Today, I’d like to share 10 reasons people won’t join your MLM Team.
While not everyone you talk to is a good prospect for your business, many people are. In fact, if you’re talking with lots of prospects and everyone is telling you no, you’re probably doing or saying something wrong. It would be in your best interest to counsel with your plugged in, successful upline and find out if there are a few things you can tweak and improve. Sometimes, just a few small changes can make a big difference in your conversion ratio.
10 Reasons People Won’t Join Your MLM Team
What you see below are what I believe to be the 10 reasons people won’t join your MLM Team. These are things I’ve discovered during the past 18+ years in the industry. They are listed in no particular order.
# 10: Your Prospect is Not Entrepreneurial
Let’s be honest for a moment. Most people are not entrepreneurial. That’s why most people have jobs. Throughout school and college, we’ve been conditioned to be employees. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. We need employees to keep the world going.
From personal experience, I only share my business opportunity with people who are entrepreneurial minded. I look for people who work on commission, have done network marketing in the past, or have owned a business. I have found that these folks are much more “open minded” to additional ways (or non-conventional ways) of making money.
# 9: The Timing is Off
Every person you talk with is a good prospect at a certain point in time. They are also a bad prospect at a certain point in time. It all comes down to the “timing” in the person’s life. This is why it’s so vitally important to understand that every prospect is a prospect for life. It’s important to take the long-term view with each prospect, and stay in touch with them until they buy or die.
# 8: You Lack Credibility
Sometimes, when we talk with the people we know about our new business venture, we lack credibility with them. They might like us as a person, even trust us, but they do not respect us as a business person, because we have never owned a business before or been financially successful. For this reason, it’s important to introduce your prospects from your warm market to someone OTHER THAN yourself. Edify your upline or coach and introduce them to your prospects. Or, approach people that you don’t know very well yet.
# 7: You Come Across as Desperate and Needy
Posture is everything; especially in selling. When you come across as desperate, you will repel people. Instead, be confident in yourself and what you have to offer others. Remember, you don’t NEED the person you are talking with to join your business. They need you! It’s not your job to sell them or pressure them to join you! Your job is to be a network marketing professional and sift and sort your prospects until you find the right people.
# 6: You Focus on What You Want, Not What Your Prospect Wants
This business is not about you. Everything you say and do when talking with your prospect should be about your PROSPECT. Find out what they want in life and show them how the business or products can help them get what they want. Your prospect only cares about themselves. They don’t care about you or your business. Therefore, make sure your presentation and conversation is about “what’s in it for them” and you can’t go wrong.
# 5: You Say To Much
Don’t talk too much. Don’t tell them every little detail about the business or products so they end up confused and overwhelmed. Avoid giving people information overload. Instead, get good at asking questions and LISTENING. The less talking you do and the more you can get your prospect to talk the better off you will be. When you are talking with people, make sure they are talking at least 2/3 of the conversation.
# 4: You Give Your Own Presentations
There are two reasons you should NEVER do your own presentation. First off, you will be horrible at it and mess it up. Or worse, you will be “amazing” at giving presentations and then your prospect will think they can never do what you do. This is why you want to use a third-party presentation, either a webinar, conference call, DVD, or in-home-presentation.
# 3: You Don’t Follow Up
The fortune is in the follow up. You already know that. Most people will tell you NO when you talk with them the first time around. Where you will make your money is when you follow up with them 30, 60, 90 and 180-days later; and sometimes YEARS later. If you are serious about the business, many of the folks who tell you NO today will tell you YES three to five years from now. Collect names, emails and phone numbers of everyone you talk to and remember to follow up with them periodically. Many of your prospects who aren’t ready to join today will be ready to join at a future moment in time, if you stay in touch and never use pressure.
# 2: You Focus on Features Not Benefits
People do not care about the features of your products or services. Instead, they care about the benefits of what your company or product line can do for them. If you are selling weight loss products, you are selling the “looking good in their swimsuit” or “attracting the opposite sex” or “looking amazing at their 25th high school reunion” not the weight loss powder itself. Show people how your products can help them get what they want and you will sell a ton of products.
