Why You Must Stop Paying for Leads
August 5th, 2009
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When a new Network Marketer gets started out in the business, their first and most pressing need is to figure out how they will get their message to the world. It can be an extremely daunting task since they usually have little to no knowledge of how this Industry works. In addition, they typically are lacking in experience, and often times resources to really make the big splash they so urgently want to make.
Your first few months in your new business might look something like this:
Month #1
- You sign-up as an Independent Business Owner with much excitement
- You put together your warm-market list of people to contact about your products and/or opportunity
- You begin diligently making daily calls to your warm market with the high hopes of enthusiastic responses and lots of purchases and/or sign-ups into your organization
- You quickly learn after a few weeks or so of constant and time-consuming phone activity and one-on-one meetings that this might have been a bad idea…”Uggh!…why is this so hard?”
- You wake up one morning with the realization that your warm-market is about as warm as a block of ice on a cold snowy day in Minnesota
- You call your upline sponsor for help! “What am I doing wrong?”
- Your upline sponsor lets you know that you must continue with your efforts…”It’s hard work and it will take a little while…but it will happen EVENTUALLY. You’ve got to get in front of as many people as possible.”
- You continue working diligently, doing what your sponsor told you, only to meet with similar results
Month #2
- More opportunity meetings and phone calls to your warm market ensue…”Maybe things will work out this time…if I’d maybe work a little harder”
- A few people enroll into your organization…but wait…IT’S JUST TO GET THE WHOLESALE PRICE ON PRODUCTS!…”Well, at least it’s something”
- You secure a few retail customers who don’t sign up for the Auto-Ship program, so no residual income there…”Hey maybe things are starting to turn around?!…Maybe Not!
- The flurry of calls and meetings continue, and things seem to be turning around…Enter Month #3!!
Month #3
- You take stock in everything that you’ve done in your brief Network Marketing career…this can be very painful
- You determine if it’s all worth it…and depending upon what you decide…this might be where you exit stage right…never again to return to the world of mlm…”Just too many bad memories…and, oh the rejection! Boy does that hurt!”
- You determine that things need to change…You need to consider a whole new way of reaching prospects if you’re going to achieve your dream of financial freedom.
- You consider buying leads as a way to increase your chances of growing your business…”With people who actually want to work the business.” That would be so great.
That’s When the Adventure Begins
You decide to take advantage of your Network Marketing Company’s “Super Qualified” leads with the hope that these
people will hear your message and be ready to take action! Let’s see here…and the options are many…You have anything from $1.00 lead specials, on up. If you want the Super Duper Qualified leads, you’re gonna have to pay up big time, but the rewards will far outweigh the investment…Yeah, Right! If your idea of reward is having to chase these people down day after day…trying to get them to watch your Company’s Opportunity and Compensation DVD only to be perpetually disappointed with their lame excuses about why they couldn’t take 15 minutes out of their week to review the information. Wait a minute…Weren’t these supposed to be the Super Duper Highly Qualified leads?
That’s when you start to wonder if it’s just you. You begin to wonder if you really have what it takes to make it in this Industry. Everyone else seems to be doing so well, but why is this so hard? Well, I’m here to tell you that when you use the old “Stalking” techniques…that is when your business consists of numerous methods of “approaching” people, you will meet with more rejection than anyone was meant to experience. No wonder 97% of Network Marketers never make a single dollar of profit in this Industry and ultimately walk away. Most of them, and I include myself in this group, are being constantly told that they need to adopt techniques that aren’t really viable anymore in this day and age. They may have been effective before the internet and social media were introduced, but now, if you’re exclusively using approach tactics in your business, it may be time to re-evaluate whether you’re doing the right business activities. If you’re paying for leads…for the ability to contact people that you’ve never met, and who know nothing about you, and likely very little about your company, then you’ve got your work cut out for you from the very beginning. No matter how personable you sound on the phone, and how wonderfully you deliver your message, there’s still going to be a major hurdle that you’ll need to overcome, which is whether this person is really interested in, or ready for what you have to offer.
