Switching sides - From corporate leader to network marketing professional
First of all I want to take the time to tell you my story. I was introduced to MLM some years ago in a different way than most people. Being a student, I always had part time jobs to finance my studies. I was teaching undergraduates, preparing Pizza and delivering Indian Food in order to pay the bills - until my friend offered me a job in the customer service call center, for a network marketing company. Even though I would like to keep the name of my former employers discrete - the first client and my first introduction to MLM was by working for a company that supplies travel services. It took me a while to understand MLM in its essence, but I knew already that I had just come across a very powerful tool to help ordinary people achieve extraordinary results. When that client temporarily stopped their support in Europe, I was approached by my Manager at that time with another project - he offered me the team lead position for the fastest growing network marketing company at that time which I happily took. The project was way bigger than the one before and I was able to deepen my knowledge and try to pick up everything there was about to know MLM. I dedicated these years to studying success factors, studying different teams, how they duplicated, how they build their business and tried to identify factors that made successful teams outwork others. The formula I identified for success in network marketing has 3 pillars: Product, Company and Team. First of all, the only thing that is generating income in Network Marketing is revenue or sales. Therefore it is paramount to find a product or service that not only most people can afford but that is also relevant to the greatest possible amount of people. Apart from that, the only thing that will ever generate passive income is passive revenue. Therefore it is paramount that the product or service supplied is being used by the customer on a repeated basis, or otherwise no passive income will be generated. Too often I saw especially in product network marketing that one thing that was holding people back was that they had no passive revenue at all - people signed up with their company just to stop the business again or being unable to pay their auto ship, customers only used their product once - which made all work always active and passive income impossible to occur.
When it comes to choosing the right company, I think the most important factor is timing. Ideally one wants to pick a company that is large and established enough to allow for building a business globally in a smooth way, but not too large and too established so that the peak of momentum might have already occurred or is declining. Building with a company from the beginning on or getting in early not only allows for picking up momentum but also establishing important corporate bonds and gaining influence.
Lastly, I think one reason why people fail is that they try to reinvent the wheel. There are many proven ways to success in MLM, whether that might be via personal meetings, presentations, calls or recordings. Especially new people however often lack a real mentor in the business, someone who has proven results and can guide them along the way to teach them everything they know. Finding someone who is experienced and successful in the MLM industry is the number one key to success as all the mistakes the mentor has made can be avoided by the MLM newbie.
These are the factors that I personally thought distinguished successful networkers from unsuccessful ones. After having worked for 4 years as a corporate leader I wanted to start a network marketing business myself- and paid very close attention to complying for these factors when looking for a company.
But apart from paying attention to these factors the most important thing I looked for was to find a concept that in my eyes is underlying and encompassing all these factors, namely a business opportunity that enables also the absolute newbie to generate passive streams of income. Too often, in order to be successful and make real income people either need to lead a army of distributors or put in committed work for 3-5 years to build a large team to generate a income large enough to live from - whereas all that people want is getting paid when they start the business. If the distributors at your foundation are unable to generate income - you will be too.
Taking that into account, I found and signed up with a company that has a low initial start up costs, where auto ships are free when having only 2 team members, where people with a team of only 8 people can already generate as much money as a part-time job would, where there is a great connection to the CEO enabling me to tailor my business to the markets I build in, an opportunity that is in the fledgling stage just starting to tap into markets outside of the US and most importantly - a product that people really want and need and where results do not have to be promised or vary between people.
Because the most important thing that people want is getting value. Money is what you pay, value is what you get. Bring value to people and results will follow.
