Buying and calling leads is a common way that traditional network marketers use in trying to build their business. Through a personal story, this first article in a two-part series points out how this approach can become addictive and how it commonly contributes to failure in the network marketing industry. Part II will introduce a revolutionary and highly constructive alternative.
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If you're one of the elite few who have made it big time in network marketing, this article is not for you. But, if you're among the large silent majority (about 95%) who have struggled valiantly to succeed and are still a wannabe, then you may find this message to be like a bright light shining at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
First of all, in keeping with a long-standing tradition in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and it's myriad offshoots, I want to be completely upfront by telling you, "my name is George and I'm a leadaholic." (That's "lead," not "led.")
Being a retired psychologist and psychotherapist as I am, I often wonder how I could've gotten hooked the way I did. But I figure that if it could happen to me, it can probably happen to most anyone--which, incidentally, I believe it does all too commonly. And, if you've read this far, I wouldn't be surprised if it has happened to you.
My second confession is that I'm also subject to another form of drivenness that sometimes borders on addiction--namely, I get really high on helping other people. It was this very strong motivation, in fact, that gave me the staying power to survive an incredibly rigorous graduate training program in my profession.Interestingly, this very same strong need was a major factor in getting me hooked on leads.
Here's how it happened. Nearly four years ago, a dear friend introduced my wife, Mildred, and me to a unique and remarkable nutritional supplement. Over a 6 month period of adding it to her diet, Mildred experienced a complete and lasting reversal of chronic and very debilitating symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis that she had been subject to for 18 years.
As you can probably understand, we both became passionate about these supplements and--in keeping with my strong drive to help others--I set out to tell the whole world about them.
Unbelievably, however, I discovered to my dismay that hardly anyone wanted to hear about them--even our dearest friends and family members who I deeply believed could benefit from them tremendously.
Getting a cold shoulder from my supposedly "warm market," as I did, I was led to the next developmental stage in what I now recognize to be a very lawful addictive process. As I tell you about it, it may strike a familiar chord for you.
Recognizing as I did that there are literally millions of people suffering from chronic degenerative diseases of all kinds whose very lives could be saved by taking these supplements, I felt a strong ethical responsibility to get the word out to as many of them as possible, in whatever way I could.
This strong drive, coupled with the hope of also improving our financial situation, led me to redouble my efforts in recruiting prospects who would share my passion for these incredible products and who would happily join my distributional team in marketing them to the long-suffering masses.
My already hot fire was fueled immensely by the endless testimonials I heard on weekly conference calls from others who seemingly were having outstanding success in doing exactly what I wanted to do. If it worked so well for them, I reasoned, it HAD to work for someone as strongly motivated as I was.
Since I live in a very remote area of northern Minnesota, however, it became quickly apparent to me that the only way I could realize such success was to utilize the internet and/or the phone to build my business. Given my very rudimentary knowledge of the internet, that door seemed to be closed for me.
So, as you can probably see, I was ideally positioned in navigating these challenging network marketing waters to be easily seduced by the many sirens singing from the rocks and to get hooked on the easy solutions they promised to provide.
Mainly, these took the form of endless leads companies offering a wide array of red hot prospects who were often portrayed as sitting eagerly by their phones just waiting for my call. Many of the terms that were commonly used to describe these prospects seemed quite tantalizing: Phone interviewed leads, 4 question surveyed leads, 8 question surveyed leads, phone verified leads, double opt-in leads, exclusive real time leads, etc.
As with varieties of wine, the implication clearly conveyed by the companies marketing these leads was that their quality was in direct proprotion to their price. As I was to discover, however, (as I have also with wine), the invariable common effect of indulging in them, regardless of price, was to produce an initial rosy glow (of the anticipated positive results), followed by a sobering return to stark, cold reality.
Unlike many of my network marketing colleagues, I was able to overcome the "20 pound phone" effect fairly easily and got so I could spend many hours a day dialing numbers continuously--to the point, literally, of wearing the numerals off the phone buttons.
I developed this process into a fine art and must say I actually came to enjoy it. It was similar for me in some ways to the many enjoyable hours I've often spent fishing earlier in my life-- without catching anything at all. As I became fond of saying, I took each voicemail message, busy signal, wrong number, or flat out "no" as bringing me one step closer to getting that inevitable "yes."
