The 21st Century Network Marketer
A Network Marketing Newsletter CONTENTS: 1.
GUEST ARTICLE Marketing
From Your Conscience
By Steve Pavlina
Do you ever find yourself dragging your feet when it comes to marketing
your business? Steve
Pavlina shares some valuable insight into a possible cause for this and
what you can do about it.
2. EDITOR'S VIEWPOINT
Network Marketing Success: Put Your Prospects First By
Liz Monte
This article, previously published in "MLM Woman" ezine, tells the tale
of two fictitious network marketers and contrasts their recruiting
styles.
3. EDITOR'S VIEWPOINT, PART 2 MLM
Prospecting: Creating a Win-Win Outcome
by Liz Monte
Win-win is nearly always the most satisfying outcome in any human
transaction. But achieving it requires some know-how.
If you haven't yet discovered StevePavlina's blog, you're in for a
treat. His subtitle is "Personal Development for Smart People."
Marketing From Your Conscience
By Steve Pavlina
Years ago I learned a simple yet powerful marketing secret: You must
become so convinced of the benefits of your product or service that you
feel you'd be unjustly depriving people by not doing everything in your
power to get the word out.
I was infected by this attitude from Jay Abraham. Jay has an absolutely
brilliant way of thinking about marketing. For example, if you're an
accountant, and you're skilled at saving people money on their taxes,
Jay might ask how much you save your average client. Say it's $500 per
year. And then Jay would ask how much you charge. Say it's $200. Then
Jay might take you through a conversation like this: EDITOR'S
VIEWPOINT by Liz Monte Jane and Mary are both in network
marketing. (They're also both fictitious and are not intended
to depict any real persons, living or dead.) For the sake of
this story, we'll assume they both possess equal talent, resources, and
motivation. However, their approaches to recruiting and
business-building are quite different. Jane is
determined to enroll as many new business partners as possible into her
organization each month. So
far she's been pretty successful at it.
In the last year, she signed up 300 people, averaging
twenty-five new associates per month and even winning her company's
"Top Recruiter" award. In looking at
her organizational charts, however, she notices that the great majority
of her new distributors aren't doing anything, and quite a few of them
have even resigned from the company already.
She'll be lucky if she still has fifteen active people
left in a few months. And
she'll be really lucky if any of them are
duplicating what she's been doing. Oh well, she
thinks. Most people are lazy. I'll just work with the ones who really want
to improve their lives. Meanwhile back to recruiting! After all, if the
drop-out rate's going to be that high, I better get as many new people
as I can to compensate for it. Mary, on the
other hand, has been averaging one or two new enrollments per month.
She's been carefully screening and interviewing her prospects, making
as sure as she can that they have the skills, resources, and attitudes
they'll need to be successful. She takes the time to get to know them,
learn what their needs are, and most importantly,
find out if they really want to do what she does. Above all, she wants to
make sure her opportunity will be a good fit for her new business
builders. She also
expects to do a lot of training and hand-holding with each person she
accepts into her organization – at least during their first
few weeks. And she knows this will take time. In summary, here are four things you
can do to accomplish this: 1. Find out
what your
prospects' needs are and help them decide if network marketing will
help fill those needs. If it won't, let them go. 2. Get to
know your prospects well enough to determine if they have the skills,
resources, and attitude necessary for success. If not, steer them gently
in another direction. You'll be doing them a favor and they'll probably
be grateful for your honesty. 3. Don't
twist their arms or use any other form of manipulation to get them to
sign with you. If they're not already genuinely enthusiastic, you've
got a guaranteed drop-out on your hands. 4. After
they've joined your team, take however much time they need for training
and hand-holding. Commit yourself to their success. By putting
your prospects' needs before your own, you'll be building a stronger
organization, giving the network marketing industry a better image, and
creating some awesome friendships. ********************************************* EDITOR'S VIEWPOINT, PART 2 Prospecting:
Creating a Win-Win Outcome by
Liz Monte In any endeavor involving other
human beings, a win-win outcome is always the most satisfying and
productive. This is the real reason we network marketers want to put
our prospects first. By doing so, we stand the best chance of
creating a positive result for them and us. What do we
mean by win-win when it comes to finding new partners for our network
marketing business? For the
prospector (you), a win probably means acquiring a new business partner
with the following attributes: easy
to work with, motivated, determined to succeed, reliable and
accountable, upbeat, honest and hardworking, and so on.
