The three big issues most network marketing distributors struggle with in this great profession are: generating leads, high attrition, and lack of duplication.
Agreed?
So the question then becomes why?
The easiest way to understand this question is to look back at your first experience in this industry and ask yourself how it went for you.
Odds are pretty high you failed right? You were probably told to make a list of friends and family (which is the right thing to do), and then contact them about the opportunity.
And then after burning through your warm market list you may have been left high-and-dry.
Sure you probably plugged into weekly trainings, phone calls, and hotel meetings, but in the end what good did all that do?
Did you acquire any new skills from those get-togethers?
Did those meetings or phone calls result in a horde of new signups?
Did your new signups duplicate?
If the answer to these questions is “no,” I will tell you why, and it can all be summed up in one word: TRAINING.
Training is the Achilles heel of the industry and the one true area that most teams fall short with.
Think about it this way, let’s go back to the three problem areas in our profession.
Did your team ever teach you anything beyond the 3-foot rule or simply meeting new people. If this was the extent of your lead generation training odds are extremely high that you struggled, ultimately adding to the attrition epidemic.
Did you actually learn the fundamental skills that a network marketing professional needs to possess: qualifying, inviting, following up, handling concerns, enrolling, and training? If you said “no” odds are very high you failed again.
I personally come from a training background, in a highly technical field in fact. This field was commercial nuclear power, and as you can imagine, the operators required vast amounts of high quality training to be able to perform their jobs correctly.
Those jobs required unique skill sets that had to be developed before they could even lay a hand on a piece of equipment. If they did not do their jobs correctly the consequences could literally cost thousands of people their lives.
How silly would it be if the extent of a nuclear operator’s training was: write down what you already know, take this test without training or instruction, and now go operate the nuclear plant?
Our country would literally be a ticking time bomb of nuclear plants just waiting to melt down.
Well, that’s pretty much what we have in the network marketing profession when we don’t train our people. You have a horde of untrained distributors, with great intentions and big hearts, but inadequate training to prepare them for the job (I know I said job, go easy on me) function they assigned to do: the job of a network marketing professional.
So let’s vow to fix this, as a community shall we?
From here forward let’s make a commitment to one another and train our new distributors the right way.
This means taking your newest person by the hand and walking them in a 1 on 1 fashion through whatever training process it is you have set up.
At a bare minimum your initial training program should include skill based training that covers pre-business launch, goal planning, qualifying, inviting, following up, objections handling, enrolling, and then training your people to become trainers.
From there your training process can move into areas of continuing training and advanced training if your new people are interested in taking their businesses to the next level.
Driving depth is great, and working a warm market is a key ingredient in doing this, but don’t do it at the expense of the people you pass up.
Let’s live as network marketing professionals with a “No Distributor Left Behind” philosophy.
Our teams, the industry abroad, and everyone watching us will be better off for it.
Article Written by Jason Lee
Founder of Unleashing The Alpha Networker Podcast
CEO of Alpha Sponsoring LLC
Network Marketing Trainer Professional
