Building A List Of Friends And Family Is Bu$%#$

So I’m sitting in my home office doing some evil Ninja stuff, waiting on my football game to come on (Go Vols!), when it occurred to me that the #1 skill you must have for network marketing success is the ability to talk to and connect with people.

I think most in the industry would agree, however there are a lot of industry purists who are going to start throwing daggers at me for the next thing I’m gonna say.

Building a list of friends and family is Bullshit!! Okay, let me back off of that a little and just say that if you’re in need of quick money in this industry, friends and family are the answer.

Now, here comes the boom…

If you’re looking to build a sustainable, long term, and highly leveraged network marketing business, you need to get good at marketing. Why? Because everyone’s friends and family list is only so big and what happens to most people when they run out of contacts? They’re out of business period. Sure there’s a select few who like the pain of cold calling people off of business cards, instituting the dreaded three foot rule, and even some who buy leads to call.

They can have that crap…

Reality set in for me after I’d joined my first real network marketing opportunity (ok, so really second, but does one joined during college really even count), made my “list”, and called every single person on it until they quit answering, hung up on me, or told me to “screw off”. Sure I had some success, signed up a few people, but by the time I’d gotten to the end of my list I was, for all intents and purposes, out of business. My fireball of enthusiasm died with the last name on my list.

(My upline) “Eric, you’re not out of business, you’ve just got to go out and talk to everyone you come in contact with about the awesome opportunity, blah, blah, blah.”

And so there I was, all fired up about this incredible opportunity, but beating myself up at the same time because everyone else couldn’t see the AWESOMENESS (not sure that’s a word) I saw with it. Then in a last ditch attempt to “save” my business, I did an online search and came across the idea of attraction marketing. It came in the form of a course called “Magnetic Sponsoring“, bought it, and read the entire thing that night (which I’d suggest for anyone serious about being successful long term, buy it here now).

I was BLOWN AWAY…!

The entire night, I could hardly sleep and something really amazing took place. A mindset shift, and clearer understanding of how to be really successful in this industry. The reason the top earner in your company is the top earner is because they’ve “attracted” people to themselves by providing value to others. Marketing themselves if you will.

Here’s where my revelation happened…

So if all those top earners “attract” people to them because they have something of value to offer, all I need to do to duplicate that is to start educating myself on things that people looking to join an opportunity will need. Here’s a list of the skills I came up with:

– Recruiting
– Prospecting
– Marketing
– Lead Generation
– Personal Development

So, I already knew that I sucked at prospecting, so I wasn’t going their. Then I looked at marketing and thought, hell, I took a course on that in college, how hard can that one be to master (little did I know I’d still be trying to “master” it 2+ years later, although I am proficient now). I looked at the remaining choices and nothing was really attractive so I just picked lead generation. At that time I was still working the family biz and figured worst case, maybe it could help me get more business there.

Fast forward 2+ plus years…

I’m a lead generation machine. I don’t say that to toot my own horn, but leads for anything won’t ever be an issue in my life (or any of my team’s). The lesson for this is that if you truly desire to be successful in this industry, you MUST go out and educate yourself in a minimum of 1 of the skills I listed above and master it. Now the one question I always get here when I say that is, “how can I do that if I’m brand new and need to generate income now?”

Great question…

My answer is, pick something quickly, then make a commitment to get really good at one part of it. For instance, with lead generation, you could get proficient at 1 method to generate leads (which, by the way, I do completely online and on autopilot, I know another snafu according to your upline).

If you want to achieve network marketing success, it’s really simple, remember the second word there, “marketing” and specifically attraction marketing.

Here’s to your success,

Ps…if this helped you at all, google plus it, facebook it, and twitter it for me.

Pps…if you’re interested in the push button lead generation system I use shoot me a quick email and I’ll let you look at it.

Tagged as: attraction marketing, magnetic sponsoring, network marketing success