This One Very Common Prospecting Mistake Will Torpedo Your Home Based Business Before You Even Get Started
One of the keys to being successful in network marketing is having the ability to quickly and accurately qualify your prospects. People have different criteria in making these important decisions, but it really comes down to one important question:
“Is your opportunity one that will help solve the problems of your prospect?”
Too many people in network marketing make the critical mistake of qualifying people based on how the prospect will add to their OWN business. For example, if Mary comes to me willing to spend thousands of dollars in capital to gain entry in to my home business opportunity, this would mean a huge commission in my pocket. But before I can in good conscience add Mary to my team, I need to assess her needs and wants to be sure that they are consistent with the ability of my opportunity to satisfy them.
Under what possible circumstances would I disqualify a prospect?
Here’s another example.
Let’s say that John comes to me inquiring about my home business opportunity. John tells me he has looked over the business briefly, has the few hundred dollars to enter the opportunity at the lowest level, and is eager to get started.
Before I accept John’s money, I have a conversation with him regarding his needs and wants. It turns out that these few hundred dollars is all John has left in the world, he is unemployed, no immediate prospects of finding work, has no prior experience in network marketing, and needs $3000 in the next 20 days to make his mortgage payment or he will lose his home.
There is no way that I can recommend this opportunity to John, nor any network marketing opportunity that I know of, because I understand how unlikely it would be for John to meet these critical needs.
This is an example of putting your prospects needs in front of your own.
It is critical to get this right.
Putting your own needs and wants ahead of your prospects will almost certainly result in the ultimate failure of your home business.
I make this statement with no hesitation because I firmly believe that the intention of your business will ultimately decide its fate.
If your intention is solely to make a lot of money for yourself as quickly as possible to satisfy your OWN desires, your prospects will quickly realize this and move away from you as a leader who can help them. However, if your true intention is to help others solve THEIR problems and meet THEIR goals, and your opportunity can help them realize these goals, then you have the perfect opportunity for adding them to your team and helping them succeed in their business.
Making this important shift from your own needs to those of your prospects will set you up as a leader to be followed and a person of great integrity. You will undoubtedly make more money in the long run and thus, meet your own personal income and life goals in the process. And there is one more advantage:
You’ll be able to sleep at night.
Is Your Mission Statement Holding You Back?
Every business, from the largest corporations to the smallest work-at-home business needs a Mission Statement. In other words,
Why Are You Doing What You’re Doing?
For what reason? What do you want to get out of your business venture?
When most people sit down and think about it, they start thinking about what THEY want out of their business.
A new car.
A Caribbean vacation.
A boat or new house.
Fire their boss. Freedom. Wealth.
But wait….
THIS IS A CRITICAL MISTAKE!
Now you’re probably saying something like, “What’s wrong with that?”
Nothing, and EVERYTHING.
Let me ask you a question. If I approached you to join my terrific business opportunity, and you asked me this very simple question…. “Why should I join you?”
How do you think you’d react if I responded,
“You should join my team because I want a new car, a new boat, a vacation, financial freedom.”
I’m sure you’d say, “Who give a s’&t!!”
And you’d be absolutely right.
People want to join a business, or buy a product, because there is some benefit to THEM, not the seller or the business owner.
And the sooner the business owner understands that, the better.
If your Mission is solely SELF DRIVEN, this will come across to your prospect and you will repel them.
However, if your Mission is to benefit others, then your prospect will be attracted.
Rosemary and I have a Mission Statement for our business. Here it is:
Our Mission Statement is to help as many people as possible live the life they desire.
NOTICE – There is….
No “US”
No “WE”
No “I” in our Mission Statement.
There is no room for these words in your mission statement.
It needs to be all about what’s best for your customer.
To your success!
Global Business Coach and Marketing Strategist
Starting a Home Based Internet Business — Which Products Should I Market?
Congratulations! You’ve decided to make starting a home based internet business a priority in your life. It may be one of the best decisions you’ll ever make in your life.
Or it could be one of the worst. It depends on how well you do your homework.
Over the next week, I will be outlining and discussing the most important questions to ask BEFORE taking the internet marketing plunge. Because if you don’t get it right in the beginning, you could be in for a bucket load of frustration and misery.
