Setting Priorities In Your Network Marketing Business

As a network marketing business owner there are a number of priorities competing for your time, attention and finances. One of the reasons why I believe distributors fail in this industry is because they fail to set the right priorities.

As a distributor there are going to be a lot of things that are promoted to you. Your company will promote tools to purchase, company trainings to attend, company conventions to attend and other resources to help you build your business.

Your upline leadership team will promote conference calls to get on, opportunity meetings to invite your prospects out to, local trainings in your area to attend, team conventions to attend and other resources to help you build your business.

Then on the internet you will be bombarded with ads and promotions from personal development experts and network marketing industry vendors. They will promote the latest book or home study course that will teach you the skills you need to succeed in this industry. They will have their own conferences and seminars to promote to you.

Because there are so many resources and information available to the average distributor, I believe that most distributors suffer from information overload. They buy all of these courses, go to all of these events, purchase all of these products and services and then never make any money because they are unable to take all of those resources and turn it into an actionable game plan to execute.

Always remember that the bottom line is that you are an independent distributor for the company that you represent. While there are a lot of resources available to you and a lot of people willing to offer their opinion on what you have to do to be successful, the bottom line is that success in network marketing is pretty much up to you.

Therefore as a distributor you need to evaluate where you are in life and what you can engage in based on the resources that you have and where you are in the business.

If your company has a weekly opportunity meeting that you can invite guest out to, should you attend that weekly meeting every single week? If you asked me that question even a couple of months ago, I would have answered an emphatic yes. However, being home with my kids has giving me the time to reflect and my position and opinion on certain matters has now changed.

Now if you asked me that question, as a general rule, I would answer yes. However, it would be a qualified yes based upon your personal circumstances. It's probably not a good idea to attend that weekly opportunity meeting if you are suppose to be at work because then you are going to get fired from your job.

It's probably not a good idea to attend that meeting if you are strapped for cash and you need that money to cover your product order that qualifies you to earn commissions to begin with.

Should you attend your company's national convention? Generally speaking, yes you should. However, there are some situations where you really shouldn't be attending your national convention. For instance, it's probably not a good idea to attend a national convention halfway across the country if your wife is 9 months pregnant at the time!

The company, the leaders and the experts promoting these resources are going to promote them very hard. That's their job and that's what they should be doing if they are offering resources that are going to legitimately help you to build your business. However, the fact remains, your business life is not over just because you couldn't attend a specific event or purchase a particular business building tool.

That being said, there are sometimes where you are going to have to make a serious sacrifice as well. This is why I say you are an independent distributor and you need to make certain decisions based upon where you are at the time.

If you have no other way of improving your situation other than this business opportunity, you might have to do some uncomfortable things such as borrow money to attend an event that you know you need to build your business. I'm not discounting the sacrifices that are necessary to build a successful business.

My point is, set the right priorities and don't make stupid decisions.

Case in point, if you've been to your weekly opportunity meeting, attended your weekly local training, listened to a company conference call, listened to two training conference calls held by your team and then you realize that you haven't exposed a single prospect to the business because all of your available business time was spent attending these events, you will probably need to cut some of these events out of your calendar and dedicate some time for prospecting and recruiting.

Commissions are not paid for event attendance. Commissions are paid for product sales. The events can help you make more product sales, but if you are not engaging in activities that create opportunities for product sales, the events are useless.

So set the right priorities in your network marketing business based on where you are today. You do this by having an end goal in mind, evaluating the benefits and costs to each action you are considering and then you prioritize based on what action is the most important action towards moving you closer to your goals.

This is how you create success in a network marketing business and as you create success, that will create more opportunities to you that may not have been available when you first got started.