Duplication may have been great when huge downlines were being built in local communities through home meetings, but in the new internet age, there are way too many choices to starting a home business.  Being a “duplicate” of your upline or having “duplicate” downlines will kill your business fast.

Duplication leads to commoditization.  Do you place extra value on a commodity?  No, you don’t.  Commodities compete on price.  Does the average person care where they buy gasoline for their car?  No, they just want the cheapest option.

Commoditization leads to a “lowest cost wins” business mentality.  This is not what you are interested in.  Having a downline that is full of people seeking the lowest cost business opportunity will not result in a large revenue stream.  You should want to recruit and create leaders.

How do you recruit and create leaders?  You become a leader.  You anti-comoditize yourself.  Stick out from the crowd and don’t approach things like everyone else.

• You are in control, not the prospect.
• Be willing to let the prospect go.
• You have the power to ALLOW people to join your business.
• Don’t waste your time by taking on duds because you are emotionally attached to the prospecting process.  Objectively evaluate prospects to determine if they are right for the business and if YOU want to work with THEM.  Not the other way around.

Avoid the hype and stand out from the crowd.  If you emotionally sell a prospect on either your opportunity or product, you’re going to have to keep selling them on it.  Emotional sales also lead to buyer’s remorse, because people realize later that they made an emotional decision rather than a rational evaluation.  Let them evaluate it all they can.  Give as them as much information as they need to make a decision, but be willing to let them go if they won’t pull the trigger and get signed up.

People get distracted by the tools and flashy websites.  The only reason to have tools and websites is to amplify your effectiveness when it comes to prospecting.  In fact, usually the best performing websites are the “ugliest” by artistic standards.  They are there to serve a function–that’s it.

There is only one of you.  Make yourself count.  Be the best version of YOU possible.

For more alpha networker tips, sign up for the free videos here.

“Every person within 3 feet of you is your prospect.”

WRONG!
WRONG!!
WRONG!!!

This is so unbelievably false.  Why on Earth would you want to start a business relationship with just anyone that happens to be around?  Remember from the last newsletter, the goal of interacting with a prospect is to determine, as quickly as possible, whether or not they are a good fit for your business.

What does it say about your business if you think that literally everyone is your prospect?  Proponents of the 3 foot rule will tell you that everyone wants to quit their job or make extra money.

Like walking down the road, doing martial arts, and prospecting, you have to commit fully, or you’ll “get squished.”

From the first moment you interact with a prospect, they are evaluating you. What you say, how you say it, your body language. They all send your prospect signals about the type of person that you are.

If you do “middle of the road” or “guess so” prospecting, your prospects will jump all over you like a pack of dogs. They’ll ignore your calls, hang up on you, blow you off, or perhaps the worst of all, pitch YOU on THEIR business while YOU’RE paying for the call.

Most network marketers have no idea how to present themselves and so the prospect dominates the interaction. They get themselves in a situation where the prospect is evaluating them. This is backwards from the way that all expert recruiters work.

The goal of interacting with any prospect is to assess, as quickly as possible, whether you think they are right for your business or not. Get rid of the losers and move on to the next one. It’s not unheard of for expert recruiters like Mike Dillard or Mark Weiser to disqualify a prospect based on how they answer the phone.

Prospect (picks up phone): “What!”
Expert Recruiter: “Sorry wrong number”

Good prospects, that will make good distributors, will join your business for 2 major reasons. The first reason is that you have positioned yourself as a leader and the prospect thinks they will gain skills my interacting with you as part of your downline.

Going back to the quiz question, how many messages is the right number. In this case “How many?” is not as important as “How It’s Done.” A single message displaying knowledge, authority, and leadership skills is about the best that you can get. And if you’re really making a serious number of calls, it might be worth investing in an autodialer service that ensures you only ever actually talk to live people.

When it comes to talking to prospects, success will come when the emotion leaves. When you stop worrying about what your prospects think and you start objectively evaluating whether or not you want to work with an individual, you’ll find that sponsoring will become easy.

