Jonny, my family and friends have stopped talking to me. How am I going to find new people to join my network marketing business?
My answer: Get 10 retail products customers using the Get-em, keep-em, Grow-em method and teach people how to do the same.
It’s that simple 🙂
In my post “The Ultimate Network Marketing Strategy”, I’ve taught you exactly what you need to do to find a daily supply of people who will buy your products.
The Grow-em part of the formula, teaches you how to convert a proportion of these customers into loyal team members.
As you will see, finding new people isn’t the challenge, the real challenge is…
Building a Team That Sticks Around – For Years.
So, in this post, you are about to discover…
How to Recruit in Network Marketing – Without Chasing Family & Friends!
You see..
The last thing that most people want to do is to approach family and friends and sell them an opportunity that they aren’t sure is going to work.
Most network marketing professionals will make these people out to be, lazy, cowardly, and other adjectives of derogation but I disagree with this approach.
If you have not been able to build a solid customer base for your product, you have no business trying to persuade other people to do the same.
Now…
I can already feel the pin pricks from the voodoo dolls that some of you network marketing ‘leaders’ are grasping tightly in your clenched fists.
Jonny, why are you telling people this, the more people that read your post are going to approach network marketing in a way that doesn’t fit in with our teams culture.
My response: GOOD!
Another dogmatic phrase that I keep hearing as a justification to promote recruiting in network marketing is..
You might end up recruiting someone who is better than you.
Now, this I agree with – wholeheartedly!
But…
Our philosophy at Team Sofa, remains the same.
Here’s what I mean..
You need to demonstrate that you can get results and put some retail product profit in your pocket before asking anyone to join your team.
Another misconception is the importance of the three-way call.
In nearly every ‘Getting Started Training’ you will hear the phrase,
“Its impossible to be a prophet in your home town”.
The explanation for this is that people you know probably don’t take you seriously so you should get someone else to explain the opportunity to them.
Not a completely ridiculous concept but it is often acted on incorrectly by using the infamous…
3-way Call!
Here’s how it works…
Sally signs up as a distributor on Monday.
Sally’s sponsor gives her the following advice:
Make a list of people you know who could be good in this business and invite them to join a call with me, a leader in the company. Don’t tell them anything about the business but just get them on a call with me and I’ll sell the opportunity to them.
This rarely works well.
Here’s an example of a typical conversation that takes place between a new distributor and one of their closest friends.
Sally: Hey Steve, how you doing? This is just a quick call. I’m really excited to tell you about a new opportunity that I’m involved with. The company is expanding in our area and they are looking for a few key people to join the business. If could show you a way to earn an extra income around your current job would you just be interested?
Steve: Yeah possibly, what’s it all about?
Sally: That’s great. Rather than tell you, I’m going to get one of our leaders to explain the business in more detail so you get all of the relevant information.
Steve: OK, but please just tell me something about the industry or what I would be doing.
Sally: Just wait till you meet our leader Jeff, I’ll call you a 7pm an he’ll be on the line.
Steve: Hmmm OK then.
Guess what happens when 7pm comes along…
Crickets!
What a surprise eh?
Steve’s issue is that he’s started to question Sally’s integrity – which is reasonable.
If someone can’t explain the way that a business works it communicates two worrying things:
- There is something unethical about the opportunity because it seems to be shrouded in mystery OR..
- The person making the introduction doesn’t really know that they are talking about and probably isn’t the ideal person to partner with.
Reasonable assumptions.
So, once again…
The most reassuring way for you to introduce a new person to your business opportunity is to follow the Grow-em strategy.
Now…
Once you start sponsoring new distributors, here’s what you need to do to help them to realise that they need to stay as a member of your team.
1. BE A PRODUCT OF THE PRODUCT
The first thing that you need to do to grow a successful network marketing team is to lead from the front.
How?
By openly demonstrating that you love the product and the company.
If you are working with a network marketing company that you are not passionate about ,or with products that you aren’t that enthusiastic about…
Leave & Find a New Company!
Nearly every network marketing company has products that can produce life changing results.
If you want better skin and drink Forever Living’s aloe juices – you will see a noticeable improvement.
