When you join an MLM, you are told that you can prosper in this business after you learn how to find local MLM leads. We have found that this approach simply does not work because it is based on an incorrect assumption about the nature of MLM and the role of an independent sales representative. Despite a tremendous amount of hype about MLMs being a business-in-a-box or a home business that pays generously, realistically speaking MLM is a referral business—you get paid for referring people to become customers or fellow distributors.
For a business to be a business, it has to hire highly qualified people and to have an effective marketing and sales process. Anyone can join an MLM provided that they can pay for the monthly product purchases. What passes for marketing and sales training are just meetings where the top distributors share their story of success and pass on a few casual tips on how to talk to more people. By that definition, then, MLM is more of a loose association of people rather than a coordinated enterprise.
However, before we go into detail about how you can become highly successful with MLM following our unique approach, it is first important to fully describe why the current lead generation paradigm is not feasible for long-term success.
How New Recruits Are Trained To Find Local MLM Leads
In team meetings, you, as a new sales representative, are told by your older peers and sponsors that the best way to become quickly successful is to get very good at finding local MLM leads.
You are persuaded that this is the way to go using the following lines of reasoning:
1. The best way to convince people to join the company is to talk to them face-to-face. The more people you can find and talk to about the MLM opportunity the greater the likelihood of success.
2. Building a profitable MLM home business is entirely about building relationships. When people can come to know, like, and trust you, then they are much more likely to buy from you.
3. You can find local leads by doing a search on Google for keyword strings like “local multilevel marketing leads.” You can also do a similar search on YouTube. When you do this, you will find fresh, good quality leads through a list broker. Of course, the better the quality and the fresher the list, the more you will have to pay. But, you are told, you will quickly make your money back once these presold leads become customers. The very best leads are no older than a week, and you will be provided with the full name, email address, and telephone number. In addition, you will also get their answers to a questionnaire that they filled out about why they would like to start a home business and how much they are willing to invest in it. The cost of these great leads will range from $1.50 to $3.50 per contact.
4. If you cannot afford to find a local list broker, then there are other ways to get local leads without breaking the budget.
a. You can hang flyers on doorknobs of homes or on tack them on boards in the library, in grocery stores, and in unemployment offices. Your results will improve when you use an attention-getting headline like, “Make Thousands a Month from Home.” Additionally, you should use tear away tags with phone numbers and your website address.
b. Make a lot of business cards and distribute them generously. You can leave them on shop counters, stick them on bulletin boards, and drop them in the glass bowls at restaurants that have a free meal lottery. Your card has to be more than just your name, occupation, and address. It has to stand out. It should, for example, have a compelling message and a strong call to action. Draw extra attention to the card by either making it slightly larger than most business cards or having the corners rounded off.
c. Check with your local city hall office to put funny, attention getting flyers in public places—for example, “Wanted,” or bandit signs.
d. Contact local publishers of magazines, newspapers, and tabloids. Insert classified ads, or help wanted ads.
e. Join local businessmen who are having a job fair and set up a booth to “hire” people into your business opportunity.
f. Connect with other people in your MLM and form a co-op advertising plan on the Internet, using social media marketing platforms.
After you are introduced to these methods and try them out, you will quickly learn that they are more time intensive than you had guessed, require much more physical effort than you had anticipated, and yielded far less results than you had hoped. Since you don’t know any better and since everyone in your organization is apparently doing these things, you automatically assume that your lack of success is your fault. You would succeed, you believe, if you could just get better at executing these methods. What you may not realize is that you have been set up for failure—because the methods themselves are rather ineffective.
Why These Methods Fail
While on the surface of it, these methods sound reasonable enough, they only yield partial results or no results at all. Moreover, even if one method does work, it is hard to be consistently successful with it because there are so many unpredictable variables to consider. For example, you might actually buy a responsive list from a lead broker, but then find other lists from the same broker to be completely unresponsive.
Here are some examples of why these methods do not work well enough to be considered a strategic business plan:
1. While you may be eager to talk to as many people as you can face-to-face, they are probably much less eager to talk to you, and you may get frequently brushed off when people find the hidden agenda behind your apparent friendliness. Only the most thick-skinned and extroverted personalities have a chance at sticking with this method for very long.
2. While it may be true that people are more likely to buy from you when they come to know, like, and trust you, the problem is sifting through enough people to find those who are even interested in what you have to offer.
3. Finding leads through a list broker is usually more likely to result in high expenses and low returns. The leads are often resold to many people interested in home business opportunities. It is estimated that each list is sold at least six times. In many instances, you simply do not know if the lead is as fresh as the broker claims. However, even if the list is fresh, it in no way means it is a responsive list. Many people who have used this method have found that they end up spending thousands and not getting significant returns.
4. What about generating your own leads? This is even harder to do. Most flyers are torn down by staff after they have been put up. Distributing business cards, no matter how well designed, is completely untargeted marketing. Local city hall officials are not impressed by creative flyer suggestions. Those who respond to want ads are usually people who are looking for real jobs with time clocks and regular paychecks, and the same goes for people who approach an employment booth with a resume in hand. Finally, getting cheaper advertising by pooling resources also means that the leads themselves have to be divided up.
What Makes Our Lead Generation System Different
Our lead generation system is not a variation of existing lead systems. Moreover our system does not rely on you, the independent sales representative, to follow any local lead generation methods at all. The reason we are not in favor of local lead generation is because the sales numbers show that these methods do not work well for most people. They are based on the underlying premise that it takes a tremendous amount of effort to yield small results. Even if you were to find some local lead generation method that did work, it would require so much effort that it would quickly become too difficult to keep it in perpetual motion.
Instead, we provide you with a system that will work for you, a system that will reduce your stress and take off the pressure. In other words, this is an effective system. We define an effective system as one that produces results and that does not rely on the training and performance of the sales representative.
We understand that selling is not for everyone. And we also understand that you may have a tight schedule between work and home and have no time to fit in a side business promoting an MLM opportunity.
Using our system, we do the work for you and use technology and experienced salespeople to help you become successful. Think of us as a consultancy business. And what’s more, our company, Tru180, is based on a pay-per-performance model. In other words, we only get paid after producing results for you.
We will be happy to explain our system to you in greater detail. For this reason, we have a new launch to show people how easy it is to get the best, most responsive leads at http://www.tru180.com.
