Would you go up to a person you see in a club, or at the mall, etc., a person you have never met, and say to them, “Wow, you are beautiful! Let’s get married.”?
And if you would, would you really expect that person to reply with a serious “yes”?
Or, would you go to a party wearing a big, bright sign across your chest, and right in the midst of the gathering would you stand up on a chair and begin shouting, “Attention everyone! I need everyone to listen! I have the best business opportunity that has ever been and I want you all to join me right now because we are all going to get rich!”?
Would you really do that?
I dare say that you might be asked to leave that party.
This is basically what is happening when a person blasts out their “This is the best new MLM opportunity in the world”-type message via email, Facebook, whathaveyou.
I get no less than 20 of these proposals in my personal email box on a daily basis.
So if you are a person who’s method of recruiting is that of proposing prior to the first date, or of ruining the party, and you wonder why people just aren’t joining like gang-busters, and you wonder why they just don’t respond, just realize that others generally don’t agree to marry someone prior to the first date and they don’t want their party interrupted.
People couldn’t care less about your opportunity. They already have their own opportunities they are working on building. What makes you think that they are just all of a sudden going to go, “Wow! The best opportunity in the world huh? Man, I thought I had the best one but I guess I was wrong. I suppose I shall have to join this new one”?
OK, maybe if you happen to have a list of people who you know are all looking for a new opportunity, a list of people who are not marketers, but perhaps newly laid-off laborers or something like that this might work. I’m not sure.
What I do know is that part of my workday involves that of deleting about 60 to 80 of this type of emails from my personal email box, and my Facebook message inbox, and my Twitter DM box, and of clearing my wall of spam.
If you are going to email me how about sending me something about ways in which I might improve my own business? How about letting me know about some tools that you use, and what they do, and why it would benefit me? How about telling me about why I might want to work with you — not why your product or comp plan is the “best in the world”?
All of them are “the best ever!”.
Anyone you ask thinks theirs is “the best ever!”
If they didn’t, they shouldn’t be in that opportunity.
My viewpoint is that if I join up with someone I am going to be working with them for the next 20 years. I want to know something about why I would want to work with them.
For example, can you help me to improve my sales funnel? Can you offer any help in the way of…. maybe showing me how to put an exit pop-up on my lead capture page so that when a potential prospect goes to close the window they get a pop-up with and unbelievable offer? Or could you maybe share with me a marketing strategy that you stumbled across that you know hardly anyone is using, but it is producing great results for you? Or maybe you use a piece of software that accomplishes so and so and saves you like 15 hours per week and generates 100+ unique visitors per day to your site. I would want to know about stuff like that.
This stuff would be helpful.
I would build your value in my eyes.
It may just create a situation where one day if I am looking to add another stream I would think of you and remember that you were able to help me with some things.
I’ll give you a bullet here…
There are really 3 things someone wants to know before they join you:
1. How much do I have to invest?
2. Who am I going to talk to about it (in other words, how am I going to market this effectively)?
3. How are you going to help me?
Unless this is the very first opportunity someone has joined and they just don’t know, they are going to need answers to these questions.
If it is the first opportunity they have joined, well, then they probably don’t know how to market and have no real idea of what they are getting into and unless you have something of value to share with them to help them get going properly, they are just going to struggle and fail and quit. Then where will you be?
You will be in the same boat as over 80% of network marketers which is you work very hard and build a small team over the first few months, and almost none of them sell anything and after 3 or 4 months they all quit. This is a huge waste of your time.
I can promise you that it is far easier for you to be more patient on the recruiting and begin providing valuable help to people in one form or another. This allows you to build your relationship so that when that person is ready to join something new, at least they know someone who has helped them and has something to offer. And this will increase their chances of joining you by about 1000%.
So when I’m getting all this “Greatest New MLM Opportunity Ever!” spam in my email box, all I’m wondering is, “Why do I want to joint this PERSON?”. I am not wondering, “I wonder what the comp plan is.”.
There are 1000 great comp plans out there.
There are many thousands of great products.
This is all my opinion certainly.
But I think you will find that if you are looking for people to put on your team that will stick, and will produce something, and aren’t just going to fail and drop out after a short time and leave you with nothing for your efforts, you will want to focus your attention on providing them some value that may help them, rather than just pitching them with the “latest and greatest snake-oil!” blurb.
That’s my story anyway.
