With any business, it’s always important to adequately education your potential new clients around expectations – and Network Marketing is absolutely no different. It is so easy to very quickly become discouraged when the first 10 people you talk to are not interested in what you have and then quit. We see this all the time and that unfortunately will never change. But what we can change is how we communicate expectations to our prospects and reduce the potential for our new team members to give up prematurely.
Now I’m not one to put people in a box – I don’t like it being done to me so I don’t judge others just the same. None of us like to be judged let’s face it. We don’t like to be called “one of those” or “she’s like that” or “he’s one of those personalities”. I just don’t agree with it and I apologize to all those NLP Practitioners reading this disagreeing with me around personality tests. We can agree to disagree. However, if you are wanting strong, confident, independent, hard working and committed team members, then first we need to be one ourselves.
Over time I have seen two things occur pretty frequently in Networking Marketing – firstly, people get started expecting to earn a million next month and secondly, we treat our upline like a boss and become very dependent on them. I think a lot of expectations occur around those two things. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of both over the years. People quitting within the first 3 months’ because they aren’t making the “big money” (and consequently it’s all been my fault for not adequately showing them how to do it of course) and secondly, those reps who message you 20 times a day (which, consequently I don’t ordinarily mind at all) over very simple things that either common sense would answer, or the company website. These are sometimes known as ‘social distributors’ (again – I’m not labelling at all) – because they just love to be around you, love to hear you, love to chat, love to come to all the events and hang out and network with other reps like crazy – but never actually work the business. I still have people in my business now that still do this after nearly 10 years!
Please understand that there is absolutely nothing at all wrong with this, but what I can say is that we can adjust our communication with prospects early on to avoid these unrealistic expectations people have when they get started which then leads to the foundation of a crisis – for both them and you. It is almost a guarantee that if we don’t, it will then lead further onto misplaced dependency. In order to avoid this, educate your prospects – tell them you will support them in gaining back their investment within the first 60 days’. That is super easy to achieve and once they have achieved it, it feels huge to them and will motivate them to continue working towards the next milestone – actual profit. Once a new team member gets starts, educate them on where to find the answers to questions and what is reasonable for them to come to you about. Don’t tell them you’re available 24/7 for them – that is like saying you’ll build their business for them. You won’t and absolutely never should. You need to teach your new people to be independent and find the answers for themselves. Just like Jim Rohn used to say “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day – teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” And our business is no different. It’s critical to teach your new people to find the answers to their questions themselves and then coming to you when they have exhausted their own resources. I used to encourage my guys to come to me at anytime too until I learned the hard way. I’m building a salesforce, an organisation, an empire – not a dog house or an adult child care centre.
Most disappointments around Network Marketing really base themselves in these two things – expectations and dependency. Once you learn how to discipline these two things through communication, common sense, directing people to other resources and encouraging realistic and very achievable milestones, you will find your business so much less frustrating, more fun, see duplication occur a lot more seamlessly and leaders rise to the surface faster. Hope this has helped. Love to hear your feedback around this. Do you agree? Do you disagree? What’s your experience?