From day one after joining a network marketing company, your number one preoccupation is "How can I sponsor as many new people as possible in as brief a time as possible?" It is your sponsor's job to teach you the wisdom of the company, or better, the wisdom of the network marketing industry, how to become good at sponsoring new people and how to help them in turn to sponsor new people. In short, how to become a veritable "sponsoring machine." One of the "big dogs" in my network marketing company says that every day he wakes us and leaves his house saying to himself, "Today, I'm on the hunt!" And all day that's what he's doing, looking for possible prospects to join him in business. In this article, I'm going to challenge that whole mentality and the whole traditional way of pursuing prospects till you find your six, or whatever it is in your company. Prospects that will wholeheartedly stick with you and do whatever it takes to find their six. We will revisit the traditional way of network marketing lead generation and see why it's no longer the "tried and proven system" it's touted to be. I'll show you a better way, a way that is more in tune with our times and more in tune with the principles of marketing. Then I'll suggest a route for moving from the old to the new. What it involves and how to make that major paradigm shift. Before you can make a major paradigm shift in your practice of network marketing leads generation, you need to make the paradigm shift in your whole way of thinking about getting leads and recruiting team members. And before you can make that mental shift it will take some understanding of effective marketing and of the cultural shift we've been going through. Understanding the Origins of the Network Marketing Leads Generation Approach When network marketing came on the scene as a major player in the business world in the 1960s, there weren't many options for common people who wanted to start up their own businesses, if they had little capital. Network marketing offered people a chance to begin their own business with little financial capital. To do marketing through the print media or through radio or television was expensive. New recruits were taught to market one-on-one with the people they knew best, their family, relatives, friends, associates, and acquaintances. This was all new and there were many who were willing to try. You probably experienced the network marketing leads generation machine like I did. "Write down the names of everyone you know!" After struggling to get 10 or 20 names down, the sponsor would say, "No,no,no,no! Don't prejudge and write down those you think might be interested. Write down all the names you know, even the people you know by sight without knowing their names!" "You know literally hundreds of people. The kids you went to grade school with, to high school with, to college with. The people you go to church with. Then there's all the people you are related to. The people you would invite to your wedding, etc." The idea was to approach as many of these as you could possibly reach and then, when you run out of names, create lists and lists of new prospects, the new people you meet every day. Then there were carefully honed skills for prospecting, how to approach them in the right way. How to set up a meeting to show the plan. How to leverage your upline in making phone calls and in showing the plan. A hundred and one ways to get the plan before them. In hotels, in home meetings, in one-on-one meetings in their kitchen, using cassettes, CDs, and DVDs. Does all this sound familiar. For me it was in 1999 and the "tried and proven system" had been well built, oiled and greased! Understanding the Need for a Paradigm Shift in Our Network Marketing Leads Generation Approach How have you found this approach to work? If you are very outgoing and have lots of quality connections, you may have done well using the traditional approach. For me, a timid introvert who had lived much of my life overseas and didn't have many good connections, this approach was extremely painful to learn and use, and yielded a meager harvest. I managed to get a few to sign up now and then. They were usually too poor to make it. I discovered that first of all, my world was vastly different from the world of the early network marketers who had created this out of date network marketing leads generation machine. In my world, most prospects had either tried network marketing before or knew someone who had had a bad experience with it. Furthermore, I was in competition with scores and scores of other business opportunities out their competing for the same prospects attention. Not just network marketing opportunities but all kinds of other home based business opportunities out there. I also learned something about marketing, a skill that network marketing has largely neglected. Now, this is going to seem very elementary when I state it, but I came from a background of teaching not a background of sales and marketing. Furthermore, even though it sounds elementary, it's a world away from what is practiced by the "tried and proven system" of network marketing companies until recently. This principle of marketing, which seems so obvious, has been called "the holy grail of sales" by Ann Sieg. Here's how she states it: "A prospect that comes to you is infinitely more qualified than anyone you could ever approach yourself." Someone who is looking for what you have, whether a product or a business opportunity, is an infinitely better prospect than someone you "chase down". Even the network marketer will tell you that you may have to go through a hundred names on your list to get a few good prospects. I found it even to be worse using prospects I got at Barnes and Nobles or at the mall! Ann points out that the traditional approach to network marketing leads generation is about as ineffective as you can be in the use of your time. First you are limiting yourself to one person at a time. You waste a lot of time chasing people who are simply not interested no matter how persuasive your "sales" techniques. Compared with the person who is actively looking, there's no comparison. This raises the question of how exactly to find these highly qualified prospects, people who are looking for the kind of thing you are offering? How to Make the Paradigm Shift in Your Network Marketing Leads Generation Approach First, it comes with a shift in your whole way of thinking about leads generation. This leads to a whole new way of going about leads generation. The world has changed. No longer is it costly to do effective marketing with the coming of age of the internet. You can get your presence and your message out there on the internet before the people who are looking with minimum expense. Through the use of ezine articles, or websites, or blogs, or social media, this is doable on a grand scale. To be sure, it's not "easy", especially for we who grew up before the "age of the internet". There's a whole science of doing network marketing leads generation effectively that has grown up just during the last few years. It involves learning new skills, not necessarily all the new skills, but becoming good at some of them. It involves using autoresponders which enables you to sort and sift prospects. No longer are you using valuable hours to hunt down hundreds of moderately interested prospects. You are attracting prospects that are looking and that your leads generation machine is sorting for you and bringing to you only those who are highly qualified. Second, you need to get the training and support you need to step into the 21st Century world of network marketing, a world which is more and more competitive, a world which is internet savvy, a world which needs to use the best in marketing science to find the scores of people that are seriously looking. They might not be next door, but across the country and even around the world. It is this stage that I am in currently, not an expert, but becoming one as fast as I can! I've discovered by experience that there are two ways of going about mastering the skills of business building on the internet. You can chart your own course. There's a lot out there in the way of training, either free or reasonably priced. The problem with this approach is that when you are picking your own way through an unfamiliar jungle, it takes a long time and there are many false starts. The other approach is to get into a training system. There are many such systems that will take you by the hand and teach you the basic skills and help you design and build your own effective internet business. I wish you the best on your journey. It could be one of the most exciting you've ever taken.
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