If you want to see reduced lines and wrinkles and you use Nu-Skins’s products – you will see a difference.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that most of the established network marketing companies have at least 1 or 2 products that will deliver noticeable results – quickly.
So,
You need to find the product that delivers a noticeable improvement in your health , finances etc and openly use this product, talk about the product enthusiastically and let your infectious love of the product be something that people see as undeniable.
2. SCHEDULE WEEKLY CALLS WITH YOUR TEAM
Let’s think about religions and cults for a second.
One quality that they all seem to share is the need for their members to…
Congregate Together – Weekly!
Why is this?
Life!
Let me explain…
Here is something that I want you to understand about consumer psychology and you will find this repeated on many of the posts on this blog.
Every minute your prospective customers, paying customers or members of your team spend away from you and your company’s message, the higher the probability that they will become distracted and lose focus.
NEWSFLASH: People have other things going on in their lives other than you, your products and your business.
Remember…
We are all human beings trying to navigate through this world and overcome the challenges presented to us.
We all experience challenges related to mental health, family, employment/business and other stuff that commands and demands our attention.
So, your job as a network marketing business owner is to keep your team members engaged and focused on their income and lifestyle goals so that they take the actions needed to be successful.
And…
The best way to do this is to get your team members to join a weekly call or meeting, where you remind them of your team and company’s strategy and the tasks they need to do to get results.
3.PROMOTE EVENTS
This is where the magic truly happens.
Keeping members of your team engaged and focused with weekly calls is something that you have to do to build and grow a successful team.
However, something interesting happens when people can see and talk to each other in person.
One of the most powerful aspects of influence is social proof.
Social proof is when people can witness the results of others in person, or on a video call.
When 35 year old mum of two stands on a stage and delivers a training about how she is building her business, the information that she is disseminating will be absorbed and acknowledged much better than if she is simply discussing this on an audio.
Your focus should always been based on building a community of people who can develop relationships and share information with each other.
4. SEARCH FOR YOUR STARS
A myth that is often taught in most network marketing organisations is that:
Get 5 people, they’ll get 5 people and they’ll each get 5 people
Which means you will have 125 people in your downline – just like that ;(
This never works as described.
In reality, you might sponsor 5 people and 1 of them might sponsor 9 people and 1 of those people might sponsor 5 people with the other members of your team sponsoring none.
That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
Never forget this – you only have 24 hrs in a day and you need to focus your energies on the stars that you identify throughout all downline levels in your team.
Using the example above, it really wouldn’t make sense to try to work with those distributors who aren’t sponsoring anybody.
So, if the most productive person in your team is Diana located on the 6th level in your downline, you need to focus your energies on helping her to succeed.
Make sense?
So, the real question to ask here is, how do you identify a star in your team?
Well, you will find that star performers, the lifeblood of your team, will usually display the following qualities:
- They frequently use the products and are passionate about them.
- They always attend the weekly calls and monthly meetings.
- They follow the strategy that you have advised your team to follow – i.e Get-em…
In other words…
They are teachable!
When people demonstrate that they are serious about their dreams, and more importantly, they are demonstrating that they are willing to do something about realising their goals, they deserve your focus.
In a previous life, I used to sell software systems and I noticed something interesting after attending numerous meetings.
When I was selling a solution to a large corporate, who had the money to spend, the process was very straight forward.
We would have 4-5 meetings that involved:
- Discovery – discussing the prospect’s requirements.
- Demoing the product – showing how the solution could overcome their pain-points.
- Implementation – how the software was going to be configured and set up.
- Contracts – a review of the pricing model, contractual terms and associated statement of work.
- Transition to support – a discussion around next steps after contract signatures.
After each call or meeting there were obviously some action points that needed to be addressed but the overall process was quite straightforward.
Interestingly, and in contrast, whenever I was selling a solution with a lower dollar value to a similar organisation, I would often have to engage in 5x the number of calls or meetings to get the sale.
These prospective customers would call frequently and place demands to provide additional information. They were never satisfied with anything.
They would require an inordinate amount of hand-holding which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing but it became incredibly frustrating when a significant proportion of these customers ended up being..
Tyre-Kickers!
So, how is this relevant to your network marketing business?
