I've been having some conversations recently with one of the leaders in my organization in regards to evaluating prospecting strategies. If you are not where you want to be in your MLM business, I highly recommend that you read some of these insights. Without exaggeration I can say that this is the most important blog post that I have written this year.
Being successful in a MLM business requires mastering a number of key skills. One of the most important skills to master is recruiting. If you aren't a good, or at the very least a decent recruiter, you will never have the opportunity to develop many of the other key skills in this industry. The reason why is because you need a team to work with to develop those other skills.
One reason why I believe so many distributors struggle with recruiting is because it takes us outside of our comfort zone. We have no problems going to the meetings, listening to the conference calls and reading the books. Talking to people about our business? That's scary. That's uncomfortable. We might face rejection.
However, another reason why I believe many distributors struggle is because they never take the time to truly analyze the effectiveness of their prospecting strategies.
It doesn't help that many of our leaders like to prescribe "Talk To More People" as the solution for every recruiting problem. They are correct in many cases because if you're only prospecting one person a month like a lot of distributors in the industry, that's simply not going to cut it.
However what about the people that are talking to dozens, if not hundreds of people a month and are still getting nowhere? I don't care how many times you bang your head against a brick wall. Banging your head more times isn't going to get you through that wall. You need to try something else.
I see in this industry a lot of debate about what are the best prospecting strategies for building a MLM organization. Some leaders only recommend you talk to people that you know in your warm market. Others have the completely opposite philosophy. They don't want you wasting your time with your friends and family.
The fact remains, these leaders recommend their particular strategies because that is what allowed them to get to where they wanted to be. That doesn't necessarily mean that this particular strategy is going to get you to where you want to be.
For instance, what if you just moved to this country from Africa. Your entire warm market, everybody that you know lives in Africa. The only person in this country that you know is your sponsor, who you met at a local Starbucks.
You know no one else in this country and your particular MLM business opportunity is not available in Africa. I don't care how much your upline preaches warm market. Warm market is not going to work for you because you don't have a warm market.
That's a pretty extreme example, but it illustrates my point that all prospecting strategies do not work equally as effectively for all distributors. Some distributors will thrive with one set of prospecting strategies. Other distributors will thrive with a completely different set of prospecting strategies.
In order to learn which strategies you will thrive with, you need to have a system for trying and evaluating prospecting strategies until you find a few that work well for you. Here is how you do this.
In evaluating any prospecting system, there are 5 areas that you need to evaluate. They are:
#1) How much time does it take to implement?
#2) How much money does it cost to implement?
#3) How many prospects are you able to get to actually look at your business?
#4) How many customers/distributors does your system generate for you?
#5) How much money do you make when you engage in your system?
To give you an example of how this works, let's evaluate two prospecting systems that you can engage in. The first system is prospecting at the mall. The second system is purchasing and calling business opportunity leads.
When evaluating any prospecting system, I recommend that you evaluate at least a minimum of 90 days of activity. The reason why is 90 days of consistent activity gives a better indicator of what could potentially happen in the future as oppose to shorter periods of evaluation.
In strategy #1, you decide that you are going to go to the mall on a Saturday morning. Your strategy is to go around the mall, meet people, engage in conversations and see if you can find some people who are potentially interested in your business opportunity. Your goal is to find 10 people every Saturday who agree to take a look at your business opportunity.
In strategy #2, you decide to purchase 100 business opportunity leads a month. Your goal is to call these leads and find people who agree to take a look at your business opportunity.
You engage in both activities over a 90 day period. At the end of the 90 days, here are your results
Strategy #1 - Prospecting At The Mall
#1) How much time does it take to implement?
36 hours of prospecting over a 90 day period.
#2) How much money does it cost to implement?
$240 in marketing tools
#3) How many prospects are you able to get to actually look at your business?
30 prospects actually look at your business.
#4) How many customers/distributors does your system generate for you?
7 customers and 3 distributors
#5) How much money do you make when you engage in your system?
$350 in commissions from personal product sales to the 7 customers.
Strategy #2 - Purchasing and Calling Business Opportunity Leads
#1) How much time does it take to implement?
15 hours of prospecting over a 90 day period
#2) How much money does it cost to implement?
$300 in costs for business opportunity leads
#3) How many prospects are you able to get to actually look at your business?
30 prospects actually look at your business.
#4) How many customers/distributors does your system generate for you?
3 customers and 3 distributors
#5) How much money do you make when you engage in your system?
$150 in commissions from personal product sales to the 3 customers.
After evaluating both strategies over a 90 day period, under this scenario, prospecting people at the mall is clearly the better strategy. It earned you $350 in commissions and when you subtract the costs for your marketing tools you are left with $110 in profit. The leads cost $300, but you only made $150 so you are losing $150 on the leads. Therefore, under this scenario you should stick with the mall prospecting and stop the leads.
Keep in mind this is a scenario for illustration purposes. If you actually employed these two strategies you might find that the leads work better for you. The point is take a hard look at what your prospecting strategies are producing for you and look for ways to either improve the strategy or replace it with a more effective strategy.
Let's throw one more caveat into the mix. Let's say from your mall prospecting, you also made an additional $100 in commissions from the sales that those new distributors made. However, from your business opportunity prospecting, you made an additional $1000 in commissions from the sales that those new distributors made?
Now you have a tougher decision. You lost money on the initial sales with the business opportunity leads, but made significantly more money when you factor in the commissions from the team you built.
In this case, you may want to try another 90 day cycle to see if those numbers continue to hold up. If so, it means that the business opportunity leads may be bringing in a higher quality of distributor and it's worth losing money on the front end to make money on the back end.
By constantly evaluating and refining what you are doing, this allows you to discover a rhythm for what works for you. Once you do this, you can prospect and recruit at will and that is when the business becomes fun!
So what about you? Are you evaluating your prospecting strategies based on hard actual data? Or are you just sticking with one strategy because that's all feel comfortable doing? If you are sticking with one strategy, how much money is that one strategy costing you? Those are the tough questions that you need to ask yourself.
If you need ideas on prospecting strategies, make sure you download my free prospecting guide that reveals the 7 strategies that I personally use to build my MLM organization.
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