7 Thoughts on Recruiting Your Network Marketing Team.
Today I’m sharing 7 thoughts on recruiting to keep in mind as you are building your team. They are simple strategies on how to recruit people that I’ve found helpful to my build.
#1 People join you, not your company.
No matter how great your opportunity, People join PEOPLE, not businesses. You must be someone worth joining. Your prospective partner is going to evaluate YOU as much or more than they evaluate your products or your company.
In order to follow you, they must know that you have a plan. They need to know that you have a system for success that they can adapt to use to build their own successful business. They want to know that YOU are in for the long haul and will be along side them as they learn how to do the business.
This means you have to be and continue to be a person worth following. Work on your skills daily. This includes people skills and marketing skills. Work on your vision and your attitude. Make sure you are someone worth joining.
#2 Develop a Daily Method of Operation (DMO).
Consistency of action is the secret to success in building your home business. Whether your goal is earning an extra $500 to $1000 per month or replacing your job, you need to take action every day that will move you forward.
Essentially, we do three things to build a business:
- Find people to talk to.
- Talk to the people you find and enroll the volunteers as either customers or business partners.
- Teach the people who catch the vision how to do the first two things.
Strive to take action on each of the three steps every day.
Your primary focus, especially for your first couple years will be on your own personal activities. Therefore your DMO should focus on finding people to talk to (prospecting and advertising) and talking to people (inviting and presenting).
For example, your DMO could have you acquiring 5 new friends on Facebook, starting conversations with 5 new people, inviting 3 people per day to watch your presentation and follwing up with 5 people per day.
Those are simple activites you can do every day and that you can control. Outcomes will take care of themselves.
#3 Network or Market?
To recruit business partners for your team, you can network or you can market.
Networking to recruit is conversational, one-on-one, interactive reaching out to people to see if they, or someone they know is interested in your opportunity.
You are meeting people, building relationships and interacting with them directly. You can do this in-person or on social media.
Your out-of-pocket expenses are lower with this method. You are limited in speeed of growth by how many people you can interact with during your alloted business hours. (You do have alloted business hours, right?)
There are people who have built enormous businesses exclusively using these recrutiting techniques.
You can also choose to market.
Marketing is the art of attracting people to you and your message through media communication, both paid-for and not. People come to you.
Marketing usually takes a longer amount of time to achieve results and you have to go through a large number of leads because you do not have a relationship of know/like/trust with these people. Out-of-pocket is generally higher to use these techniques because of the cost of advertising and media.
People have created enormous businesses using only these recruiting techniques.
Depending on your budget, you may want to begin recruiting your team by networking to keep your start-up costs low. You can then expand into recruiting people using marketing techniques as you build revenue from your business, plowing that money into a marketing budget.
#4 Keep Your Recruiting Pipeline Full.
When you have a full recruiting pipeline, you have power. You aren’t worried about a particualr person joining your business or not. There is always someone else to talk to.
This is why you should have 100 or so people in your pipeline at any given time.
You should be talking to 5 to 10 new people per day and helping them ove through your process.
If your pipeline is empty, you are out of business.
#5 Become a Master at Follow-Up.
Very few people you recruit will join your business after the first exposure. You will need to follow-up and provide new information, answer questions and resolve their concerns.
Recruiting is a process, not an event.
You need a system to make sure you stay in touch with people on a regular, ongoing basis and to stay in touch with them until they join, die or tell you to go away.
You can use index cards, a spread sheet or a full-blown CRM, but you must have a place to keep track of conversations, notes you’ve taken and when you will contact them next.
Don’t pressure or hype. Don’t be concerned over which person joins or drops out of consideration. Just stay in touch and move them through your process. Forever.
#6 Whales Aren’t the Only Fish in the Sea.
Okay, I know. Whales aren’t fish.
Some people teach that an optimal strategy for success is to focus on recruiting “whales” or “heavy-hitters”. These people would come from other companies or be hard-charging, serious, all-in people from day one.
I respectfully disagree.
First off, with new people, you can’t predict who will build a big business and who won’t. Sure, there might be some indicators, such as previous sales or business success, but there are too many people who had all the potential in the world who just didn’t get the deal done.
True whales are very few and far between.
Second, if someone is already a strong performer in a competing company, do you really have anything to offer them that will improve their situation? Probably not.
Besides, it’s tacky to poach people.
The vast majority of people who raise their hand and say, “I understand it. I’m in. I’m doing it.” either end up out of the business entirely or scale back their participation to being a customer within 6 months.
These people will make up 90% or more of your team.
Rather than looking for a whale, look for people who would enjoy the products or be happy earning an extra few hundred dollars per month.
Some of these people will lead you to heavy hitters through their connections.
Whales are best found and groomed rather than chosen based on initial enthusiasm. If you go after all-in superstars as your strategy, you will eave a LOT of money on the table.
#7 Ask for the Business.
If you can’t or won’t ask for the business, you will not achieve your highest goals. Most people need to be led; they won’t come forward on their own.
I am not saying you need to pressure people or convince people to join you. That doesn’t work, either. If you have to convince someone to join your business, you will have to convince them every day to do the business. That is neither fun or profitable.
One of my mentors, Dale Calvert, taught me the best close I know. Simply ask, “What questions do you need to get answered before we get you started?”
It’s simple, direct and to the point.
You will find out what needs to happen for this person to decide for themselves that joining you is a good idea for them.
Sometimes they won’t join and that’s okay, too. Our job isn’t to convince them, it’s to give them enough information to decide if the business is right for them.
But you must ask.
Conclusion.
There you have it. 7 of my best recruiting tips for building a Network Marketing team. Make these strategies part of your process and you will get better results with less frustration.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment down below.
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