The Truth About Downline Building

If you want to be successful in network marketing you have to master the fundamentals of downline building. It is the key to achieving passive and residual income.

You can earn great money retailing your network marketing company's product. In my network marketing company, we have distributors who earn a full time, in some cases even a six figure income, just from the commissions that they earn retailing the product. However, that type of income is what is known as earned income. This means that you have to personally do something in order to be able to earn that income.

When I host a network marketing business opportunity meeting, I like to refer to this type of income as "roll out" income. What this means is that you have to roll out of your bed and do some work in order to make this income. While it is nice to earn this income, I didn't get started in this industry because of this type of income. I got started because I wanted to make money even if I wasn't the one personally making the sales.

To get to that point in your business you have to become good at downline building. What this means is that you have mastered the art and science of recruiting new distributors into your organization. However, more important than that, you have mastered the art and science of teaching those new distributors how to recruit and teaching them how to teach their new distributors how to recruit.

So how do you become successful at this? There are several keys to becoming good at this. They are the following:

1) The REAL Recruiting & Downline Building Begins After The Distributor Signs The Distributor Agreement

What is interesting is that most distributors in this industry have the exact opposite mentality. Once they get their prospect to sign the distributor agreement and make that first product order, they pretty much believe their job is over. They are off looking for the next recruit while their new distributor is sitting there without the slightest clue as to how to build the business.

Some distributors might actually sit down with their new recruit, develop a game plan with them and plug them into some type of company training. However, even that is not the REAL recruiting.

The best in this industry understand that you are not done recruiting someone once they sign a distributor agreement. All that means is that they have given you permission to recruit them some more.

There is a young man by the name of Todd Cahill. Most of you probably have no clue who he is. In fact, many people in the company that Todd is in have no clue who he is. However, I can tell you this, I believe that Todd Cahill will be one of the greatest network marketing distributors in the history of this industry. Do you want to know why I believe this? It is because Todd Cahill has MASTERED this concept of "real recruiting" and downline building.

Todd Cahill's organization last month recruited over 1000 BRAND NEW DISTRIBUTORS. Yes, you read correctly, that is not a mistype. His organization recruited over 1000 brand new distributors in a single month and he's only been involved in this industry for 5 years. He's not even 30 years old yet. I personally don't know of anyone his age with a team putting up those type of recruiting numbers

How did Todd's team recruit over 1000 distributors? It happened because Todd spends a HUGE portion of his working hours calling through his massive organization of tens of thousands of distributors.

Is Todd a big recruiter? Not exactly. He's probably recruited maybe 100 people personally since he's been involved. Yet he doesn't have to be a big recruiter because he knows how to recruit the distributors who are already a part of his team.

You see, just because someone joins your team, that doesn't mean that they are recruited yet. You now have to get them to do some activity. You might recruit them, but it may take you 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, a year or more just to get that person to come out to an event or to start exposing other people to your products and business opportunity.

Simply ignoring these people is a big mistake. Some of the most successful people in this industry didn't get started immediately after joining the business.

2) Helping Your Team To Leverage Their Strengths In Downline Building

This is a big one and I see so many people completely fail at this aspect of downline building. Everyone is not going to build the business the exact same way that you build the business. Trying to force people to do activities that you might be strong and comfortable at is are surefire way to create failure in your organization.

I see distributors who are good at meeting people on their way to work, coming home from work, filling up gas at the gas station, going to the mall or supermarket, etc and exposing those people to the business. However, just because you are good at building the business that way, that doesn't mean that everybody on your team is going to be good at building the business that way.

Case in point, I have NEVER personally recruited someone that I met during the course of my daily activity. It is not anywhere close to being one of my strong points. I am a shy person naturally and talking to some stranger at the mall and trying to pique their interest about my network marketing business is not a skill set that I have effectively mastered as of yet.

So the way I look at it, I can either try to get better at something that I'm not good at. Or I can take something that I'm good at and see if I can apply it to downline building.

I am good at talking to people I don't know over the phone. I have a call center background so it is a skill that I have developed after years of experience. I am also good at marketing over the internet. My full time business is a marketing and consulting business and the large majority of my clients are small business owners that I help market their businesses in some way, shape or form over the internet.

So I decided that instead of trying to become good at something that I'm not good at, I would focus on taking what I'm already good at and looking for ways to apply it to my network marketing business.

As a result, I l have an organization of hundreds of distributors in over 33 states in the United States. I have done this all on a part time basis and quite frankly I have not been anywhere as consistent as I should have been or could have been. It's scary to think what type of results I would have produced had I been consistent over the last several years.

How did I do this? Because I made a conscious decision to find another way to build the business that leverages MY strengths instead of trying to build the business in a way that leverages my weaknesses.

Since my strengths are the phone and the internet, the large majority of my personal recruits have come from people that have responded to some type of advertisment and people who I have met over the internet. I have also recruited a lot of people that I know personally, which I assume is because the people that know me actually like me and trust me, which helps.

3) Plugging Your Team Into A System That Makes Downline Building Easier

If you want to build a team that grows rapidly, you have to plug your team into a system. Many of us have different philosophies about how we build a network marketing business. Therefore, if you want your team to be able to duplicate recruiting without your involvement, it is a requirement that you plug each of your distributors into a system that teaches, systematizes and simplifies the process for them.

What makes up a good system? It should be something that anybody can do and it should be something that can be plugged into by anybody anywhere.

Some examples of different components of a system include the following:

a) A local opportunity meeting
b) A local business training
c) An opportunity conference call
d) A training conference call
e) A team website and/or blog
f) Tools that do a full presentation for your distributor
g) 3 Way Calls between a prospect a distributor and an experienced distributor

When you have an effective system, your team can grow without your involvement. This is what you want to happen and when this does happen, that's when you know that you have mastered the art and science of downline building.