As I engaged in this extremely low reward process, however, I was often reminded of the hapless rats I had observed in a laboratory psychology course many decades earlier. These animals, placed in a so-called Skinner box, were trained to press a lever in order to receive a pellet of food. Then, by gradually increasing the number of lever presses required to get the reward, they could be trained to keep pressing it repeatedly with no reward at all to the point of total exhaustion.
I'm afraid that this is a very telling metaphor for the potential fate of most network marketers who are led down the primrose path of buying and calling endless leads.
It's not that this approach does not bring some small degree of success. It did for me. Over a period of many months, through an extremely high degree of commitment and dedicated persistence, I successfully recruited and enrolled a respectable number of distributors to my team.
But the very tragic bottom line for me--as I believe is true for the vast majority of others using this deeply flawed approach--is that literally NONE of the people I recruited by using it were able or willing to duplicate it. Anyone familiar with the crucial and central importance of duplicatability in all network marketing will recognize that this is, indeed, the Achilles heel of calling leads.
In Part II of this saga, I'll describe the profound epiphany that has led me on a happy path to recovery from this all-too-familiar and self-destructive dead end that I'm now convinced contributes greatly to the failure of huge numbers of aspiring wealth-builders in the network marketing industry.
If you've identified at all with what I've been describing here and are interested in looking at a revolutionary new approach to building ANY network marketing business, without ever having to buy leads again, I invite you to go to my website listed below.
I also invite you to learn more about this by reading Part II of this series.
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How To Fail In Network Marketing--Confessions Of A Recovered Leads Junkie, Part II
(c) George Shears, Sept., 2006
In Part I of this two article series, I described my unfortunate addictive journey down the dead end road of buying and calling massive numbers of leads in a zealous effort to achieve success in my network marketing business. In this follow-up article, on a much happier note, I'll share how I finally broke through my denial and discovered a way to kick this exceedingly common and costly addiction.
Just to recap briefly, I'm a retired psychologist and wellness consultant living in the remote north woods of Minnesota. When I retired, I had no more interest in network marketing than in taking up sky-diving or mud-wrestling. But then, happily and unexpectedly, my wife, Mildred, had an amazing recovery from chronic and very debilitating symptoms of MS through taking glyconutritional supplements. This launched me on a passionate new mission to tell the whole world about these fabulous products. As a side benefit, I also hoped to generate some supplementary retirement income by marketing them.
In the traditional network marketing fashion, I started by introducing them to my supposed "warm market" of family and friends. In doing so, my rose-colored glasses got quickly shattered. In spite of my passionate promotion and the strong evidence of their efficacy in helping to restore health to people with many forms of chronic illness, most people in my inner circle reacted as if I were offering them snake oil or rat poison.
Fortified, however, with total confidence in the product I was offering, I then turned to the "cold market" of other health professionals and to the massive numbers of chronically ill people whom I knew could benefit immensely from them. Same results!
The more I tried to share this potentially life-saving information with others, the more I felt like a would-be rescuer trying to throw life preservers to blind people being swept away in a flood.
With the determination of a dedicated mountain climber ascending Mt. Everest, however, I finally turned to "cold calling" hundreds and thousands of "leads" that I purchased from various dealers. As described in the previous article, through this futile, last ditch effort to build a distributional system for these fantastic products, I became a "leads junkie."
Some Transforming Epiphanies
In much the same way that addicts of all kinds commonly break through their denial only after getting into some kind of treatment, this is also how I came to recognize the utter futility of trying to build my business by calling leads.
The "treatment" in my case was to have the great good fortune (thanks to my sponsor) of being introduced to a revolutionary new approach to network marketing that is distinctly "outside the box" in many ways.
As I gradually came to understand this novel new business-building approach, it was as if a set of blinders had been removed that previously had prevented me from seeing what now suddenly became quite obvious.
The first big insight was very simple but equally profound--namely, that absolutely NONE of the sizable number of distributors I recruited through the painfully slow and inefficient process of calling leads had been able or willing to duplicate my actions. As I see it now, that can probably be credited to their basic sanity.
But, given that the sine qua non of all network marketing is duplication, this offers compelling evidence--at least for me--that trying to build a business through calling leads is just simply another job--and a very difficult, unrewarding one at that.
Secondly, I began to see clearly how EXTREMELY unqualified these leads actually are as prospective business partners. This is in decided contrast to how they are often portrayed by the vendors who sell them. First of all, the vast majority of them are flat broke and, therefore, do not have the necessary financial resources even to get started in a business, much less to be able to build it successfully. Amazingly, a large proportion of them are actually offended by learning that a start-up cost is even involved.
