, that the relationships being built are just another strategy to get you to buy. They aren’t true friendships. They aren’t relationships you can trust.

That’s a problem. We’re already a skeptical society. We’re sensitive to dishonesty these days. We’ve become consumers viewing all our relationships through clouded lenses and jaded perceptions.

We’ve been burned. We’ve been used. We’ve learned that the only person you can trust is yourself.

Who’s Out to Get You?

Is this strategy of relationship building a good one? I’m not so sure. I’m beginning to wonder if it doesn’t exacerbate the problem and make the skepticism worse. If you can’t tell which relationships are real or fake, you’ll approach every relationship with mistrust.

That makes business tougher. The people who genuinely want to help others have to fight the negative perceptions being created by those who just want to make money. The sellers who really do give a damn war with those who don’t.

Part of the problem is that it’s very easy today to learn how to influence people to buy. There are books and courses that teach you just how to do that. Are they bad courses? No. They’re rather good, in fact. So good that anyone can create a false persona and hop on the ‘net in the blink of an eye.

And those people want your money.

Who Should You Believe?

So here we are. We can’t tell the good guys from the bad anymore. Sales pitches surround us. We’re increasingly skeptical. We’re becoming harder to persuade.

The result is that we’re not buying as much. We opt to find information that’s free, do-it-yourself or full of how-to instructions. And when we’re pitched a sale? We ignore it.

We’re generalizing. All sales pitches are bad. All sales efforts are shameful. We even neglect our own sales potential, refusing to market, downplaying our strategies, sometimes even flat out damaging our own business success in the name of being a Good Person.

It’s time for a little bit of truth: We’re hurting ourselves.

Our own skepticism makes us pass up on good products and education that we could use for our benefit. We get less sales because we won’t be like those sleazy bad guys. We avoid the sales pitches at large, opting not to spend time and energy figuring out whether the product is actually good or bad.

A lot of the books and courses are worth it, like this one, which I’ve seen with my own eyes. And yet… We refuse to be sold. Worse, we refuse to learn how to sell.

Who Has the Solution?

I wish I had a nice conclusion that presented an answer to the problem, but I don’t. I know that I’m tired of being sold, I’m beginning to avoid those who continually shill for my money, I’m tired of false relationships that beg me to open my wallet in the name of trust.

And at the same time, I understand and respect everyone’s efforts to earn money.

Because that’s the crux of the matter right there. We’re all in business to make money. We aren’t here to be selfless Mother Theresas trying to change the world and Do Good Things For The Human Race. We aren’t here to give away the shirt on our back and grovel in dirt to help someone else reach Ultimate Success.

We’re here to earn a living. Everyone has bills to pay, kids to feed, rent money to fork over, food to buy. We all need to sell. We all need to pitch. We all need to learn how to do it in a way that leaves people feeling good, not dirty.

What do you think?

Next Page »

---