Troubleshooting Your Network Marketing Business

If you are having trouble with getting the results that you are looking for in your network marketing business, perhaps you may want to consider taking action similar to the way computer technicians handle trouble with computers.

I have a background in the technical support industry. I started off as a lab technician for a university and I worked my way up to management positions. In the technical support industry, you have to do a lot of troubleshooting.

For instance, suppose a client has a problem with their computer. You have to ask that client questions to see if you can determine what the root cause of that problem is. Once you determine the cause, you then need to take corrective action to fix the problem.

If you are having trouble in your network marketing business, you need to have a similar philosophy. You need to determine what the root cause of the problem is and take corrective action in your business to correct it. This needs to be done not only for yourself but for the distributors in your organization as well.

Case in point, let's say you are looking at your paycheck and you are not a happy camper. You are spending more money per month on your business than you are making every month. This is a big problem. Network marketing businesses are known for their low overhead so if you can't even make enough to cover your overhead, something is wrong in your business in a big way.

So how do you address this? How do you determine what the problem is so that you can fix it?

Jeff Olson, one of my mentors in this industry says that if you are having trouble in your business, meaning you don't like the results that you are getting, the first thing you need to do is look at your actions. Are you taking the right actions to get the results you are looking for?

If you aren't taking the right actions, you need to look at your attitude. Do you have the right attitude about building your business? If you don't have the right attitude, you need to back up one more step and look at your philosophies. Your personal philosophies about how you build your business drives everything else and is usually the root cause for whether you have success or not.

So to continue our example, you aren't happy with your paycheck. The first step is to take a look at your actions. How do we get paid in this industry? We get paid when we either personally sign up a new customer or someone on our team who we are qualified to earn an override from signs up a new customer. We also get paid when we retain a customer.

I can write an entire blog post about retaining customers and I may very well do that later. However, let's focus on signing up new customers right now. How do you sign up a new customer or help someone on your team sign up a new customer?

You do this by personally exposing a potential customer (known as a prospect) to your company or by someone on your team doing the same. You also do this by following up with that prospect until you collect a definitive decision. When that decision is a YES, you have that prospect fill out an application and that prospect becomes a customer.

How do you expose a prospect? You have to have a reliable source for finding prospects for your business. A prospect is someone who indicates an interest in learning more about what you have to offer.

So if you aren't signing up customers or people on your team aren't signing up customers, the problem lies in your actions within this entire process. How do you know where in this process are you lacking? You know this by tracking your actions in your network marketing business.

Tuesday, I posted an article of one tool that you can use to do this, known as the GoalTrends system. Tomorrow, I will share with you the system that I personally use to track my network marketing business.

However, without having a system in place to accurately identify whether you are taking the appropriate actions, you will never have the success in your network marketing business that you are looking for.