Moreover, very few of them have any realistic understanding of the high level of commitment, persistence, investment of time, money, and energy, and the requisite skill development that are necessary to be successful in ANY kind of business, including network marketing. I've been endlessly astounded, for example, by the numbers of these folks who have told me, unflinchingly, that they wanted to bring in $10,000 a month or more, without any initial investment and by working 10-15 hours per week!
Through these epiphanies, then, I've come to realize that buying and calling leads is a profoundly inefficient and extremely costly way of trying to recruit business partners in network marketing. In my experience, this is true regardless of the cost of the leads and no matter how "fresh" and/or "exclusive" they are said to be.
My Life In Recovery
Suppose that you were offered a completely free, detailed plan, along with all of the necessary tools, to build a huge billboard next to the largest freeway in the world. Suppose, further, that with this billboard you could advertise your network marketing business and invite all interested prospects to contact you.
On top of that, imagine that your first personal contact with these prospects would occur AFTER they had joined your business building system.
And then consider that--whether or not they ultimately decided to join your primary business team--many of them would help generate the necessary funding for you to continue your advertising campaign.
Finally, understand that not only would you have a very attractive and highly duplicatable business-building system to offer to new opportunity seekers; but, of at least equal importance, it would have great appeal to other network marketers who've not been successful in using the traditional approach.
On top of that, it would be international in scope.
What I've just invited you to imagine aptly summarizes SOME of the most important advantages of the new approach that I've now adopted as an alternative to wasting my dollars and time in buying and calling leads. What an incredibly refreshing alternative it is! For me, it's like cruising down a brand new freeway in a luxury car after many months of trying to drive an oxcart through a swamp.
I now devote all of my business-building energies to two main activities: 1) Systematically increasing the visibility of my business building website on the internet in order to attract a maximal amount of traffic to it; and 2) guiding, supporting, and mentoring the prospects who are attracted and who choose to join me in using this system to build the network marketing business of their choice.
Like many recovering addicts, I now have an additional new mission--namely, to help other network marketers avoid getting hooked on leads as I did or--if they've already fallen into this trap--to join me on a wonderful road to recovery.
If you'd like to get a free, highly detailed map of this new super-highway to success, I invite you to visit my website below.
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The Funded Sponsoring Franchise System--A Revolutionary New Approach to Network Marketing
(c) By George Shears - October, 2006
A revolutionary new approach is now available in network marketing. It provides a way to build ANY network marketing business entirely online and can be duplicated 100% by anyone who uses it. Not only does it eliminate all of the major causes for failure in traditional network marketing, but it has additional advantages besides.
First of all, it turns traditional network marketing upside down by eliminating ALL personal promotion, recruiting and selling. This saves a huge amount of wasted time and money that network marketers typically spend in working with vast numbers of highly unqualified prospects.
Network marketers using this system have personal contact with prospects only AFTER they have already enrolled into their business building system. This means that these prospects have already demonstrated that they are serious. This shifts the primary role of the business builder from personal recruiting, promoting, and selling to providing guidance, support, and mentoring. This is a far more satisfying role for the vast majority of network marketers.
Secondly, the prospects that enroll in the system generate income for the network marketer by enrolling in the highly attractive affiliate programs that it incorporates. All of these programs are designed to become quickly profitable. They provide quick financial benefits both to the enrollee and to the network marketer operating the system, whether or not the enrollee decides to join the marketer's primary business opportunity.
The system is specifically designed, however, to guide business opportunity seekers into recognizing the key importance of a primary network marketing business for building long-term residual income. It also guides them into considering the particular primary business of the person whose system they've enrolled in. Once the system has provided comprehensive education about network marketing in general and the importance of a carefully-chosen primary network marketing business in particular, many of them will naturally opt in to the primary business of their sponsor.
So, once again, the business-builder who is utilizing this system waits for these prospects to approach him/her, instead of trying to recruit them actively.
But it gets still better. Not only is this Funded Sponsoring system very attractive to new business opportunity seekers, it has equal or greater appeal to the vast numbers of other network marketers who are struggling and/or failing using the traditional approach.
Further, since it is international in scope, its potential market is absolutely huge.
If you'd like to learn more about this exciting and highly refreshing new way to build a network marketing business, I invite you to go to my website shown below.
