Luck Changes When You Face the Three Largest Network Marketing Challenges

Many have asked why I have written, spoken and trained so much on the top challenges that networker marketers face. I answer in one short sentence:

“Know your enemy.”

That view is most credited to 15th century Italian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli. He, and others, combined the art of political science with the psychology of human nature to teach the art of warfare.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.”

Those who understand their opponents win wars. The great Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote in his “Art of War”, “If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.”

When so many in the Network marketing industry are touting unfounded promises of “easy wealth,” when so many ads proclaim that “all you have to do is sign up, we will do the rest,” when the biggest promise of all is that building a “massive, leveraged, residual income” is easy, you need a clear voice to help you truly understand the enemies of your success. Because those “enemies” do exist, or else everyone would be making money in MLM and clearly, that is not the case.

When we are ignorant of the enemies of our success, when we don’t know how to make them our friends, our success is in grave peril. So, here are...

The Three Biggest Enemies of the Professional Network Marketer In this article, I will give you the three largest enemies, the three largest challenges to success in network marketing. I intend to spend the most time on “Enemy #2.”

But if we are talking about “luck” and network marketing, we need to understand and face all three of these top “enemies.”

First…

Enemy #3 - Most people have never learned the skills necessary to succeed. If a person joins a good company (by The 12 Critical Success Factors™ standard), with good training, support and systems, they should be able to be profitable right out of the gate earning hundreds, even a thousand or more dollars per month.

For larger success, however, one must well learn the skills of the trade. The larger the success desired, the more these skills have to become second nature. This takes both time and commitment to master.

Some of these skills include good communication, goal-setting, accountability, leadership, time-management, focus, persistence, etc.

The good news is that by developing self-improvement habits, and applying the habits consistently over time, soon you will become a network marketing master.

Jim Rohn put it this way:

“You don’t have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months, or the next 3 years”

This is a continuing challenge for those who aspire to great success in network marketing. That said, there is much available, a lot of it free, from excellent trainers. TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com is a veritable treasure trove of valuable information, ideas, and priceless training. I recommend its use in our organization along with the consistent habit of investing in personal growth. It’s amazing how much “luckier” you get when your skills and attitudes are ready for the opportunities that come your way – and they always do – when you are ready for them.

Enemy #2 - Most people simply do not have enough good people to prospect. I list this huge challenge as the #2 biggest obstacle to building a significant network marketing income because it doesn’t matter how many skills you have or how great a communicator you are, if you don’t have anyone to communicate with! Or, not enough people to communicate with. And, no matter what anyone says, unless you know or regularly meet lots of high-quality prospects that are interested in new business ideas, you will need a continual way to find them.

Understand that network marketing companies pay us for “access” to people, people who will be customers of the company’s products and business plan. They pay us for our endorsement. And, they pay best of all for our leadership, which creates more customers, business builders, and leaders.

Bottom line, we have to be able to consistently bring “good” people to the company.

What Is a “Good,” High Quality Prospect? The ideal prospect for a network marketer is an already successful person that knows, or is known by, a lot of people and who has the respect of those people. In industry terms, it is a person that has a large, responsive, “warm market.” This successful person must also have a big reason why they would want to do something different. There are also “professionally discontent” people out there that are literally praying right now for new inspiring career direction. If you are one of these people, or if you know a lot of people like this, or if you are willing to learn how to meet and approach people like this, you may be all set to build a large business.

For most people though, that is not the situation.

Most people simply don’t have enough people to contact that they already know, and they don’t know how to effectively expand their “warm market.” This is a critical skill that needs to be learned.

Sometimes though, on the advice of others, they start calling “business opportunity seeker” leads. Unfortunately, most of the time those prospects don’t have two nickels to rub together. Most have nothing better to do than sit around and surf the Internet looking for the magic bullet that will make them rich. And, frankly, most will waste far too much of your valuable time.

Another common recommended method to meet this challenge is known as the “Three Foot Rule.” Again, this is a skill that can be learned. But often, the idea pretty much ends up with people pestering every person within three feet of them over and over, until that person gives up or goes into hiding. It is one of the techniques that, when done poorly, has helped give MLM a bad reputation in many people’s minds.

The problem is, both of these approaches are tantamount to trying to find a needle in a haystack. They will work, if you have enough time and patience. Most people do not have enough of either.

A third way to find people is to advertise for prospects. In one MLM company where our group reached well into 6-figure per month volume, advertising is what helped me build my business. This is the area where I would like to go into more depth in this article.