For some other great free prospecting and sponsoring tips like overcoming objections and the top 3 questions you should ask a prospect, get the free video with Mark Weiser and Mike Dillard. It over an hour long and it’s worth it to watch every minute. You can get access to it here.

I don’t want to leave any of you hanging here. “But what if I just started and I’m not a leader? My downline is full of exactly no one. How can I convince prospects that I am a leader?”

There are two answers to that, and they both are simple.

1. People respect passion. Are you fired up? Use it to your advantage. I can think of many conversations I’ve been in where I had absolutely no previous interest in what the other person what saying, but they spoke with such passion and conviction that I hung on their every word, asked questions, and afterwards wondered where the time went. Be that other person. Don’t blab on and on, but channel your newfound enthusiasm for networking and share it with each and every prospect.
2. Acquire knowledge and new skills that will automatically position you as a leader. You don’t need a PhD, you just need to know more than your prospects. Often this might mean only a few hours of research or reading a book or two. You should be doing this anyway, but if you’re brand new, DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE the power of passion.

For more tips, go get that free video.

How Buying Advertising The Wrong Way
Can Actually Be Like Gambling in Vegas.
Don’t Waste Your Hard-Earned Cash
With No Results…

The goal of any advertising campaign should be results. Unless your business is Coca-Cola, you probably can’t afford to launch massive advertising campaigns that promote your brand, but don’t necessarily result in more sales.

With us network marketers, it’s pretty simple–our advertising efforts must either result in more distributors or more product sales or we’ll be out of business.

Unfortunately most of us are taught advertising methods that don’t typically yield the types of results that we need. Buying leads or buying clicks from Google Adwords aren’t necessarily bad methods. In fact, in right person’s hands, these methods can produce outstanding results.

But for the brand new network marketer, these methods probably will not be effective immediately. Some of us may be able to afford buying leads or clicks while we learn how to prospect. But if you can’t afford it, then you really shouldn’t be spending your money learning the wrong way to do something.

It’s easy to get lured into these traps. “If I buy 200 leads, all I need are 2 new distributors to make my money back. That’s only 1%, I can do that.” or “If I get 1000 visitors to my website from Adwords, I’ll only need 2 new distributors to make my money back.”

If you’re brand new to either of these methods, you might get lucky and meet your sponsoring goals and break even. But most likely, you won’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to end up with no results.

So you buy more leads, or you buy more website traffic and now the voice in your head says, “Well I lost money on the last one, but if I get 4 new distributors, then I’ll break even. I learned a lot from the last batch and I won’t make the same mistakes again.”

So this time, you make a whole new set of mistakes and end up with no results again. You keep going.

“This time, I need 6 to break even”
“This time, I need 8 to break even”
“This time, I need 10 to break even”

and so on…

Meanwhile you’re just waiting for the time when you get “lucky” and start sponsoring. This sounds familiar–It sounds like my friend Shawn playing the blackjack tables in Vegas and it sounds like my grandmother playing the lottery with scratch tickets. If they just get “lucky” they’ll make their money back, and if they get REALLY lucky, they might win it big.

But what if you never “win big” and you run out of money, what then?

The problem with these activities is that they aren’t leveraged and they aren’t repeatable without paying more money.

If you’re new to the industry, or even if you’ve been around for a while without getting any results, then you need to invest in acquiring skills that will increase your leverage when you’re building your business.

What if instead of that first batch of leads, you invested in some training materials that taught you some phone skills so you could better talk to prospects?
What if instead of that first batch of clicks, you invested in some training materials that taught you how to do keyword research and write good headlines and compelling offers?

Do you think the results would have been different?

Unlike leads or clicks which are gone once they’re gone, investing in yourself is something that will keep paying off. Having more knowledge will increase your value to your prospects and automatically position you as a leader in their minds. This in turn will make them want to join you and your opportunity.

There is a really great free training video that explains this entire concept in more detail. It’s the second video in the Building on a Budget series. You can sign up to get it here.