So, if you’ve spent $200.00 for leads, you must not only consider whether you will make a return on your investment, but more importantly, you must consider whether the time invested in prospecting these fine folks will be worth it to you in the end. Certainly, you must be prepared for the myriad of excuses that you’ll hear, the endless questions and empty promises that you’ll receive as you pour yourself out in an attempt to draw them into your organization. In the end, you must ask yourself whether there’s a better way to do things. Are you leveraging your business efforts with this kind of activity? The answer is a definitive NO! Now, could you experience some success with these methods…sure you can, but it comes back to the time investment that you’ll surely have to make to get anywhere close to the results you want to achieve.
That brings us back to my initial point. When we pay for leads, and use other tactics whereby we’re the one approaching people, we’re creating more work for ourselves than necessary, not to mention that we’re setting ourselves up for a big-time amount of rejection. Now, you might be saying “Wait a minute…these are actual leads…not just someone out of the blue, here. These people are supposed to be interested in what I have to offer.” Well, my friend, that’s what the people who sell you the leads say. Why would they say otherwise. Remember, they want you to actually “buy” their leads. In reality, that’s not usually the way it turns out. That’s not to say that there won’t be the occasional prospect who will be very interested in what you have to say. They may even decide to join your organization, but these folks are few and far between. Now, how many people will you have to prospect just to get to that “Needle” in your hay stack of purchased leads.
What’s the solution, you might say? Well, it comes down to being able to generate your own leads through developing and then feeding your own marketing funnel on the internet. It really is quite simple, when you think about it. There are many people involved with Network Marketing in various capacities who have created a funnel through which they have attracted people to them by providing valuable information, products, and resources that are high quality and intriguing enough to compel prospects to action. Usually, that includes the prospect giving their name and email address for access to information products, services, newsletters, etc… These people then end up on an email lists (also known as the “Drip System” and are considered a ”lead”, though not necessarily a high qualified lead, but they are now seated in the Internet Marketer’s “virtual audience” of prospects and begin receiving information, newsletters, product promotions, and other related materials that are designed to move them along the marketing continuum until they eventually reach the classification of “highly qualified”, and make that purchase. This is how lead generation works…it takes time, but the energy expenditure from this process is nothing compared to what you could do in a person-to-person format, especially if you’re plan is to build a large organization.
When you rely upon someone else’s efforts to get you leads, you end up with a prospect who was interested in what someone else had to offer, not you. That’s the issue here. So as you begin talking to them about your Network Marketing opportunity, they may not have any concept of what your company is, and may not have any interest in your particular opportunity. More importantly, you two have yet to build any type of relationship, so the conversation is likely to be awkward at best. They may eventually warm up to you, but how much time will that take, and even so…the relationship they built with the company you purchased your leads from is far better and way more leveraged than with you.
I hope you’re getting what I’m saying here. Learning to generate your own leads online will be so much more efficient, and will not cost you tons of money or personal time…it will actually free you up big time to focus on so many other areas of your business. Imaging having your “virtual message” out there speaking on your behalf 24 hours a day. That’s what will happen. You can go to sleep at night knowing that your marketing funnel will be perpetually filled with new prospects even when you stop. Not only that…these will be people who actually are interested in what you have to offer and…get this…they may even be seeking you out to talk to you about your products and/or opportunity. Now that’s what I want for my business, and what I trust that you want for yours, even though you may not quite be able to see how it might all work out for you right now. Being open to new ways to market your Network Marketing business includes being open to many possibilities, and that includes being open to the Internet. Explore your possibilities and know that Yes, it is possible, and Yes, you can do it! If you want to talk, please contact me. I’d be glad to show you how you can use the Internet 2.0 and all that it entails to propel your business to new heights.
Categories: Lead Generation
