Network marketing is often presented by industry charlatans as a get rich quick, easy way to make money. Unethical recruiters cast hooks baited with talk of an easy ride to the top — where you don’t have to do much and everyone you know will just sign up because the product is so great.
Rarely people join companies with strategy on how to approach their contacts effectively. What to say, How to say it, When to say it, and to Who is a strategic part of the prospecting process that is critical to your success.
Rarely people get started with the understanding that their personal reputation and credibility makes a huge difference in whether or not people will follow them into their new venture.
Your personal reputation among your peers and contacts is key to attracting them into your new opportunity. If you have a great reputation, all the more reason to guard it.
Do not waste your reputation and sphere of influence on a less than a stellar company. That’s why the FIRST and BEST thing you can do is make a careful evaluation of the company you’re considering to join before getting involved.
In my 14 years in the industry as a full time professional I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly. Often, people approach evaluating a company in a twisted way. Instead of making a careful evaluation of the company’s reputation with an industry expert before attaching their own reputation to it, they go fish for their friends’ opinion and approval.
Asking your friends for their opinion and approval on a company before you pull the trigger yourself is the best way to doom yourself and your opportunity.
You see, when we test the waters like this because we’re not committed yet ourselves, we’re, more often than not, are met with skepticism and pushback from the people closest to us.
So if you approach your decision by testing your friends’ interest level first, you’ll end up letting your friends’ well intentioned but often massively miss-informed opinions determine the direction of your life, business, and financial interests.
You can’t blame your friends though. The way you approach your friends about your opportunity is critical to your success.
If you go about approaching your friends with no strategy or if your strategy is to test the waters first before you get your feet wet, all they see is someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, especially, if you haven’t been trained yet. To them, you sound like someone who just got roped into “one of those things”.
The good news is . . . this will NEVER be you, because you’re here getting this information.
The company’s reputation or name recognition isn’t typically why you will get pushback from friends. More than often, their opinions are based off of the following scenarios:
1- They have a narrow and limited understanding of the industry as a whole (and that’s not their fault).
2- They’ve been involved with a company before and had a negative personal experience.
3- They know someone whose had a negative personal experience.
The same company can have two co-existing but opposing perceptions depending on the source.
For one person, it could be the death-star that screwed over thousands of people. For someone else, it’s the super-star that has created more millionaires than any other company in the last decade.
For each person, their opinion is the ultimate truth. Whether their opinion holds truth or not is another question that begs to question the reputation of the company under evaluation.
Companies have reputations; some good, some bad. But you will rarely get a clear picture of it from someone who isn’t on the inside of the industry.
Industry insiders, who have been playing the game at a high level and for a very long time, are the ones who hold precious insights and private information about the inner workings of companies in the industry that you are looking at.
So when it comes to evaluating a network marketing company . . .
Seek a Pro not a Bro!
A company’s reputation inside the industry and it’s reputation outside of the industry are two totally different evaluation sticks to consider. The next several articles I’m going to dig deep into that.
But if you’re looking at a company right now and want to get a feel for its reputation, a good place to start is with this question:
17. What’s the reputation of the company in the public view? Have people already heard of it and formed a negative opinion of it? If so, the trouble to build it is probably not worth the work.
To learn more about what you need to know before joining any MLM company, you can check out my previous posts on medium here.
Till next time,
Charles
Co-authored with Dr Maral “YESS” Yessayan, PhD.
P.S. You can always find on social media: Facebook or Youtube
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