WHAT are you selling? WHY are you in this business? WHO are
you marketing to? HOW are you marketing?
The answers to these four questions can make or break your
network marketing business. You need to be clear about the
answers yourself, AND you need to be able to convey those
answers to your prospects.
Of course, it's obvious to you WHAT you're selling, and you
probably have a pretty clear idea of WHY you're selling
what you're selling. (Something to do with a beach house in
Jamaica, right? Or is it Maui?)
I'll bet you're really good at explaining the WHAT when
you're recruiting, too, giving out an abundance of info on
your products and services, your company, and your
compensation plan.
I'll also bet you know that to be an effective enroller,
you need to explore your prospect's WHY, encouraging her to
open up and share with you all her frustrations, hopes, and
dreams. You want your new recruit to be motivated, after
all. And you want to be able to demonstrate how your
opportunity can help solve her frustrations, and turn her
hopes and dreams into reality.
This is all good.
But when we come to the WHO and the HOW, many network
marketers fall flat on their faces.
Your prospect needs to be able to see herself doing this
business. She wants to know exactly HOW she's going to
market your company's products and opportunity and WHO
she's going to sell them to.
I'm sure a prospect has asked you this before. "What,
exactly, will I be doing?"
What do you tell her?
If you give her the usual lame explanation that she'll be
"sharing" with her "warm" market of family and friends and
that she needs to make a list of everyone she knows right
away, chances are you're going to lose her.
Anyone who's already done network marketing or whose
brother-in-law or coworker ever hounded her to join a
business is already hip to the fact that this approach will
take her down the road to humiliation and social isolation.
No one wants this.
Plus, there's the dirty little secret that out of all the
highly successful people in network marketing, hardly any
of them got there by recruiting friends and relatives. I'm
not saying it never happens, but in general, you can't rely
on the warm market strategy to get you where you want to
go. And recommending it to your prospects just compounds
the problem.
So what IS the HOW? And who IS the WHO?
What will you tell your prospect if you don't really know
the answers to these questions yourself?
To cast some clarity on this, let's take a look at another
group of professionals - real marketers. In other words,
professional business people who actually make a living
marketing products and services.
You don't see them hitting on their family and friends. Or
putting flyers on windshields, or tacking up posters on
coffee shop bulletin boards, or dropping their business
cards in restrooms, or inviting their neighbors over for
product parties.
This is the scatter-shot,
if-I-just-shoot-enough-bullets-in-that-general-direction-may
be-I'll-eventually-hit-a-duck approach. You're going to run
out of ammo long before you see any results. You do these
things if you want a hobby, not a business.
On the other hand, professional marketers know exactly WHO
makes up their target market - people who already see a
need and have a desire for the marketer's products or
services. Their HOW uses laser-focused, thoroughly tested
strategies to reach that target market.
If your goal is really to have a business that will allow
you to quit your J.O.B, to allow you to retire comfortably,
to give you the lifestyle of your dreams... then you need
to treat it as a real business and start using the
marketing strategies that real, successful businesses use.
You need to discover how professional marketers reach
thousands of prospects and sift and sort and qualify them
so they only talk to the best ones?
If you find out how to do that, and teach it to your
downline, what will that do for your organization?
I realize -- it takes digging, and researching, and lots of
reading to learn real, effective marketing techniques.
Fortunately, you'll find plenty of resources out there to
help you. And when you're done with your basic research,
you'll want to try things out and experiment to see what
works best for your business.
You may experience a very steep and exhilarating learning
curve for a while. But believe me, you'll think it's SO
worth it when you've joined the ranks of the really
successful network marketers and you're sipping Mai-tai's
in Maui.
----------------------------------------------------
Would you like to get started learning effective 21st
Century marketing techniques today? Liz Monte is offering
a 7-part mini-course designed to cover all the basics. It's
called "Attraction Marketing for Networkers," and you can
enroll for free at http://www.wisenetworkmarketer.com . Liz
Monte writes on a variety of topics of interest to network
marketers.
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