The method I used was rather brilliant because it solved this second largest challenge for me, at least for a while. Though I confess, it was not my idea. I was working with a top industry earner; let’s call him Ted. Ted was making well in excess of $1,000,000 per year at the time. So here was the ad I ran:

I made over $1,000,000 in each of the last 5 years in a simple, no stress, relaxed lifestyle, home-based business. Now I am looking for two people to teach my turnkey system. Call 24 hour hotline, 800-xxx-xxxx Ad responders would call the toll-free number where they would hear him say about the same words that were in the ad, give an admonition to “not waste” his time if they were tire kickers, and instruct them to leave their name, number and address so we could send them further information.

I would then, mail out an audiotape with the sales message about our program in Ted’s voice. All that was left for me to do then was call up, say I worked with Ted, and I needed to know if they listened to the tape and if they wanted to learn more.

I found a lot of new people to talk to with this method. It also solved another challenge for me that EVERY new networker faces.

The Credibility Challenge Solved

All of us, when we get started, have never had success in network marketing— maybe not at any business venture ever— and we lack the credibility necessary to really attract top quality prospects.

So I “borrowed” credibility from Ted! It worked great. Whenever I called, I simply associated myself with him— with his permission, of course; he was my 2nd upline. Anyone can figure out a way to do that and should have someone in their company or the founder of their “system” that would be willing to do that for a serious team member.

At any rate, that whole approach worked very well for me— for a while. It was also very expensive. I must have spent over $20,000 in tapes, ad costs, postage, etc., the first year. But while I did manage to meet and recruit some very good people, the method ultimately failed because it was not duplicable by others on my team.

I train on other fundamentals that must be in place for real, sustained, and massive growth for an MLM business or company.

One inviolable principle is that you have to be able to get a lot of very average people to do at least a little, consistently.

So while this ad method worked for me - for a while, it did not work for the average person. It was too expensive, too time consuming, and in truth, rather “hypey” and at least a little misleading. (While it literally was true, Ted was making over $1,000,000 per year, the implication was that anyone mentored by him could do so also. That never happened.)

I have never found an ad campaign or “cold market” system again that worked as well— until recently.

So how can we solve this very large challenge? How can we take the very real fact that most people don’t know enough good people to talk to and make this “enemy” our friend?

Certainly not by pretending the problem doesn’t exist. Certainly not by remaining in ignorance. If we think we will just get “lucky” some day and the right person will magically appear in our business, the only “luck” we will probably experience will be the bad kind!

The solution first takes recognizing, defining, and understanding the problem. Then it takes the application of the “marketing” part of network marketing.

A colleague of mine wrote, “Network marketing is a business of Marketing, by people that have never learned how to Market."

So, let’s first lay out…

The Ideal Goal of the Ideal "Cold Market" System

• Identify where good, qualified prospects "hang out". 2. Find out how to reach and "attract" those prospects to you and

your team.

• Make them hungry to work with you. 4. Make the whole process not only affordable for an average

person, but profitable so that he/she can use it for months and years to come without draining their pocketbook. This is the recipe for a “Self- funded, Cold Market, Attraction Marketing System.”

In other words, how would you like a way to attract high-quality prospects who pay you to find them? Would that make a difference as to how large you could build your business? And in how fun and exciting it would be? Sound impossible?

Not at all - it has been done before, even before the Internet age.

Back in the mid 1990’s I became acquainted with a networker that worked with one of the major long-established network marketing companies. They had a program where they, and their team members, would pass out flyers and, in various ways, advertise a package that promised to teach people how to get rich working from home. The package cost something like $39. The content essentially sold the company’s business without ever mentioning the name. And, the profit from the sale was enough to pay for the advertising!

One would imagine that method would be even easier, cheaper, and therefore more profitable to do in this Internet/Information age. And, indeed it is.

Here are the steps more specifically:

• Identify a target market 2. Figure out what kind of information the target market really wants

and which solves a problem for that market.

• Find or create an inexpensive information product, newsletter,

audio CD, etc. that you can sell to people in that market.

• Build a database of people who you regularly contact with helpful

information that begin to know, like and trust YOU.

Then - you will have both the credibility and the relationship established to get a great response when you bring your business opportunity to them.

There are an unlimited number of ways to do this. Let me give you one example:

One networker I know has a background in Real Estate and believes there is a very real chance that prices have peaked, will soon drop, and that a lot of real estate people will be looking for another way to earn income.

Whether that happens or not, it is a “perceived” problem that is weighing on the minds of many real estate people. So, there is opportunity then, to solve the problem!

“Why not,” I suggested, “write a booklet or pamphlet entitled something like ‘How Very Successful, Savvy, Real Estate Professionals Will Make Even More Money in the Coming Real Estate Downturn.”

The contents will provide the facts about what is happening with inventory increases, financing, massive debt loads, etc. Then, show how the most successful agents with the best reputations can recruit dozens and dozens of other Real Estate professionals and build a network marketing business with a better kind of income, a reliable, long-term, leveraged, residual income.

