“Just Recruit a few and Drive Their Lines Deep”
ONE common misconception in the network marketing industry has led people down into the administration pit. Certain leaders contend that the key to success in our industry is finding four or five good people, then driving their groups by focusing exclusively on supporting them
until they are wealthy, then finding five more and doing the same thing. That is the absolute antithesis of what is required to succeed in our profession. The three magic words are “GO WIDE FAST!” Recruit as many frontline distributors each month as you can, until you are earning at least $10,000 a month consistently. Then you can relax a bit until you feel re-
freshed, only to run right back out there into the frontline recruiting trenches Unfortunately, some well-meaning authors and leaders have done a horrible disservice to our profession by misleading new distributors into believing that success in our industry requires less effort than it really does. People who teach this philosophy do so innocently because that’s what they’ve been taught through their upline leaders who learned to do this through books and tapes. The first ninety days of warm-market prospecting are much more personal and support-intensive since new distributors are focused on their friends and families. We will
discuss this more in later chapters. But the truth is that you cannot hope to achieve a tremendous income, like those huge figures the legends in our industry earn, unless you play it as a numbers game, especially once you enter the cold market.
Ron Wiggins, who left the shoe business after eleven years to join network marketing at the age of twenty-seven, said one of the most important things he learned his first year is that
“success defies all logic . . . so quit trying to figure it out. Just do the numbers! And when
prospecting large numbers of people, don’t try to tell them everything you know. It’s a matter of raising their curiosity, not satisfying it.” He goes on: “I was doing so much of the wrong, eventually it just started to add up! From all the mistakes I made, I learned and now teach from experience to eliminate logic in your own mind and simply do what’s been done by the experts and authorities of the industry who have already made all of the mistakes themselves. You’ve got to get rid of any personal perceptions you may have and try to
accept from the beginning that it’s going to be a lot of hard work on a very consistent basis.”
After a year of hard work, Ron had matched his previous income. Shortly thereafter, his wife, Chris, also left her job and together, working full-time, they have become one of the top
network distributor teams in Dallas. It took Ron and Chris four and a half years to reach the very pinnacle of their company’s compensation plan. Today they earn a five-figure monthly
income. They have utilized their experience to become experts at training, and have learned to keep it simple so that their system can be easily duplicated.
If network marketers were truly doing the numbers that it takes to succeed, no one would have time to fall into the entrapment of administration. Human nature looks for the line of least resistance, and, clearly, it is much easier to work with existing distributors than it is to
face the daily rejection that occurs when recruiting new people. Because this is a business of duplication, your people will do what you do. If you manage your downline, so will they. If you spend most of your time prospecting and recruiting, so will they. The secret is not managing
your organization; rather it’s finding leaders, who will in turn find other leaders. Generally, leaders must be found; they cannot be created. But many people have untapped leadership skills that do not manifest themselves until the timing is right. In order to “find” those leaders, you must keep prospecting and recruiting, realizing that new blood is the. lifeblood of any network marketing organization. Recruiting is the only viable way to offset the inevitability of attrition. This is a numbers game that inevitably becomes a people business once distributors are sponsored into the business, often forging lifetime bonds.
It would indeed be wonderful if we could all skip to the bank each month with checks for $100,000 after merely working with a handful of frontline leaders. It is human nature to want
to believe that there is an easy way to achieve this goal. We warn you against leaders and authors who grossly and unfairly mislead people by projecting concepts that feel easy and effortless to everybody, yet don’t work. Don’t be taken in by those who teach management as a philosophy of success because it is indeed the very cause of as much as 50 percent of the
failures in our industry. Here’s the scenario: A new associate is exposed unwittingly to this system, spends a few weeks talking five friends into signing up, then the rest of his/her short career consists of attempting to drag those five people over the finish line. Then the next thing you know, our network marketer is having weekly baby-sitting sessions in the living room of someone’s home.
Fortunately for Amway, two of their biggest leaders saw the folly of this philosophy early on.
Because, as leaders, they command so much respect and loyalty from their downlines, they were able to immediately replace this concept with more realistic guidelines by removing one bestselling book from their sales tool repertoire. We truly believe that one of the several reasons that Amway has continued to grow and become a multibillion-dollar empire, while none of their competitors have done half as well, is the absence of widespread dissemination of this management philosophy. Their distributors don’t try to manage everyone; they continue to place their emphasis on showing the plan, thereby adding new frontline
distributors. It is the same with our own downline. Over the years, we have promoted Power Multi-Level Marketing (our book) and All You Can Do by A. L. Williams. Consequently, our most successful leaders continue to recruit large numbers of frontline distributors and teach their people to do the same.
HARRY SIR LOFTY.
0240787223
BADENYA HARRY 