Well…
What you will often find is the the members of your team who aren’t following the ‘plan’ and sticking to the strategy will be the people who demand the largest percentage of your time.
Yes, your responsibility is to support everyone who joins your team but you need to focus the majority of your time on the ‘doers’ – the people who are actually doing the work and showing up on a weekly basis.
I can remember a time recently when I sponsored 2 people within the same day.
Within the next 90 days one of these distributors, attended all of the calls, became passionate about the products, built a customer base of 25 people and sponsored 12 people frontline.
She probably called me once a week over and above our scheduled 1-2-1 calls and team meetings that she was asked to join.
The other distributor used the products a few times, and attended 1 or 2 calls in three months and didn’t implement the Get-em strategy, and didn’t get to move on to the Grow-em strategy to sponsor new distributors.
Maintaining as much composure as I could at the time, I remember saying to her:
Why is it that you are never on the weekly training calls or available to attend our 1-2-1 catch up meetings?
Her response:
I haven’t been able to join the calls because some of these calls clash with a weekly gin night that I have with the girls and the Thursday meeting clashes with netball practice.
My response: Does spending an hour watching actors who get paid tens or thousands of dollars per show seem like the best way to achieve your lifestyle goals?
Her response: Yea but, hmmm, …
You get the point.
Let me reiterate, finding new members to join your team isn’t hard.
You know exactly what to do after reading the Network Marketing Strategy blog post.
Knowing where to focus your time and energy to build your team is where most distributors have an issue and you must train yourself regularly to look for and identify stars in your team.
And…
When you find them, celebrate them at every opportunity.
5. INVEST IN YOURSELF
Education, Education Education.
To grow a successful team, you have to be seen as a leader.
A defining quality of any leader is their vision and to have vision you must be someone who is knowledgeable about your industry and other aspects about your domain e.g. Marketing, Business etc.
The fastest way to expand your knowledge-base is to invest in yourself and consistently be looking to develop new skills that can help your team to achieve their goals.
If I’m being honest, I normally throw up when people talk too much about personal development.
Cynically, I do believe that the vast majority of the personal development industry sells vulnerable people, audios, videos and other training products that deliver little value to the average distributor or consumer but I’m a strong believer in educating oneself on a constant basis.
I can remember my first couple of profitable months in network marketing when I finally had excess income to spare.
This started to happen soon after I had attended marketing seminars (unrelated to network marketing) and when I started to apply these concepts in a structural way to my business, the results manifested quickly.
People started to notice my progress and the same thing happened to members of my team when I started to help them to implement these same new-found skills.
When they started to increase their income consistently, members of my team would ask me…
Jonny, now that I’ve got some extra income, what should I do with it. Should I invest in real estate or the stock market?
At first, I didn’t have an answer, I realised that there was a knowledge-gap that needed to be filled, so I decided to do something about it – more education 😉
I called a commodities trader friend of mine who guided me to get some books and products based on William J Oneill’s – Can Slim investment strategy.
I spent some money, ordered some books and other training products and I put my money where my mouth was.
I started investing and lost a ridiculous amount of money because I didn’t follow the step-by-step advice that I had been taught on these trainings.
So, I tried again and started consistently making profits from trading.
After achieving results consistently, I started sharing my experience with my team who followed what I was doing and some of them have had phenomenal success.
If I would tell you how many of them are making a fortune trading High frequency Futures and Crypto Currencies (against my advice), you wouldn’t believe me.
Note: I don’t understand Crypto or have time to learn about it so I would advise you to be careful before going down this road.
The moral of this story: Let education be a permanent fixture in your life. If you want to be a leader, you have to learn, trial and test new strategies and techniques that your team can benefit from.
Finito!
If you want to build a team that sticks around and generates a significant sales volume that will pay you bonus/royalty income on a consistent basis, you need to follow the point stated above.
It’s not rocket science, it’s quite straight forward but it’s amazing, how many people do not consider these tips and end up jumping from one company to another hoping that they will find the holy-grail.
If you found this information useful, I would advise that you sign up for our VIP Network Marketing newsletter below and I’ll give you more practical, actionable help to build a profitable network marketing business – WITHOUT chasing your family and friends.
Till next time.
