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MLM
Hater?
©
David Peterson – 2006
There
are probably thousands if not millions of MLM Haters in the
world today. People who felt they have been monetarily ripped
off, stuck with product they could not sell, or even pressured
to continue running a business they were not capable of running.
I am not one of those people.
I
may not be an MLM Hater but I’m not actually strong proponent
either. My ezine articles that I write come from a variety of
real life topics. This week it came from my temporary job of
Jury Duty. I was standing in the Jury Waiting Room and one of my
fellow Jurist starts talking about Melaleuca. He had a variety
of aliments and had just started using the product. He then led
in, with “…did I ever think about selling this product…”
Now being the business writer that I am and being a fulltime
Sales Manager I thought this was a pretty weak pitch so I
thanked him, said no, and gave him a little MLM business advice.
Now I’m going to bring that advice to you.
What
is not to like about MLM’s in general? They are real
businesses with low start up costs. For under a couple hundred
dollars you get your own website professionally designed. You
get a proven business model. You typically get experienced
coaching from people who have made the business model work. You
will meet lots of people in your organization that have made a
lot of money working that exact business model. So in general
what’s not to like?
How
is it possible you could fail at running your own MLM? Everyone
around you is getting rich! Well, here’s how - It is very
possible you will fail if you do not correct these three basic
business errors:
1)
You rarely use the product, you really don’t
know how it works, and you have a hard time being passionate
about the product. Rule #1 in sales is if you can’t sell
yourself the product then no one else is going to buy it from
you. Passionate people will tell their Melaleuca story like
this “…I used the product on my knee for two straight
weeks and the pain slowly went away, I’m now pain
free….” Compare that statement to this one “…Trust me
Melaleuca is great!” – Yea right, I bet you haven’t even
used it. It becomes very easy to talk about a product, any
product, which you know and love. You don’t have to
“sell” it you just have to talk about it passionately. In
sales we call that – Painting a Picture for the prospect.
2)
You go right into MLM member recruiting without
a plan. You buy into your “up-line’s” rhetoric that this
will be easy and everyone will be knocking on your door trying
to get started with you. Here’s a perfect example… last
week a very good friend of mine tried to get me to pay $450 to
join an MLM dealing with music downloads. It’s not that I
wouldn’t entertain any MLM but in this case I don’t
download music, and he knows I’m already too busy in my own
business. He doesn’t have a plan on who he should be
recruiting for this type of business. He should be taking an
ad out in a college newspaper not pitching a 45 year old man.
3)
You don’t treat your new MLM as a business.
You treat it as an opportunity. What’s the difference? A
business has to be worked and worked hard. An opportunity is
something that allows you to stick your toe into the water to
test the temperature before jumping in. Using the music
download MLM above as the example my friend needs to realize
quickly that he has a lot more money to spend on advertising,
bookkeeping, and purchasing the product himself before he even
gets his first customer or first member. Real businesses do
not fall out of the sky; they have to be worked.
What’s
not to like about an MLM business? You get a low cost,
successful business model. But before you jump in realize that
to succeed you better be passionate about your product, have a
recruiting plan, and treat it from the very first day as a
business not an opportunity.
Sincerely,
David
Peterson
Author
of:
Been There - Done That
David
Peterson's Search Engine Optimization Guide
Please
send all correspondence to: questions@usreference.com
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