Frankly, it’s brilliant. Too many MLM ads appeal to the least qualified! “Get in Free.” “No Selling, Prospecting, or Cold Calling. We do all the work for you!” Right. What kind of person would you be attracting with that kind of ad? I’ll tell you, it’s not the kind you want to work with. I frequently hear networkers complain that they have lots of people who do nothing. I wonder if they haven’t unwittingly attracted exactly that kind of person by their approach.

Notice here that the approach to Real Estate professionals will only appeal to the most successful agents with the best reputations. They are ideal prospects because they know, and are known, by a lot of people. How many of those would you need to have a great business yourself?

If you are reading this and you are a leader in your company, you need to find or create such a system for your team. Doing so will empower them to reach their goals.

Then, as Zig Ziglar says, and I paraphrase, “the more people you can help to reach their goals, the more certain it will become to reach yours.”

The bad news is, if you don’t implement such a system, you will be competing with more and more teams practicing this kind of “self-funded, cold market, attraction marketing” method. And that is a position I would not want to be in because most people care more about seeing a system they can use, than even the company or people they work with. That’s not a smart priority, but it is what most people want to understand… “how can I do your business?”

If this is more work than you have the time or expertise to do, there are others that have built turnkey systems which will work with any company you are in. I believe you will need to find one or the lack thereof will greatly handicap your business. Times are changing. More and more, sharp people are learning how to use good marketing principles to empower their own and their team’s businesses.

The #1 Enemy of the Professional Network Marketer This is where I am always accused of being too controversial. But let’s face it, if you ask the average person whether they would like to learn more about the MLM company you are with, it may be the last time they ever answer their phone when you call. The reputation of the industry is that bad.

For the last two years I have polled people on my training calls about the words and phrases that they believe most people associate with network marketing or MLM.

Here are the most common answers, beliefs, and phrases:

Pyramid scheme People “at the top” make all the money – everyone else loses Bugging friends, family, neighbors Over-priced products Over-hyped products Garage full of products

The amazing thing is that I almost never hear mentioned the more positive things that have drawn most industry leaders.

The truth is, over the decades, all of the above charges have been found true far too often.

Now, we could dismiss all of that by saying, “There is good and bad in any industry.” We can pretend that the poor reputation of the industry is not a huge challenge to the success of our teams and the good people joining us. We could say, “Well, people just don’t understand our business.” We could stick our heads in the sand and pretend our enemy doesn’t exist.

But, if you are like me, you know it is far wiser to well-know, well- understand, and then face our enemies, our challenges, head on.

So, the #1 enemy of network marketing is…

There are still people getting hurt…

…by joining companies and people where there is deception, false promises, few solid business practices and little in the way of real value being offered to the participants.

Reputations are earned. And once earned, they are very hard to change.

But I believe it must be changed. And, I believe it can be changed. The “anti-MLM” critics are all over the Internet. They need to be silenced if network marketing will ever be widely accepted in the mainstream.

How can we turn it around?

We make this “enemy” our friend by studying and thoroughly understanding what industry practices have led to the negative reputation.

We can make this “enemy” our friend when as many people as possible understand what solid business fundamentals must exist in an opportunity in order for its participants to enjoy a reliable, long-term, leveraged residual income.

We can make this “enemy” our friend when we, as leaders, consistently speak, write, and teach the whole truth about what it really takes to succeed.

We can make this “enemy” our friend when we refuse to join companies or people who perpetuate the practices that have harmed people.

I write much more about all of this in other places, and in much more detail. There are criteria that can be used to quickly and effectively pinpoint truly moneymaking, reliable, long-term, leveraged residual income producing companies— and make the scams and schemes stand out like sore thumbs. This has become my mission.

I am very pleased that there are so many great people and great leaders who love this lofty mission also. Seek them out. Work with them. Join their companies.

Your “Luck” Changes When You Face Your Challenges

You will get “lucky” in this industry when you always take the high road, when you settle for nothing less than integrity, when you make sure that in your business, you only help and never hurt people.

In fact, we will all get much "luckier" when we face all of these challenges head on. There are no shortcuts to real and lasting success.

Lou Abbott’s experience in the industry goes back to a brief participation in Amway 30 years ago. A self-employed entrepreneur from age 21, at age 51, Lou has built many successful businesses including rising to the top 1% or more with his successful network marketing company. Lou’s very useful website provides services and reference material for the professional network marketer. Regarding his Special Report, MLM The Whole Truth, John Fogg commented on Lou’s mission to make the network marketing industry a place where no one will ever get hurt again, “What that will take is just enough smart, savvy and courageous men and women reading and writing information like MLM The Whole Truth that tell it like it is and – more importantly – as it must become, and then walk that talk.”

See http://www.mlm-thewholetruth.com