After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that there are really only three things that any network marketer needs to be successful in pretty much any network marketing business. These three things are:
- Confidence
- Abundance
- Skills
That network marketers need confidence is obvious. Imagine how much more successful you and your team would be everyone had confidence! The fear of failure holds people back from doing so many of the necessary tasks that any of us has to do to be successful in network marketing. People are afraid of failing, afraid of getting “no’s”, afraid of what people will think of them, afraid of what people will say about them, and sometimes they are even afraid of of success.
Lack of confidence leads to a vicious cycle. When people are not confident they usually do not end up sharing their business often. Since they don’t share the business often, they don’t get very good at it. Because they are not very good at it, they share it even less. Their lack of success leads to even LESS confidence and they eventually fizzle out. We’ll look at fixing this in just a second.
The second thing we network marketers need is abundance. To be more specific, we need an abundance of people to share the business with. Do you know any top leader in any company that doesn’t have hundreds if not thousands of people on his or her team? Of course not! That’s absurd. Network marketing is a people business. The more people you share with, the greater your chances of success.
However, most people’s circle of friends and acquaintances is not more than 150-250 people. Out of these circles, not everyone is qualified to join the business. Some are too young, too lazy, or too irresponsible. There are going to be some people that blow us off, put us off, or people we don’t even know how to get in touch with anymore. Of the people we can share the business with, there are going to be some that are not interested, some that will wait to see what you do with it, and a few that will probably sign up with you. And if you are a normal networker like me, it may take you several times of sharing the business before you get good at it!
More often then not, a normal person’s initial list of contacts will not be enough to achieve the lifestyle they are shooting for. And to make it worse, every “no” that we get is almost unbearable because we know that we only have 30-50 people we can share our business with!
Abundance solves this problem! What if you had 100x as many people as the average guy or gal? The person that has 15,000-25,000 people to contact probably isn’t going to worry too much if he gets a “no” or even if he gets 100 “no’s” right?
The third thing that networkers need to succeed are the skills of the trade. Someone can be confident and have an infinite number of people to share his business with but without the proper skills, he probably still won’t sponsor very many people. Networker’s need leadership skills, relationship skills, and business/marketing skills.
Leadership skills are skills such as integrity (being who you say you are all the time), character (being a person who sticks to right moral principles), and being able to cast vision that inspires your team. Relationship skills are skills such as the ability to make friends, listen to what others are really saying, and the ability to empathize with others. Business/marketing skills are skills such as how to attract more leads for yourself and your team, how to do three-way phone calls, how to set up (or find others to set up) team websites, seminars, open meetings / tasting parties / demonstrations, and how to manage your personal finances.
The networker that has these 3 things will succeed every time!