Of course, you would probably also want your recruit to
have some free time and enough money to get started. For the
prospect… well, we really don't know what a win would be for
her, do we? We
could make an assumption and guess. We could assume that she just wants
to make a lot of money. But what if we guess wrong?
What if her heart's desire is to help people and make a
difference in the world. The only way
we can know for sure what's going through our prospect's head is to
talk with her -- ask questions, listen closely to the answers, ask more
questions, and do a lot more listening. One word of
caution, though: When
interviewing a prospect, it's very tempting to listen just until she
mentions some problem your product or opportunity might help solve. And
then… (sound of bugles) YOU'RE OFF AND RUNNING! Blabbing all
about how wonderful your company is and how much she's going to LOVE
what the products will do for her. But telling
why YOU think your opportunity is the greatest thing since sliced bread
is not the goal. The
goal is to reach a win-win outcome, and there's more to it than just
presenting your favorite features and benefits and assuming that's what
your prospect wants, too. If you're
truly dedicated to win-win, your goal is to reach a deep understanding
of what a win would be for her and then honestly assessing whether or
not your opportunity would create that.
If it's not a
good fit, let it go. Thank
her for her time and move on. On the other
hand, if your opportunity looks like a match for her, go ahead and
explain to her why you think so. Be sure to connect the dots between
her specific problems and how your opportunity can address them. Then she
signs up, right? Not quite.
Actually, there's yet another critical step you both must take before
reaching a win-win
outcome. Recently, I
started reading a book that really gets into the whole win-win
strategy, The New Conceptual Selling
by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez. (Although it was written mainly
for business-to-business salespeople, most of the principles the book
lays out are applicable to network marketers, too.) It describes
three stages of the decision-making process.
Stage 1: The
decision-maker (your prospect) comes to a better understanding of the
situation she's facing. (This
is where your question-answer dialogue helps her.) Stage 2: The
decision-maker explores options and solutions. (This is that other
critical step I mentioned, and it's where many network marketers fall
on their faces.) Stage 3: The
decision-maker puts it all together and picks the best option for
herself. Why do I say
that many MLMers fall on their faces in the second stage? The answer is
that we naturally want OUR option to be the only one the prospect
considers. But the person sitting before us must be free to consider
ALL her choices, or her final decision will never be satisfying to her.
(By the way, this is a common problem with many salespeople, not just
network marketers.) Plus, people
know when they're being pushed or manipulated. Throughout this whole
conversation, you've been creating rapport and building trust. If you
suddenly start pitching your solution as the only one, your prospect
will close up again before your very eyes. She'll start talking about
how she needs to think a few things over – and maybe she'll
get back to you in a couple of weeks. Maybe. In other words, you just
lost her. Or if you do
succeed in manipulating her into agreeing to your solution without
giving her a chance to think about her other choices, she may feel
buyer's remorse down the road and secretly resent you for it forever.
That's certainly no way to begin a healthy business relationship, is it? If you want
to play a positive role in your prospect's decision-making process and
achieve your win-win goal, you must make it totally clear to her, both
in your words and in your actions, that you support her right to
explore different options. The good news
is, if you truly understand her situation and genuinely believe that
your opportunity is her best solution, and if you have effectively
communicated why you think that way, chances are pretty good that your
prospect will end up agreeing with you. And then you will get to enjoy
that most treasured of all outcomes, win-win. Your new
business relationship will be launched in an atmosphere of mutual
respect and commitment, with the positive expectation that it will
continue indefinitely. You and your prospect will each get what you
want, and you'll both feel terrific about your decisions. *********************************************
|
