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Are Your Prospects WORTHY Of Your Time?
You don't need whiners in your downline. The people you need in order for your business to grow are the ones that are too busy producing to be calling you up, complaining, every other day. Self-motivated individuals...people with great attitudes...true leaders. And if you want your business to really flourish, you'll need to focus on building a team of leaders. Which means you will need to start raising the bar on your prospects...and on yourself.
When you join your very first MLM company, you naturally don’t know a great deal about marketing.
And if your company happens to be one of those “Mickey Mouse” businesses (as it was in my case) and you’re walking in the footsteps of your just-as-clueless upline—well, then there will likely be a few things along the way that don’t make much sense to you.
A year or two down the road, however, when you look back on the things that used to puzzle you, you’ll often find you’re now suddenly able to analyze and comprehend them. Because now you see them in light of all your other experiences, everything that has occurred in your personal and professional life since then.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean.
One of the “mysterious” things I had happen to me as a newbie marketer, was that the better I got at what I was doing, the harder it actually became for me to recruit people!
I wasn’t able to put two and two together at the time, but what I know now was going on, was that the more experienced I got, the more, unconsciously, I began to raise the bar on my prospects.
See, when I first started out, as a brand new rep, I would attempt to recruit just about anyone. My mentors told me it was purely a numbers game. So naturally, as the obedient student I was, I would shamelessly pitch my products and my company to anyone who would listen. Even a prospect’s “no” didn’t really mean “no” , explicitly—it just meant “not right now”.
I learned how to ask the right questions. I learned how to breathe life back into dying dreams. I learned how to handle objections and still fears. Every tool I had been given in my MLM toolkit was diligently put to use.
I was firmly convinced that my Opportunity held the solution to most, if not all, of humanity’s problems. Driven by this belief, it didn’t take me long to become a “master recruiter”. The fact that I couldn’t get my downline to produce...well, that was a whole different story.
Then, as the months went by and I grew personally and professionally, something gradually changed. I actually started to disqualify prospects (!) I stopped chasing them. It wasn’t even a conscious decision on my part, and I certainly didn’t change my DMO overnight. But what happened was I gradually gave up trying to convince people.
If a person wasn’t serious about wanting to change their life, I let them go. If someone stood me up for an appointment or wouldn’t return my phone calls…I let them go.
Simple.
One day I actually put a price tag on myself. I decided that my time was worth $250/hour. It was an arbitrary figure, sure, but in my mind it was a reasonable one. The fact that I wasn’t making anything remotely close to that at the time was of little importance.
I simply looked back on everything I had accomplished so far in my life—the schooling, the studies, the courses, the endless hours spent on my business, the sweat, the tears, the sleepless nights, the self-discipline, the commitment to excellence in everything I did… I took all this into consideration and concluded that $250/hour was in fact a very reasonable charge.
Before embarking on a dialing session, I would now ask myself whether the next 30 minutes I was going to spend cold-calling my list of recycled, dead-beat leads could, realistically speaking, be expected to yield a significant enough return on my investment to make it worthwhile.
It was easy to answer that question now that I had established what my time was actually worth. Yet it was a completely new way of thinking. I was used to feeling like I was bothering people. Now, instead, I was asking myself whether the particular prospect I was about to call truly qualified for my time.
Believe me, it was an empowering feeling.
Something had dramatically changed about the way I saw myself. I had started to walk to the beat of a different drum....
Up until that point I had been a slave to the “formula”. A blind, non-thinking slave. In network marketing the formula for success is, of course, massive action. Seasoned reps always want to hammer this into the heads of brand new recruits. Chances are, you’ve heard it too, from your upline…
I don’t have an objection with the “formula” per se. However, if the activity itself is mindless, then doing massive amounts of it isn’t going to make you very successful. It’s only going to make you waste a whole lot of time.
It will give you a false sense of being productive while you really are only spinning your wheels. And that’s a sad place to be in.
What I did, was I stopped participating in what I considered to be mindless activities; activities that weren’t giving me the real long-term results I was looking for. Instead, I began to invest my time in myself.
And it was during those long nights with my eyes glued to the computer screen or my face in a book that I started to make real, tangible deposits in my future bank account.
Whenever I felt tired or discouraged, whenever something was particularly difficult and I felt like calling it quits, I would remind myself of that.
I would remind myself of what my hard labor was actually doing for me and the people I loved: It was opening up doors of opportunity for me in the future which, when they actually came to pass, no doubt would be so amazing that the struggle would have been more than worth it.
You see, there’s no such thing as a wasted moment when you’re honing your skills. Again—every minute spent is a check you write out to yourself and deposit in your future bank account.
Every course you take, every book you read, every marketing strategy you strive to master.
With each challenge, with every task you embark on—even with those you don’t “succeed” in, you are storing up massive treasures for yourself. And not only financial ones. But educational, personal, emotional, and spiritual ones as well.
So, let me ask you this:
Are you able to look beyond the up-front commission and instant gratification of bringing in a new rep, and see the bigger picture?
If, six months down the road, that same rep has gone AWOL, never having produced anything -- and this in spite of your tireless support, handholding and babysitting—how will that make you feel? Maybe a little cheated?
Sad but true: time spent is time gone, forever.
So why in the world would you want to recruit people who aren’t right for your business? So that you can waste your time on them? When you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense, does it...?
And on the same note—what good does it do you to chase your team members?
“But if I don’t go after them, if I don’t keep motivating them, then they’ll be forever none- producing,” you may answer. That’s true. Those reps aren’t going to be producing anything of any significance, with or without you. So let them be. You don’t need them.
The only people you need are the ones that are too busy building their businesses to be calling you up every other day, whining and complaining. Self-motivated individuals. People with great attitudes. True leaders.
And if you want your business to really flourish, you’ll need to focus on building a team of leaders. Which means you will need to start raising the bar on your prospects. And if you are going to raise the bar on your prospects, you’ll need to first raise the bar on the man in the mirror.
So, stop and ask yourself: “Am I the type of person I want to attract?”
Think about it. And if the answer is “no”, think about what you need to do in order to become that person.
Now, if you will excuse me…I have a marketing course I need to finish :-)
See, I’m going for TWO commas on MY check… ;-)
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