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Prospecting 101 Lesson 1 - Everyone is Not a Prospect

Edited by David Gignilliat

If you want to annoy your friends, frustrate your family, lose all of your confidence and fail miserably at your network marketing business, adopt the mantra that “everyone’s a prospect.” If prospecting everyone that gets within three feet of you is only marketing strategy, be prepared to join the 97% of network marketers that quit the industry without making a profit.

The phrase ‘everyone’s a prospect’ has been the lynchpin of MLM lead generation techniques for decades. But is there any truth to it? Ask the millions of aspiring entrepreneurs who have tried and failed. They will tell you, without fail, it’s not for lack of “presentations,” “pitches” or “contacts.” Often, it’s simply because they’re trying to sell to an audience that just doesn’t care. Your company has spent millions on market research and knows exactly how many people you need to talk to get someone interested and how many of them it takes to get a prospect signed up. Your managers will tell you repeatedly that it’s just a numbers game, but the amount of rejection you personally have to endure is both demoralizing and unnecessary.

Does the strategy actually work for anyone? Yes. For these rare Johnny Appleseeds that make it work, they’ll tell you it’s just a matter of putting your head down, trusting the numbers game and staying the course. For most of us, however, this “shotgun” approach will be our first step toward quitting the business. It’s the contradiction of it all that starts to get to each of us. You’re frustrated and desperately want people to sign up for a great opportunity where they “can make money just by talking to people,” … while you can’t seem to make it work simply by talking to people. People tend to sour quickly on the business after an endless loop of no’s and go running in the opposite direction. It’s not the business itself that repels them, it’s the work required to convert these “prospects” into to sales that drives them away.

Ultimately, your customer has to be in a mindset to want to buy something from you. The more expensive your product or service, the more your customer will have to be thinking about it already and better yet, taking steps of their own. Even though your business makes perfect sense to you, everyone else probably doesn’t see it that way. Try convincing someone to move to Australia. Unless they’ve been thinking about it on their own already, it is crazy to suggest it to them without warning. You can give a prospect all the reasons in the world to say “yes,” but if they have no desire to do it, an avalanche of features and benefits will do little to change their mind.

So what should your motto be? “Everyone that asks you about your business or product is a prospect.” And how do you make people ask you about your project? By positioning yourself as someone that can provide others with something they want. Instead of broadcasting your perfect, polished message to thousands of complete strangers who don’t care, you must learn how to get yourself in front of those who truly want to hear what you have to say.

In short, find the people who already want to move to Australia. If you can do this successfully, you just may be able to afford to visit them there someday.

One of the best things a network marketer can learn to do is to leverage his or her time and effort. This applies to many different areas of our home business, from the network marketing company itself, to using other people’s products (with their permission), and lastly by taking people’s advice and expertise as to not start from scratch every time.

Let’s first talk about the network marketing company itself. I’m not too aware of the other companies that are out there, but I’m pretty sure I found a good one. The company I’m in has these perks: you get paid on a downline to infinity (so everyone under you making sales and qualifying prospects makes you money equally), the money is residual (so once you build a downline that pays you say $1500 a week, it will continue to do so for the rest of your life, as long as you stay in the business) and you only need to have about 10-15 costumers a month. Now lets tie this into leverage. For anyone in MLM, the idea of getting paid off of everyone else is somewhat common. No exception with my company. But the fact that some people have to continually earn their checks over and over is a little ridiculous. This fact is so important, because with me, I spend time now building a business that pays me over and over and over again without any more effort on my part. That’s the kind of leverage I’m after, the most effective return on my hour of work.

Setting up a process that repeatedly pays you(residual income) is one example. Another example of leverage is using other people’s efforts whenever you can to your own advantage. A great example of this is the renegade system. You buy the ebook once and have unlimited access to their landing pages and system. This is a huge deal, because they put thousands of hours testing and tweaking something that you can get paid for using without having to do any of the hard work. Eventually you can make even more money by making systems that can help people in the same way you’re being helped, but for anyone starting out, it’s makes a lot of sense to leverage other people’s work to benefit yourself.

And finally, leverage your precious time by reading and taking advice from people who have been there and mastered what you’re learning. Once you get into the whole world of online advertising and business building, you can get lost in the sea of new material. I’ve wasted so many hours trying to figure things out on my own, when I could have spent a little time and sometimes and little money and jumped directly to the end result I was hoping for. Sometimes it comes in the shape of a book from an expert (which I used to learn about blogs), sometimes it’s a video tutorial (how I learned to use an auto-responder). Each of these tools saved me days and days of reading to get me to exactly the end result I was looking for. Then there’s the free support you get when you sign up for a lot of the online tools I’ve mentioned before. I’ve tried godaddy, hostgator, aweber, and countless others and found out that they have amazing support staff that will practically teach you anything you could want to know. Manuals and video tutorials can be ok, but talking to someone that knows exactly what to tell you is even better. So if you’re trying these programs out, don’t waste time trying to guess, have a plan, take advantage of the help and use the most direct route you can to get there.