Activating your downline will be one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in network marketing. The only chance you have is to create an action plan and hold them accountable.
I have been in network marketing or MLM, as many call it, for over 10 years. I have also been a traditional business owner for years and MLM is certainly a more difficult business to operate. The thing is … The traditional business is a model that has employees. These employees are easy to motivate with both positive and negative methods. Negative motivation is easy because it can threaten to fire people if they don’t do their jobs. MLM is a group of independent entrepreneurs who generally took the deal because they thought it would be easy. It’s a lot harder to activate people you can’t fire … or so I thought.
Activating a person with positivity works the same in traditional business and in network marketing. People are people. When I decided to stop looking for the easy solution to success. Success began to manifest itself. I realized that I needed to be a leader and a leading leader. It is important to explain the difference between motivational leadership and simply leading by example. Often people think that leadership is simply walking the path, but walking the path is easy. In MLM, sponsoring people is easy. Getting people to sponsor other people is difficult. The only chance you have is responsible motivational leadership.
“I get it,” many people say. Everyone understands that people need motivation, but what people don’t realize is how to motivate them or appreciate the critical timeline before quitting. You have 72 to hours from when someone joins in to have a “heart-to-heart” talk about their goals. I hate meeting people to discuss their goals. It was boring and usually a fruitless waste of time until I realized what he had to say. I found that everyone plans to do something with their new business, but many people do not even come out of neutrality. The reason people don’t start is because of fundamental human emotional nature. People are afraid of looking stupid or of being rejected. Your goal is to empower them to see how inactivity kills business, not rejection. Make them despise being an idle dreamer.
Activate the fear of failure. Activating a person’s fear of failure is the key to success. You must instill in the new representative that an action plan is not a results plan … it is a plan for failure. Let me explain. Failure is the key to sales success. Every salesperson will tell you that flow and speed dictate success, not quality issue. People must learn to have a plan to be rejected by 2 people a day. Interpret the rejection and prepare them to deal with it so that they are confident that they can reach out to someone. If you congratulate them for failing and laugh a little. You will have made it. You must follow them and congratulate them or this will not work.
In conclusion, most people stagnate while sitting in neutral. Your leadership is your only chance and if you don’t step up and act as a stoic motivator, you will always be looking at your team and wondering why they are not activating. Remember that people sit in a neutral position to show them how to drive. Teach that “The road to success runs through landfills” and preparation is your ticket to success.