Be a Recruiting Superstar

The Fast Track to Network Marketing Millions

Mary Christensen

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780814401637
• eBook ISBN: 9780814410271
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Network marketing has turned millions of people into successful business owners. But to truly reach their earning potential, network marketers need to successfully grow their businesses by recruiting the right people.

Network marketing superstar and recruitment expert Mary Christensen takes the guesswork out of successful recruiting, letting you in on her easy-to-use system for finding and training the right people to sell your product or services, and teaching them to do the same.

In Be a Recruiting Superstar, you will learn how to:

• discover their own recruiting style
• identify people who will become a great part of their team
• do and say the right things to turn prospects into partners
• overcome objections with confidence
• attract people who never considered network marketing

Filled with advice and inspiration, Be a Recruiting Superstar gives network marketers the know-how and confidence they need to grow their enterprise and become top earners.

PART I

Prepare to Recruit

Why People Become Network Marketers and Why They Don't

HERE ARE TWO SIMPLE QUESTIONS.

First, what is the number-one reason people start a network marketing or party plan business?

The answer is that they started the business because someone asked them. The overwhelming majority of people never considered the business before they were approached.

That is not surprising. Our business is word of mouth. We don't run media campaigns trumpeting our opportunity and we don't advertise in the job opportunities section of the newspaper. Unless and until you connect with your prospects, how will they know how incredible the opportunity is?

Second, what is the number-one reason people don't start a network marketing or party plan business?

And the answer is that nobody asked them! People are not going to come knocking on your door. You have to reach out to them—preferably before someone else does. Believe me, there will be no harsher lesson than seeing someone you could have approached, but didn't, turn up at a corporate event as someone else's star recruit.

Every day, thousands of people who never seriously considered a network marketing business sign an agreement. Luckily for them, they were in the right place at the right time when the right person came along. That person could be you.

Don't prejudge, don't hesitate, and don't hold back. Approach people and talk about the business at every opportunity you get. If an opportunity doesn't present itself, create one. The more people you talk to, the more successful you will be.

All you need is a belief in your products, your opportunity, and courage.

If you have not yet done so, choosing your products will be the easy part. Just about every product now is sold directly. Iconic brands like Avon, which has been in business for more than 120 years, are being joined by household brands like Dove Chocolate®, Jockey®, and The Body Shop® that have traditionally sold retail. Choose a product you can be passionate about and a corporation with a genuine desire to serve you.

No matter how great your products or how much support you get from your corporate partner, your success will be up to you. So, here is the million-dollar question: How much success do you think you deserve? If you don't think you deserve success, you'll find a thousand excuses why it won't happen for you, such as “I'm too young, old, busy, not confident or smart enough, not a salesperson…”

Read between the lines and what you really are saying is, “I'm too (busy) so don't expect me to (try).” You're giving yourself a free pass to fail, but “stinking thinking” always comes at a price.

Here is something else to think about. What if you do have what it takes to create an amazing life from your network marketing business, and then give up without giving it your best shot?

There is no penalty for not reaching your goals, so what do you have to lose? Go for it and you may surprise yourself by achieving success beyond your wildest dreams. Give yourself permission to succeed—and to succeed spectacularly. Tell yourself, a thousand times if that is what it takes to believe it, “I want it, I deserve it, and I can do it.”

To put yourself out there every day takes courage, and you will almost certainly face a few setbacks. This is when you have to make a choice—to pull into an emotionally handicapped space and stay parked or to drive on regardless. As the famed American writer Mark Twain said in Pudd’nhead Wilson, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”

If you wait to become confident before you start recruiting, you will waste your best opportunities. Confidence will come once you see the positive impact you can make on others.

If you wait until you have an encyclopedic knowledge of your compensation plan, it may be a long wait. Skills come from practice. The only way to learn to play the guitar is, well, to play the guitar.

It takes courage to build a network marketing business. No matter how nervous you feel, reach out to as many people as you can. Encourage every person you recruit to do the same.

Don't buy into the fiction you don't have what it takes to succeed. Or that it's difficult to find the right people. Or that something may go wrong. If you want it—and believe you deserve it—you can do it.

