The Real Problem With Tire Kickers

The real problem with tire kickers…

It’s probably not what you think.

See, a lot of business folks out there, absolutely can’t stand “tire kickers.” And let me be clear. When I say “tire kickers” I mean those people who sit on your list for years…

…never buying any of your products. Just content to consume your free content, ad infinitum.

I’ve personally heard many marketers and business folks absolutely curse the ground the “tire kickers” walk on. Treat them like second class citizens, downright do everything in their power to abolish them from their email lists.

And for good reason. The tire kickers cost them money. They skew the numbers on their email list, and act as a giant weight on the whole system. I’ve heard it said that many people would rather have…

…500 buyers than a million random tire kickers. A total waste of time they have said.

Now me?

I do see this a little differently than most.

Yes, all of the above things are factual. Tire kickers do cost me money. They do skew my numbers in a negative way. And yes, their inaction can be frustrating at times.

However, the way I see it is this:

People are on a journey. Everybody starts out as a tire kicker. Or at least a lot of us do. We consume free content. We graduated to low ticket content.

We then elevate to the more expensive stuff, as we need it and as we trust the person we are buying from.

That’s all of us. Not just some hypothetical “tire kickers.”

Now what is the real problem I see with “tire kickers?”

Well a few things.

One) Firstly, they often wrongly assume they can “figure it out” with just free content. Trying to “reverse engineer” someone’s systems is haphazard at best, and frankly disrespects the vision you have for starting your own business.

Think about it. You care about this person’s content enough to “reverse engineer” the things they are talking about, but you aren’t going to invest in their products?

That’s like deciding you are going to build a rocking chair from scrap wood, and instead of following a guide, just kind of “figuring it out.” Might be fine if the rocking chair you are building is just for fun, like a hobby…

…but if you plan on selling your rocking chairs, you should probably figure out some actual knowledge. Develop some actual skill.

Two) The mentality of it. There is a mentality of only wanting to get “Free stuff.” And that mentality carries over to you trying to SELL stuff. Consider the hypocritical nature of it.

You don’t want to “pay for anything” but you want people to BUY things from you. It is by its very nature, out of order.

Why would you expect your customers to “buy things” that you, yourself do not feel like you need to buy?

So for that reason, many “tire kickers” never get past ground zero. They instead collect a bunch of free information on their hard drives, half of it never even read or consumed.

Third) The Jaded Nature. The “tire kicker” is a jaded sort of person, usually. I always think of something that Oscar Wilde wrote in one of his plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan. It was an exchange between two characters.

Here it is for your reference:

Lord Darlington: “What cynics you fellows are!”

Cecil Graham: “What is a cynic?”

Lord Darlington: “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Cecil Graham: “And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”

These guys are going back and forth critically about those who put too heavy a stock in value and those who put too heavy a stock in price.

A tire kicker, from my standpoint, is both.

They both “value” the idea of getting something that should cost money, for free, and yet they do not respect it because it is free for them. At least not enough to take action in most cases.

So what does that equal?

It equals someone who has seen a lot, tried a lot, and probably has not experienced a whole lot of success, thereby making them inherently jaded.

The sad part about that is, often their “tire kicking ways” are a major component of what is holding them back.

So that, in my view is the big 3 problems with tire kickers, and NONE of that makes me dislike them or seek to KICK them off of my list.

It does make me feel a bit sorry for them. But I look at it like, we’ve all been there, and if I can bring them around to my way of thinking, then great.

If not, then at least I tried.

Either way, those are my thoughts on the “dreaded” tire kickers. Most of them, very nice folks (even if a touch ‘cynical’,) I might add.

Anyways, if you see yourself in any of the above…

…I strongly suggest you reconsider the position. A great place to start is my Lazy Man’s Guide to Picking a Profitable Niche.

It’s a great foundational training to get you started right, and I got er’ priced cheaper than chips on a Sunday Picnic.

That’s all I got!

Kam