# 1: You Don’t Ask for the Sale
Quite perhaps the number one reason people do not join your MLM Team is because you don’t ask for the sale. Meeting a prospect and sharing the business or products are only a small part of your success factor. At the end of each presentation, and each follow up, you must look your prospect in the eyes, ask them to take out their credit card, and buy or join.
To clarify, I am not talking about pressuring someone. You should never do that. But, you do need to lead people to a decision. Very few people are going to sign up or buy on the spot, even if they want to, if you don’t ask them to.
My favorite way to close the sale is to say this:
What questions do you need me to answer before we get you signed up and started today?
After you ask that question, or a similar closing question, keep your mouth shut and wait for them to respond. The first person who talks loses. Even if you have to sit there for 20-minutes in silence, do it!
And remember this, you will miss out on 100% of the sales you don’t ask for.
Final Thoughts
In summary, these are the 10 reasons people won’t join your MLM Team and what you can do about it. I hope you will study the information on this page and implement it in your business.
What are your thoughts? Why do you think people won’t join your MLM? Leave a comment and let us know. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Chuck Holmes
Network Marketing Professional (21+ years)
Top Recruiter & Top Rep
mrchuckholmes@gmail.com
I hope the MLM folks read this and take it to heart. I’ve been hassled and badgered for years by all kinds of “friends” who wanted me to join their MLM. Unfortunately, I fit a lot of the criteria you listed – I’m successful, hard-working, have disposable income and a large circle of friends. But I am NOT right for your MLM. Know why? Because I despise the business model and have no interest in being part of one. So take the “no” and do the graceful thing and bow out after the first “no”. Badgering and hassling your successful friends means the word about your desperation only spreads that must further and faster.
Thanks for your comment, Susan.
There is no need to badger or harass anyone. Reps who have been trained right don’t do that. Sadly, most reps in our industry have not been trained right, so they do a lot of crazy things that give our industry a bad reputation.
Here’s to your continued success!
Spamming Facebook with your MLM, adding friends to groups without asking, re-adding after they’ve removed themselves, being pushy and annoying = NO ONE LIKES YOUR MLM!
Even though I am a Internet and Digital marketer and make my income from Drop shipping and Internet marketing business and course, I do have to admit that you are actually the most “honest” MLMers I have ever met. I do get trick by many MLMer when I was a college graduate, they tell me that it is a job offer and offer me to come over and have a look at their company and never mention that I have to pay money to “work” with them.
I am a member of Herbalife but I only use their products and only have people sign up as my downlines unless they asked to. I do agree that MLM reps do need to clean up their act. Recruiting broke and desperate people into their business will only hurt their “business” even more. Because these broke and desperate downlines will also hurt their brand through their desperate to make even more money.
This is a great website by the way and keep publishing more interesting contents.
Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad you like our website.
You say to much is my personal favorite point in this article. I have a degree in counseling and one of the things that I learned that has benefited me throughout life is to not speak. When there is dead silence a person will begin talking and tell you what you need to know. With all the information you gain you will be able to easily show people why they should work with you. Listen first, then you will know what to talk about.
Ask questions, be quiet, and listen. You can’t go wrong doing that.
It looks like you hit every point! Posture is definitely important. Who wants to work with a desperate and needy bloke, anyway? Yeah, I’m going to have to work on that. I would have possibly listed #8 much higher on the list though! I’ve sat through so many long, detailed, boring MLM presentations…it’s not even funny. I find that less information makes me want to ask questions, while getting everything at once makes me want to run the other way.
Information overload is one of the primary reasons someone won’t join your team.
According to this article, starting an MLM team in this industry is not as easy as one might think. I do like the honest approach in listing the reasons as to why people will not join the team. Then, the positive encouragement on how to accomplish the goal of building a strong and successful team.
Nothing in life worth accomplishing is easy! Big goals take hard work, discipline and perseverance, something most people don’t have.