My initial experience in Network Marketing was with a distributor organization that taught all of its distributors to begin their career in MLM by making a list of 100 people that they knew and then badgering them about the "best business opportunity on the planet." After you ran through that list (or rather the people on that list began to run from you) you were told to prospect using the "3 foot rule" and "mall walking" or such things like that. Chasing people down became the order of the day and those who didn't have the stomach for it were just left in the dust. Attraction marketing takes an opposite view by teaching you to provide real, substantial and usable information to would be prospects BEFORE you even bring up your business offer.
This kind of marketing has been done offline throughout the course of history. Have you ever gone to the grocery store and seen food companies with a new product who were giving samples away and not even asking you to buy. Have you ever heard of a Doctor offering free consultations before asking people to become their patients. Some companies will even do the work first and if you don't like it you don't pay.
Yet, in network marketing we expect that people will just "join our team" and then find out if we can help them build a successful business. Oh, we tell them about the
greatness of our company and the power of our upline and assure them that they are in business for themselves but not by themselves. What we never seem to do is to prove ourselves FIRST and then when we have made clear our abilities, then show them how they can join us and have the advantage of our expertise.
Until we who love and work in this industry learn to give first and then receive, we are going to always be fighting an up hill battle. It is much easier to provide information that will attract people to us first than it is to deal with all the struggles (and bad online press) that comes from unhappy distributors who have no problem telling everyone who will hear how we ripped them off. When we attract people to us first we will also find the best and most targeted traffic. If we continue to treat these attracted customers well, they will become raving fans and bring scores of new distributors into our organization as well. This is viral marketing at its best.
Getting involved with attraction marketing may seem to be "giving away the farm" and a long term program but it is one that will revolutionize your MLM business model. Think about it, if you could find that steady stream of people looking for good, useful information and you could give them what they were looking for wouldn't they get hooked on you? If you become the source of their most treasured information, doesn't it seem likely that if they were then to join our industry, that they would choose you to work with? It is much easier to work with someone who is already attracted to you than someone you have yet to convince.
Monday, August 4, 2008
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