What's Wrong With This Picture?

You are excited. You sign up and buy the kit. You are going to make big money. All you have to do is sponsor three and teach them to sponsor three. Sounds soooo easy. You call all of your friends and none - zero want to be your distributor. But but all you have to do is... Then you try and try and try, you get more and more frustrated. Then discouragement sets in. People are telling you that you seem like you are part of some cult, and that this will never amount to anything. You know what else your sponsor told you? That you never have to sell... Hey, you've been selling your opportunity to your friends and family right?

These are the two lies that sponsors tell: You only have to sponsor 3 - and you don't have to sell. "Everybody" uses these lies, because they are true in theory. I mean, you don't have to sell if you are buying for yourself and sponsoring others, or do you? Sponsoring is recruiting and is very similar to selling; so technically - it is selling. And you do sell to yourself. If you advertise, your marketing message is a sales pitch and usually requires a sales presentation as a follow up. Even if you are recruiting this is true.

As far as needing to sponsor just 3 people and teach them to sponsor 3, in my experience your attempt to sponsor from your warm market is nearly impossible and where else would you get just 3 from? Let's say that you beat your head against a brick wall long enough and it crumbled... in other words you sponsored 3. The likelihood that all 3 will want to do anything is slim and none. Especially if you use the same "sales" pitch: sponsor just three, no selling involved. Some people will just sign up to get you off their back. Others will sign up and get busy. Others must watch Monday night football and have a case of beer nightly. Some just have the misfortune of getting sick, injured, fired, divorced... you just never know what you're going to get.

Ok, so what do you really have to do? First, realize that you are in business. You started a small business and you will need to know how to sell your product. No way around it. You must sell to yourself, your warm market, people you know, and people you don't know. You do this to learn their objections. Hey if you sell something, that is great, but your greatest learning experience is when people don't buy. Why did they choose not to buy? Very important stuff because we need to learn how to overcome the objections to your product... mainly because the product is also the opportunity.

When you sell an opportunity, you are selling yourself as sponsor and your lifestyle, but you are also selling your product. Because... who is going to buy the product? We know from earlier posts that legal MLM companies must have product sales in order to pay commissions to distributors. If everyone is recruiting and nobody is buying or selling the product, how much money do you make? That's right, zero. "Gasp," you say, "I don't want to work my butt off and earn nothing!" Well then, you must sell the product to yourself, to customers, and to your downline distributors.

Second, you must realize that even though theoretically it's possible to only need to sponsor three (or four or five), the reality is that 95% or more of distributors will drop out. No matter how they are recruited, no matter how much support, no matter if you build their business for them, no matter if you have the greatest product ever... they will drop out. So you will constantly need to replace your drop out distributors in order to keep your business growing.

Another sad reality is that good distributors (i.e. big fish) work not with all of their distributors constantly, but mainly with their best producers. Do I agree with doing this? Absolutely. You should be there for all your distributors but usually it's the best ones who want and deserve help. The others are bothered when you call them.

One thing you can do to keep drop out distributors happy: Don't oversell your opportunity. If you tell your distributors they can make money while playing on the computer, they'll be playing solitaire wondering why the checks are not flowing in. Tell them that hard work pays, they will either work hard or not, but they won't be unhappy either way.

Next post I will write about how multi-level marketing is similar to and different from other small businesses.