Here are a couple of prospecting methods that you must be aware of if you want to survive in network marketing. I’ve shared several articles on building your prospect funnel, and specifically how to drive traffic to capture prospects. It is vital that you factor traffic generation (offline and online) into your business building strategy. After all, having effective prospecting methods in place is your network marketing lifeline!
Cold Calling Invitations
With Network Marketing, cold calling (and going door-to-door) is one of the MOST INEFFECTIVE and DIFFICULT forms of obsolete prospecting. I suspect some people might want to debate this, but let’s be realistic…
- YOU don’t like to receive phone calls
- Cold calling has a lot of resistance and people turn their ears away if you are a stranger
- People don’t like being sold things that they don’t need
- They don’t even need to see YOU – a total stranger!
Product parties or invitations to a presentation, on the other hand, might still work if it is done correctly. You can invite your friends to an event or a tea-party but make sure that you let them know up front exactly what your intentions are. In other words, say “Hi John, I’m having some people over on Friday to sample the product that I told you about – and wondered if you might want to join us?” INTENTION is very clear when you invite him or her. People are not stupid and they can sense your intentions if you have promised them otherwise.
In other words, never trick them into coming to your network marketing prospecting meeting! You’ll not only get a rejection, you may also lose a friend. Just don’t do it.
Classified Advertising (Google AdWords)
A good way to drive immediate traffic to your opportunity is through PPC advertising. With the right budget, keywords, and ad, you can drive a lot of traffic to your website very quickly. It can get expensive if you don’t know what you are doing, so be very careful with this approach.
One important thing about advertising is to ALWAYS go for direct response advertising. Do NOT burn your money on advertising that does NOT solicit direct response and a measurable way to calculate your expenditure, leads contacting you and conversion to sales!
When you advertise your opportunity on classified advertising, make sure you have a website or a phone number that they can contact you that MUST lead the prospect to the next phase of your prospecting funnel.
The problem with people is that they dump all sorts of advertising without leading to the second phase which is the direct response or lead capture phase. They think just because they leave a website or a phone number (like leaving name cards all over town) they will get a lot of people to sign up.
With Google AdWords, you must make sure you have a system that is designed to deal with those leads and execute the steps above.
Next time, we will discuss some creative ways to generate leads and prospects. You will want to utilize as many methods as possible if you want to be highly successful.
