Chatting with a colleague recently, I could tell he was really frustrated, if not a little upset with himself. It turns out that things had been going really well with a prospect and he thought he was building a sound relationship with that person. Having identified what the prospect needed, wanted, and didn’t want, my colleague felt confident that he had positively qualified his prospect and was ready to invite the prospect to take action and to look at his network marketing business. The prospect was all excited about the excellent MLM training on offer, was certainly eager to move things forward . . . and then things suddenly went really cold.
It turns out that the wife of my colleague’s prospect had found a bunch of junk on the internet that put down network marketing as an industry, and his company specifically. I can tell you that both objections are not based on true fact. I can also tell you that the same thing has happened to me and I shared my associate’s frustration in not picking up on it early enough to deal with this new “objection” in time.
The only way negative comments and negative websites will ever carry any weight, regardless of whether they hold any validity or not, is when there is someone willing to read it and believe those things.
As incredible as the internet is as a source of information, we all know that for every action there is a reaction and, unfortunately, the internet has allowed the creation of what I would call the ‘Anti’ lobby.
The internet allows anyone at all to publish anything at all. There are so many “anti” sites that are out there that I cannot believe it, and I’m not just talking about anti-MLM business. Of course there’s a lot of anti MLM because there are a whole lot of people out there who had gone into network marketing, did not do it right, who did not get trained properly. These are the type of people that don’t take personal responsibility for getting poor – or no – training, and then they turn around and just decide that they’re going to talk negatively about the MLM industry.
The person who’s spouting the negativity most of the time is feeling negative because they failed at doing the business. The person who believes the negativity, the person who comes along and reads and believes it without any inspection, without any research on their own to validate what is being said, is the person who has doubts in themselves.
They take these very erroneous statements like, “Ninety percent of the people who join network marketing don’t succeed” and believe them, and they go, “Oh, wow. Maybe I shouldn’t bother with network marketing.” Well, I’ve got another statistic for you. A hundred percent of the people who are born are going to die. So, if my reaction to that was, let’s stop having any more children – would that make any sense at all?
Yes, that would be ridiculous – and so is the erroneous statistic about network marketing. In other words, you can distort any piece of data, any information, you can just twist it however you want. In other words, there’s not a subject out there that you cannot get on the internet and type the word “anti” in front of it, and not find that somebody out there hasn’t pulled it to pieces.
The point that I’m making is just that you yourself have to be able to evaluate the information that comes to you. One of the most broad, sweeping perspectives you can take is to ask yourself, are they offering a solution to something or are they just complaining? If a solution isn’t offered following the complaint or the negative comments, then these people you’re talking with aren’t trying to solve anything. They’re trying to destroy something – because what they’re doing – just complaining – doesn’t add any value at all. One of the key components that I am always looking for any time I am listening to a complaint is some sort of a “How do I?” So, while these people spend all of their time writing up information about how network marketing doesn’t work, I tend to dismiss it because anybody who cares to turn around and look can see that it is a very large, growing, and successful industry.
That isn’t to say that some complaints do not have merit, especially with regards to MLM training. However, I do find that the more genuine people who care are more likely to offer a solution, as well as making the complaint. That’s the key element that separates the instructor from the complainer!
That’s the whole reason why I’ve taken the direction to spend my time offering solutions and help in this whole area of MLM and network marketing training.
I hope that’s helpful to you, because you will have to deal with the fact that the internet has given birth to a whole anti-movement, including anti MLM, which goes a very long way towards explaining why people are so anti network marketing.
Did my colleague – the one I was talking about whose prospect’s wife found anti-MLM writings on the web – did my colleague learn from this? Of course he did! He realized that he had been able to sense that something wasn’t quite right when he met with the prospect and his wife. He also realized that he was talking to two people who were at different stages – the prospect was more than ready to take action, whereas the prospect’s wife hadn’t been qualified effectively and still had objections that had to be addressed. The solution would have been to focus on handling the objections, qualifying the wife, and in doing so, bringing both the prospect and the wife to the same point of positive action.
About the Author
Tim Sales built an MLM business with an income of over $150,000 per month with 2,400+ new distributors joining per month. He now shares his wealth of knowledge and skills with network marketers around the globe. More free training is available at http://www.FirstClassMLMTools.com
