A practical (then humorous) approach to building a network marketing professional.
It’s not enough that you simply join a network marketing company. As Ray Higdon put it (paraphrasing), “It doesn’t matter if you’re selling scented candles or dietshakes, the 5 percenters will do well in any company.” Taking his concept in mind, perhaps the most important step before you join any company is to determine the philosophy of the team you choose before you join.
In other words, regardless of which multi-level marketing company you choose to join, if you have an idea what your goals are without knowing the essential philosophy of the group you are joining, you could be in for a rough ride as an aspiring network marketer.
The team you join has the power to make or break your chance to take part in what top earning marketer and best selling author Mark Yarnell calls “… the greatest opportunity in the history of capitalism.” You simply would not want to lose sight of the opportunity because you ended up riding along with the wrong companions.
A team is a group of people who follow a particular philosophy of marketing or business building. It is often a system based on techniques and philosophy, not of the MLM company, but of the leader(s) or founders who created the team, or some derivative of the founder’s beliefs.
So, at the risk of over simplicity, I will categorize marketing teams into 3 general categories:
1) Product Based Model (product centered)
2) Business Building Model (income centered)
3) Career Destroying and Customer Annoying Model
Understand what your objective is first and then screen the system of marketing of a team or group before joining.
Using a military analogy, you can join the Navy and you can be happy as an unrated seaman swabbing decks on harbor tug, or you can be an intelligence specialist riding shotgun on a clandestine mission.
Both of these people are happy with what they do and both serve in the Navy, but you can be damned sure, you cannot expect these two to swap places and get what they want out of serving in the Navy.
For your benefit, let me briefly describe, with modest stereotypical exaggeration, the characteristics of the three aforementioned groups.
1) Product Based/Product Centered Model
In this model, people are really thrilled about the product. Every product launch is like the next coming of the Messiah.
The team gets together often to extol the virtues of every innovation and it’s a great opportunity to get together to have parties and be part of a crowd of like-minded groupies.
2) Business Building/ Income Centered Model
This is where your knowledge of basic math is put to good use. For those who never learned it, they wished they got it 10 years earlier, and those who learned much higher math, wondered why they went through the trouble.
The math I’m talking about is when you multiply a number like 5 and multiply it by 5 and multiply it by 5 and continue to do it until you’re earning $30,000 per month or more.
3) The Career Destroying and Customer Annoying Model
This occurs when there is no matching. Matching of people’s needs to the opportunity is as alien a concept as inviting Lady Gaga to perform in a sliced meat suit at your 6 month old’s Baptism. This is when the amount of bodies is more important than the surmising of needs of the people in those bodies. This model tends to flourish when the group is marketer-centered rather than customer or prospect-centered.
Ray Higdon said, “It’s not multi-level marketing that people hate, it’s network marketers.”
But let’s be fair, in all professions, there are ethical professionals and unethical ones. It’s often the case that a bad apple spoils a public persona. Given the strong growth trends in network marketing, it would be worthwhile, in my opinion, to keep your avenues open.
God-forbid if you lose out on a great opportunity just because you accidentally ended up running with the wrong group of people and get disoriented because their philosophy did not match yours.
Now, each of the first two groups would still have variations on how they instruct new team members how to go about their business of either promoting products or building a network. There could be as many variations as there are people who join but the focus will either be product selling or business building.
If you’ve receive some value from this, please like, share and comment.
Feel free to contact me if you would like to further discuss differences in MLM team philosophies at: challenyee@challenyee.com
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I’ll see you… on the next page
