Add 20 – 25 People A Week To Your Network Marketing Business- 4 Stages

Add 20 – 25 People A Week To Your Network Marketing Business- 4 Stages

Whether you are new to network marketing or an old pro, you probably know by now that getting new customers, either users of your products or services or ‘reps’ to market your products or services, is the lifeblood of your business. And once you’ve annoyed enough family members and friends with your pitch you may also quickly realize that unless you find some alternative ways of generating leads for your business, you’re going to be out of business very quickly.

It’s this very realization that drives tons of people out of the network marketing and MLM business as fast as they get into it, and it doesn’t have to be this way. As a matter of fact, in 99.9 % of the cases it’s not the individual’s fault at all- it’s more of a systems problem. The good news is that once you are armed with the four stages you will have a clear idea of the road ahead of you and exactly where you are on the map so that you can move from one stage to the next.

So, let’s go through the four stages in a general way first and then we’ll break each stage down. You may have noticed, before we get started, that I purposely used the word ‘stage’ and not ‘step’ in the title, and there is a reason for this. The word ‘step’ implies ‘technique’ something that you can read about and learn and apply to your business right away- almost like following a recipe. Stage, on the other hand, at least for the purposes of this article, is more of a developmental phase that you go through- in other words, you have to put the time in to develop the necessary skills in order to move on to the next stage. And consequently the skills that you learn at one stage are the building blocks for the next stage.

Ok, so let’s jump into it. The four stages can be described like this:

1) Unconscious Incompetence (UI)
2) Conscious Incompetence (CI)
3) Conscious Competence (CC)
4) Unconscious Competence (UC)

The unconscious incompetence stage can be summed up in four words: no awareness, no skill. This is how pretty much all of us start out in the network marketing or MLM business. Unless you were lucky enough to have extensive training in sales and marketing (which some people have) you more than likely started from ground zero, first expanding your awareness about your particular business and then developing your skill set.

What’s the biggest stumbling block of this stage? There are two. One is that you don’t develop your skill set fast enough to make any money. This is a problem because many network marketers or MLM’ers still recruit people into the business with the promise that ‘you just have to get two people who will get two more people and then you’ll be rich’. If you don’t know anything about the network marketing industry when you start (no awareness) and you’re not one of those people with extensive sales and marketing training (no skill) then you begin to believe that you should be making gobs of money in the first week or two, and that’s not the case at all.

What’s the second biggest stumbling block at this stage? That within the first week or two, the new rep actually recruits someone into the business. What, you ask? I thought that’s what’s supposed to happen in a network marketing business? Well, it is. But what happens is that after getting their first new recruit into the business the new rep thinks ‘oh, that wasn’t so hard, I’ll be signing up a lot of people’. And then reality sets in and before you know it two weeks go by, and then a month goes by, and then six weeks go by, and then two months go by and the new rep starts to think ‘what’s wrong with me- I recruited the first person so easily and now an entire two months have gone by and I haven’t recruited anybody- this is not working’ and soon the new rep drops out of the business.

There are really only two goals in the first stage: 1) develop awareness of what the basics are and 2) start to build a skill set. If the new rep focuses on these two goals for the first stage then he or she will not be measuring themselves against how many new people they’ve recruited in the first month. If he or she can stay in the game long enough to build their skill set then the chances of them becoming successful are greatly enhanced!

This brings up the question ‘can any of the stages be skipped’? Unless you are a former network marketer or have developed your skill set and awareness in a similar industry the short answer is no. But there is a caveat. If you are lucky enough to find a good training program or mentor you can usually shorten the learning curve considerably, especially in the first two stages. You will still have to do the work of developing your skill set and awareness, but you can achieve your goals much more quickly with the right guidance.

In part two of this article I will discuss the next stage and the number one obstacle that people face when they enter stage two.

Gerard Lennon helps network marketers avoid some of the many pitfalls of the industry. You can download his free report at http://www.thetellallmlmreport.com