Is Your Being Nice Scaring People Off?

Grow­ing up I was always taught to respect and be nice to other peo­ple. If I didn’t have any­thing nice to say, I didn’t say any­thing at all, respect thy neigh­bor, all that. In school I was known as the help­ful one. I even helped some peo­ple by doing their home­work, shame shame.

As I’ve got­ten older I’ve noticed that being overly nice and help­ful leaves some peo­ple sus­pi­cious. Maybe it has some­thing to do with today’s soci­ety, I don’t know. But peo­ple seem to be wary of overly nice peo­ple. And even I have fallen to this suspicion.

We recently got a new neigh­bor and she is amaz­ingly nice. She is always throw­ing out com­pli­ments and offer­ing to get food for us since she is going out to the store. At one point I even found myself ques­tion­ing her motives. It’s not that I don’t trust her, I do, you just don’t meet very many peo­ple that are that nice, let alone hon­estly nice.

My ven­tures into online mar­ket­ing has brought some amaz­ing peo­ple to my atten­tion though. There are some great peo­ple out there. But as mar­keters, whether your sell­ing prod­ucts, mlm, or your ser­vices, peo­ple are going to be suspicious.

Online mar­ket­ing has got­ten a bad rap thanks to spam and dis­hon­est mar­keters. If peo­ple only knew, they would see that the major­ity are great people.

Awhile back I was help­ing some­one out and she was always sus­pi­cious of my motives. She even accused me of just help­ing her so she would buy some­thing. I told her it would be cool if she did buy some­thing from me, but that wasn’t my inten­tion. I just wanted to help.

Even­tu­ally she started to trust me though and it was only after she saw that I wasn’t “out to get her”. Depend­ing on your tar­get audi­ence, this might be a chal­lenge you may come across some­times. If they don’t know any bet­ter they make take your nice­ness as a ploy to get them to buy something.

It’s just a nat­ural reac­tion in today’s soci­ety. That is why it’s impor­tant to build trust and cred­i­bil­ity. If you come out right away swing­ing sales pitches, it’s not going to be effec­tive. On the other hand if you hon­estly help peo­ple out and make a dif­fer­ence in their lives they will be more than happy to buy from you. On their own terms of course.

Peo­ple love to buy stuff, but they don’t like to be sold to.

Of course if you have a tar­get audi­ence of knowl­edge­able and savvy buy­ers then this isn’t as much of an obsta­cle but you still may come across it. The major­ity of peo­ple don’t buy some­thing right away. And while it’s ideal to get the sale right then and there, when some­one does enjoy your con­tent and help, they will buy later. A lot of prod­uct sales come after the ini­tial announcement.

So just keep being nice and the peo­ple that are sus­pi­cious will even­tu­ally see that your not just “out to get them”. If they don’t want to buy, that’s okay, some­one else will. But they can still use your help either way.

~Chris

Have you ever had a sit­u­a­tion where some­one ques­tioned your motives when you helped them out?

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