There are 300 million people living in the United States. A new person is born every seven seconds, and an immigrant enters the country every fourteen seconds. Very few people are living the life of their dreams. You may hold the key. Find the courage to reach out to people every day, knowing you have the power to change lives.

If you lack confidence at the start, turn it to your advantage. Knowing exactly how your new recruits feel when they start out will make you an empathetic leader. When you say, “I know how you feel, I felt the same way,” you will be speaking from the heart. A leader who says, “I am still learning too,” is a more powerful role model than one who appears flawless. The message you will be communicating is, “If I can do this, you can too.”

Put yourself in a room of network marketing achievers and you won't immediately spot an obvious common denominator. Every socioeconomic background, education level, profession, job, ethnicity, race, gender, personality, and age will be represented. You have to look beneath the surface to see what they have in common, which is a belief in the business, the ambition to succeed, and the courage to make it happen.

You can be whoever you want to be, have whatever you want to have, do whatever you want to do. What better way to realize your dreams than to build a party plan or network marketing organization by one person at a time?

Recruiting Principles That Will Transform Your Business

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO RECRUIT. The first is to approach everyone you know and everyone you meet, hoping each will have enough kindness, politeness, or patience to hear you out!

I call it the ambush technique. It is tough on your unsuspecting prospect and it is tough on you, because—surprise—the rejection rate is high. That is because you come across like you're trying to help yourself by convincing others to consider your business opportunity.

The second way is decide before you start calling whom you are looking for and why this person may be interested in your opportunity. You're looking for a connect. When you approach people you know are right for the business, your prospects will see that you genuinely believe you have something to offer them. Always be ready to say, “I called you because…”

Will they join? Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Many factors will influence your prospects’ decision. You can only control how well you approach them, not how they respond. But one thing is guaranteed: Approach prospects with a genuine desire to help them and you will dramatically increase your success rate. Even if they decline your opportunity, the door will stay open.

You will get a better response if you understand and adopt the following key principles.

Principle Number One

Find a need and fill it.

Imagine your prospect is a target, and all the benefits of your opportunity are arrows. Ready to start firing those arrows?

But wait—before you take aim, you're going to be blindfolded. Once you are blindfolded, your prospect can move anywhere he or she wants. If you don't know where your prospect is standing, you won't know where to aim. My guess is that none of your arrows will reach their target.

You are probably thinking, “What a big waste of time!” And you are right. There is no point in firing random arrows if you can't see your target. You have to know where your prospects stand before you start trying to sell them on your opportunity. It's called listening.

If you spend 80 percent of your time learning about your prospects’ ambitions, experiences, personality, circumstances, and priorities, you won't waste your time or theirs shooting arrows that don't apply to or interest them. The 20 percent of time you spend talking will be right on target.

Principle Number Two

Duplication!

The way to fast-track your business is to reach out to as many people as possible. The more people you approach, the more people will join and the faster you will build your organization.

Imagine you want to recruit a thousand people into your downline (the people you recruit and train and from whose sales you also earn a commission). What if you recruit one person a month? How long will it take to recruit one thousand? It will take eighty-three years! At best, you'll be enjoying the rewards of your labor from a motorized mobility scooter.

What about one person a week? You'll be busy, but in just about twenty years, you'll reach your target. That's a little behind schedule if one of your goals is to fund your kids’ college educations. They'll have joined the 30 percent of students who are forced to drop out due to financial hardship or who graduated with a hefty student loan long before you reach your college fund target.

What if you taught every person you recruited to recruit, and each one did the same? How long would it take to bring a thousand people into your downline? It would take ten months! Not eighty-three years, not twenty years, just ten months!

If you want to build your organization fast, your approach to recruiting has to be easy to learn, remember, and repeat. You may have superpowers or a unique strategy that works for you personally, but the more you stray from the tried-and-true system, the harder it will be to replicate your example. If you want to be duplicable, you can't afford to do anything others can't copy.

Principle Number Three

The more you say, the less they will hear.

Words will not convince people to buy your products or your opportunity. The more time you spend talking, the less time they will spend listening. The faster you talk, the more desperate you will sound.

Information overload has become a national epidemic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Prepare to Recruit
• Part II: Identify Your Best Prospects
• Part III: Turning Knowledge Into Practice
• Part IV: Are You a Recruiting Superstar?
• Index