Worse, the experience may cause you to think that ALL internet marketing businesses are the same.
Believe me, they’re not.
The first questions to ask yourself regards WHAT you want to market?
FIRST QUESTION: Do you want to market your OWN products or get paid to market someone else’s?
Answer: Unless you are prepared for the financial outlay involved with creating, testing, producing, and keeping an inventory of your own product, I STRONGLY advise you to market other people’s products.
How does this work? Typically, you advertise and market someone else’s products and get a percentage of the purchase price when someone buys from you. This is a typical MLM model, but can also be found in direct sales and informational marketing. Sometimes this is called Affiliate Marketing.
It’s a great deal, done right. I mean, no inventory, no stocking, no merchant accounts, no worrying about guarantees. All this is typically done by the company that owns the products. You sole responsibility is to market the products.
NEXT QUESTION: What products should you market?
There are a couple of factors to take into consideration. First and foremost, the products you sell should be products that resonate with you, products that you believe in, and preferably products that you use on a routine basis. Your customers will smell it from mile away if you are not 100% sold on your own products, and you’ll repel people like rotten fish on a hot summer day.
What else should you consider? Consider the product saturation in the marketplace. Are you looking to sell products where the market is so saturated that it will be near impossible for you to get your foot in the door. One example is vitamins. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of companies that market vitamins, nutritional supplements, lotions and potions. I should know, I used to market them.
There were 2 problems with it. First, it was hard to convince potential customers that your vitamins or supplements were that much better than your competitors, so we ended up selling the vitamins at deep discounts to gain customers. The result was NEGATIVE CASH FLOW, a huge problem with low cost, saturated products.
The other problem is the low cost of most of these types of products. Low cost equals low commissions (which typically only run as high as 20% of retail. It’s hard to make alot of money when you are only making $10-25 dollars per sale, especially when trying to compete again hundreds selling the same thing.
I typically only get involved in opportunities that offer high end direct sales, where commissions start at $1000 and go as high as $7500 PER SALE. It’s the only way to make money quickly in an internet business, and when you’re just starting out, CASH flow is a major concern for most people.
Next time I will continue to discuss the very important questions you MUST ask yourself before you consider starting a home based internet business.
To your success!
See which direct sales opportunity Dr. Clarke chose above all others
MLM Success Secrets: Can I Make Fast Money?
The quick answer to this question is: NOT USUALLY.
You’d be surprised how many people I talk with who really want to start a home business, or so they think. But when I really start asking the tough questions about their motives for wanting to be a home business owner, things often get a little dicey.
My first 3 questions are always the same:
- Do you have any prior sales/marketing/home business experience?
- How much capital are you willing to spend to get your business started and positioned in the compensation plan?
- What is your monthly income goal and how quickly are you looking to attain this goal?
By the time I get to the 3rd question, you can just see the eyes starting to glaze over. It’s about this time that they realize that a home business is going to mean HARD WORK and some MONEY to get it going and maintain it until a profit is seen.
It’s also at this point that I lose alot of prospects, but that’s okay with me. I’d rather find out now than to invest a lot of time in training and mentoring, just to have them drift away from disillusionment.
In the next few blog posts I will examine each of these factors in more detail, but in general, here’s the truth in making money with a home-based business:
- You’ll make money faster if you’ve had prior experience in sales and marketing, or if you’ve owned a business before.
- You’ll make money faster if you buy into the opportunity at a higher level in the compensation plan (consider this your capital investment).
- You’ll make money faster if you have a marketing budget that will allow you to get the word out. In general, the more you can spend in marketing, the more extensively your product will be in front of people, and the more sales you will make.
We’ll discuss these more in future posts, and how you can shorten your learning curve if you are lacking the experience that will put you in the winners circle.
To your prosperity!
Dr. Bob Clarke
October 4, 2008; Cresskill, NJ
Why is the MLM Failure Rate So High?
It’s generally accepted that approximately 97% of all MLM home business owners will spend more money than they make. This results in nothing more than a fairly expensive hobby, and ultimately results in MLM failure.
Why?
I posed this question to several of my colleagues in the home business industry and, to my surprise, there was an overwhelming similarity to their responses.
The NUMBER ONE reason that most experts gave for the high MLM failure rate?
UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS. People getting into the business for the wrong reasons, and expecting unrealistic results.
Who is to blame for these unrealistic expectations. I believe the fault lies with both the new business owner and the network marketing industry.
Many people start a home business NOT to build a long term source of income but to make money quickly. They need money to pay bills, to pay off debt, or for some unforeseen emergency.
They read the HYPE on the internet, or get caught up in the excitement of a presentation, and sign on the dotted line.
Next thing they know, they find out they have to spend more money to purchase more products or to get higher into the compensation plan to make the kind of income they need.
They soon find out that there are a whole set of skills they need to be truly successful, including sales, copywriting, and marketing skills that take most people years to acquire.
And they get frustrated.
What they really want is quick money, a lot of money is as little time as possible.
They did not sign up for the long term plan.
But that is what a home business really is. It’s NOT a get rich scheme, it’s a get rich slow scenario.
And we in the Network Marketing and MLM industry are also to blame. Because of the HYPE.
We set people up for their unrealistic expectations based on our “hypey” ads, our misleading sales pages, and our broken promises of full and complete training.
That’s the bad news.
The good news? There ARE companies out there that deliver what they promise in terms of training and support. There ARE companies that cut the learning curve down dramatically with their systems.
But even so, it still is going to take the inexperienced marketer some TIME to acquire the necessary skills to succeed in their home business.
That is why I make sure that all of my prospects UNDERSTAND UP FRONT that they will need to work at their business, to treat it like a business and not like a hobby, and to learn skills they may not have at the moment.
I make sure my prospects understand, REALLY UNDERSTAND our company compensation plan, so that they are not blindsided by any additional funds needed to get their business off the ground.
Do less people sign up with me because of this. UNDOUBTEDLY.
Does it bother me? NOT A BIT.
Why? Because the ones who don’t sign up are the ones who would drop out within 6 months anyway. They are not really looking for a home business. They are looking for extra cash. And most times they don’t really want to work all that hard to get it.
What am I left with? A team of serious entrepreneurs who understand that it takes time to attain success and that sometimes money has to be spent in order to generate more significant earnings later on.
And these people are HARD WORKERS. They are not looking for a free lunch.
They are my kind of people!
To Your Success!
Dr. Bob Clarke
September 30, 2008; Cresskill, NJ
Looking to Start a Home Based Business? Watch the Hype!
Enough is enough.
The HYPE in the network marketing industry is OUT OF CONTROL. The unsubstantiated income claims, the guarantees that can’t be met, the promises that can’t be kept. Enough already!
My wife Rosemary and I are network marketers, and up until recently pretty proud of this fact. But we are embarassed by the current state of online marketing. It seems that:
HYPE IS IN, INTEGRITY IS OUT.
Just today, I clicked on a website link for a friend of mine, one who I respect quite a bit. And up at the top of her site, I see these words…
“I guarantee that you’ll make $5000 your first week, or I’ll give you a free Flip camera!!!”
First of all, the claim is ridiculous. Unless you are an experienced network marketer with tons of marketing experience, or you are bringing a huge downline into a business opportunity with you, there is no way this will happen.
So what if it doesn’t and you call her on her promise? So she spends $125 bucks, gets you your FLIP camera, and pockets the remaining commission money she received when you signed on.
I call these types of claims misleading at best, unethical at worst. AND THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.
So what to do?
Well, I was lucky. I joined my current business opportunity on the advice of a very good business associate, someone who I trust and respect. And it turned out his advice was 100% correct.
But for the people who go into this blind, who have to place their trust in people making outrageous claims on the internet, I feel sorry for you.
How the hell are you supposed to trust people you don’t know?
It’s no wonder there is an atmosphere of mistrust, skepticism, and cynicism on the Internet these days.
It’s well placed and justified.
My wife Rosemary and I are doing well enough in our businesses that we don’t have to rely on hype.
We don’t need to exaggerate and we don’t need to mislead people to join us.
We market with integrity and we believe that we have to EARN people’s trust before they will join us.
It’s the way that resonates most with us, even if it takes us longer to make our millions than others.
At least we can sleep at night.
To your success!
Bob
Cresskill, NJ; September 15, 2008
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