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Your Network Marketing Business – Can Trying Too Hard Make You Fail?

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A few years ago, I had the pleasure of sponsoring one of the hardest working network marketing business builders you’ll ever find. This guy was pumped up, enthusiastic, and really focused on being successful. He fit the mold of someone you’d really love to have in your downline. For sake of illustration, let’s call him Tom.

Tom showed a lot of effort and determination during his first year in business. He uncovered a lot of new prospects for his business, and worked hard to follow up and sponsor them.

The results of Tom’s work were surprising. He never got things moving, and never made much money, despite his efforts. Two thing about Tom’s efforts stood out.

Tom participated in co-op advertising, built web sites, drove traffic, and overall brought in more prospects online than anyone else.

Even though Tom had a larger number of good prospects for his network marketing business than most people could generate in a year, he was able to sponsor very few of them.

Watching Tom attract so many good prospects, while sponsoring so few of them, was frustrating for his upline leaders. We knew this guy had huge potential. We talked to him at length, and it appeared that everything he was doing was in line. Something was going right, because he was attracting qualified prospects in significant numbers.

All of Tom’s prospects went through the same automated online information and followup system that everyone else’s prospects did. Somehow, the difference had to be in something Tom was doing.

The big question – what was happening?

After this year of hard work and partial success, Tom got frustrated and decided to move on to a different type of business. Once he let us know what he decided, we started to get in touch with some of his prospects.

Tom was a very friendly and affable person who started out with a strong desire to build a big network marketing business. After talking to some of his prospects, though, we started to understand why so few of them had chosen to work with him.

- he was going over the top with promises of fast wealth, pitching the opportunity with so much hype that prospects felt they were being sold on a scam

- he was so intensely focused on “closing” and sponsoring his prospects that he actually came across as desperate – his prospects picked this up right away and were turned off

Tom, before he launched his network marketing business, had been active in direct selling. His background was in the type of selling that uses “one call close” techniques – the type of approach often used by in-home salespeople selling consumer products. You knew if you didn’t get a sale on the first visit, you probably wouldn’t. So, a big problem here was that Tom was approaching his potential business partners with a “one call close” mentality.

Building a network marketing business is not like selling consumer products. The approach that works best is establishing a rapport and building a relationship in some fashion with your prospect. You don’t want to use hype and pressure to bring people in.

Tom never realized that his approach was wrong, even though he had been coached on how to work with prospects who showed interest in his network marketing business. He chose to put all his focus on sponsoring prospects quickly, with a goal of sponsoring as many as fast as he possibly could.

Let’s all learn to approach our prospects as individuals with unique goals and dreams. Never push or try to apply traditional sales closing techniques – it just doesn’t work out.

This is one of the big reasons that a network marketing business has so much potential for so many – special selling skills are not required. You can learn to be a leader and coach, no hard sell required.