Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
At one point or another, we all struggle with building out Network Marketing business. Whether it’s training team members, struggling with duplication or making phone calls. I’m not going to sugar coat the industry, as it’s not “easy” for most people. There are a lot of hurdles you have to overcome and a lot of lessons to learn.
Most Networkers, they just drop out every time they hit a brick wall. The smart guys fight and figure out ways to break past the walls they encounter. Anyway, there are certain things you should and shouldn’t do. I just thought it’d be fun if I talked about how NOT to build your Network Marketing business.
In this guide
1. People Join People, Not Companies
This is probably the most common mistake people make with recruiting. As soon as they get a prospect or someone asks about their “opportunity”, they start talking about how great the company is. Stuff like “our compensation plan pays out 3 times as much as other companies”. Or “our product has helped 5000 people get healthier and it’s better than any other in the niche”. The truth is most people don’t give a damn about that stuff.
They just want to make enough money to support their dream lifestyle. Even if your company’s product does have 300 more ingredients than any other, don’t mention it. People don’t join for the products or compensation plans, they join to make money and work with people. People join people and you shouldn’t use your company, comp plan or products to recruit. You just need to remember that you are in control, you have what your prospects want.
2. Don’t Justify Why People Should Pay The Price
Sure, if you’re selling an actual product that saves you $1000 per vacation, you can justify the $300 price tag because whoever buys it will be saving $700 per trip. However with Network Marketing, you DO NOT need to justify your price. A lot of people say “well I can buy a similar product for a third of the price, why would I waste money on yours?”
Again, you have to remember that people shouldn’t be getting in to buy a product. If you’re using your company’s product as a key selling point to get people on your team then you’re an idiot. Almost all Network Marketing products are overpriced. If you want to make money selling products, go be an affiliate marketer. The commissions are better and you just have to sell products.
You have to ask people how much your opportunity is worth to them. What’s the real value of them starting a business, working for themselves and having unlimited profit potential? To me, you can’t even put a price on it. When people come to me, I ask them if they’d like to work with me or not. They almost always say yes and if they do, I tell them they have to join and pay the price or their lives will remain the same.
3. Don’t Spend Too Much Time With Your Downline
I’m not saying don’t spend any time with your downline, as it’s mandatory. I’m just saying don’t spend too much time, you’re a business owner and have bigger fish to fry. It’s crazy to spend more than a few hours helping someone get started. The statistics say that well over 90% of your downline will quit or never recruit anyone. So why spend hours training them only to see them drop out a few months later?
Instead of spending your personal time with your downline, have a system take care of training. I’ve seen so many people attempt to individually teach their downline the same skills and values they were taught by their sponsors. You can just record a bunch of videos teaching everything you’d teach in person, and then host the videos online in some kind of training center. Setup your own training system and as soon as you recruit someone, send them off to get started without your help.
4. Don’t Market Online
Although the majority of my downlines have been built through online marketing, I don’t advise regular people to go near it. It’s stupid, traffic and lead generation takes months or years to master. If you’re starting at the very beginning, it’s going to take you at least a few months to see any real results from online marketing.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
So you should always get started offline with your warm market. You can start by contacting your friends and once you’ve burnt through your warm market, get started with offline marketing. There are LOTS of ways to market offline, you can do home meetings, go to seminars, hand out business cards, drop cards and more.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Let me know your thoughts, comments and questions in the box below. Also leave me your name and email in the box below for more cool MLM tips, tricks and secrets.
4 ways not to build your network marketing business, david wood p.s. let, how to build your network marketing business, key selling point, mlm business, Network Marketing, network marketing business, network marketing products, online marketing, training team members
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Dean R Black, November 20, 2011, 20:55
David, thanks for these great tips. Sometimes it is better to just tell people the few things NOT to do so they know what to stay away from. I can relate because when I first started in network marketing I got caught up in the “my company and product is the best” way of trying to get people to join. Needless to say, nobody joined because they were not interested in joining a company but rather a person. Now I lead with me.
I also have run into the price objection more times than I can count. After listening to Black belt recruiting I was forever cured of that notion. Now it is “This is the price Period, are you ready to change your life or not”. Well that is the attitude anyway 
Three posts a day. One email a day.
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Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
The whole ‘don’t market online, start with your warm market’ section assumes you’re comfortable working a room or calling friends cold. Some of us built whatever audience we have specifically because we’re not that person. Telling someone like me to go do home meetings and hand out business cards isn’t really four ways not to build a business, it’s one way, presented as the only way.
Anneke’s objection is really about selection bias in the advice itself — the post assumes the traits that make someone comfortable prospecting a room are the traits that predict success, without ever defining what ‘success’ means here or measuring it across people who don’t have those traits. ‘People join people’ is stated as a law, not a hypothesis.
Anneke, I tried the warm-market-first approach for about six weeks. Burned through maybe thirty conversations with people I actually know, got two polite no’s and a lot of awkward silence at family dinners after. Online was slower to start but by month four it was the only part still producing anything.
‘Don’t spend too much time with your downline’ followed by ‘have a system take care of training’ assumes someone has the time to build that system in the first place. I have neither the hours to hand-hold new people nor the hours to record a library of videos.
Nia’s point matches what I see from the financing side. The people who actually build the video training library and hand off downline calls to a system are rare — not impossible, I’ve seen it done, but the median case is someone who reads step 3, agrees, and keeps doing exactly what step 3 told them to stop doing, because there’s no system yet.
This is interesting to me because ‘warm market first’ assumes a market where home meetings and handing out business cards is still a completely normal way to start a business conversation. Where I distribute, if a stranger came to my shop with a comp plan and a business card, it would be treated as strange, maybe even a little rude, not as an opportunity to be curious about. Online, at least, there is a moment where the person can look at what you are offering on their own time, without the social pressure of a room. I wonder honestly how much of this four-part list is really about network marketing as an industry, and how much of it is just describing how business conversations happen in one particular country.
If people join people rather than companies, why does step 2 tell you never to justify the price of what you’re selling them?
Ivy asks the right question. Watched this contradiction three times in thirty years: don’t justify the price, then wonder why nobody who joined can answer it either.