Hey, Tasha here with Emerge Sales Training. Today I wanted to chat with you about what I think is the Most Important Yet Most Neglected Goal in Network Marketing. As I go through this, you might be wondering, how do I solve some of these problems? If you want to just check out our courses, you can go to Emergesalestraining .com/courses.
Let’s get into it. What is Most Important Yet Most Neglected Goal in Network Marketing? If you’re new to the Emerge scene, then you might think, sales goals. If you’ve been around a little while you may say, impact goals. I think that those are important, but the most important is – Lead Generation Goals.
Lead generation is a really neglected piece in network marketing, and it’s also mission critical.
Why would I call this the most important goal? Out of all the goals that we have, why is this one the most important?
All things flow from helping customers and serving them in appointments. If you don’t have people to talk to for appointments, then you don’t have appointments. Most of the times, your best business builders, team members, and recruiting comes from customers. If you don’t have people to talk to – or leads – to call specifically with the intention of setting appointments, then you’re in trouble.
The referral goal, or lead generation goal, is the first domino to fall. Here’s how it works –
- We drop the first domino, I get some referrals.
- Then I would call the referral and set up an appointment.
- Then from that appointment, I’ll go over the agenda. I’ll go over their goals as they relate to my product or what’s important to them. I’ll connect the dots for them and give them a couple options so that it makes it easy to buy.
- Then I’ll probably say, “I don’t want to make any assumptions, so I really try to ask everyone, would you like to learn how to earn money?” If they say yes, I would just set up an appointment.
- If they said no I would say, “Okay no problem. How did you like this presentation?”, and then I would launch a referral approach.
You can see that it all feeds each other. But why don’t we have this as a goal?
My direct sales background was selling Cutco knives, this was back in college and then after college. When I was a manager, the number one goal that we had to focus on when we were launching people, the most important thing that we ever cared about was how many referrals they got. I’ll use Charlie as an example of how we would ask a sales rep about their day. Charlie is my husband, he also used to sell Cutco. I would say, “Hey Charlie, how’d your appointment go?” Good. “What was the sale amount?” He might respond with, “Oh, it was a no sale or it was a sale.” Then I would follow up with the question of, ” How many referrals did you get? And how many referrals did you get? And how many referrals did you get?”
We would not worry about the person who maybe met with five people and only made one or two sales but got 20 or 30 referrals, as much as we would worry about the person who made five sales but didn’t ask for referrals at all.
Because here’s what happens if you don’t ask for referrals consistently, you run out of people.
Another reason I think this isn’t talked about so much is a lot of network marketing superstars … which are a lot of times the people who are writing a majority of the training … they have a lot of intuitive people skills.
I don’t really have that many intuitive people skills. Growing up I always got into a lot of trouble for being too grumpy. I would get in trouble for not saying hi to this auntie or that auntie. I think I still sometimes get in trouble for not saying hi to aunties at my mom’s parties. It’s not something that comes naturally to me. I don’t go to a thing and then schmooze in the room and meet a bunch of new people. I’m the kind of person where I look around and think where’s my friend, where’s my friend? When I find them I think, Oh hi friend, how are you … and I’m gonna just hang out with you the whole time.
Or, a lot of times I don’t even want to leave the house, I want to watch a movie. I’d rather not leave the house. It’s the reason that we built a pool in the backyard and we have an air hockey table upstairs … I never actually have to leave my house. In fact, I work from home now, which is even more awesome, because I really don’t have to leave my house.
If you are not that people person that goes out and meets everybody, then we have a really big problem. What happens is, if someone runs out of people to talk to, then they do one of two things. They quit and they leave, or they quit and they stay. Which is even more dangerous sometimes because then they’re around but they’re not successful. That can harbor resentment, be a strain on relationships. We do a closing training that we do around setting up appointments and making sales.
I’ve talked to some leaders or clients that I’ve worked with personally and their go-to question for their team is, “How many appointments did you set up this week? Go set up appointments.”
I challenged one and I said, “Have you asked them how many names they have to call?”
In the entire time, she’d been doing this business her response was, “Huh, that is interesting.” So I asked someone else – Same response. I asked someone else – same response.
For these people, it was intuitive to them. They had too many people to call, so they didn’t even understand that there were people- dodo heads like me, who wouldn’t actually just manufacture a bunch of contacts out of thin air. They actually had to have a goal and a strategy and they needed to try. What was so cool, is that one of my clients just asked around, how many people do you have to call? It spurred up some activity, but she also found out some really important stuff.
We need to have this goal.
In fact, if you had almost no other goals … if you could only pick one, this is the one I would pick. Because all things flow from it. Even recruiting, that’s an important goal to have, sales goals an important goal to have … those don’t actually drive all the things, they come last, but the referral goal comes first.
The referral goal drives the performance of all the rest of the goals.
How do you go about setting this goal?
First, figure out how many new customers do you want to see in a month? Let us say I want to meet with ten people in a month so I can make six or seven sales. That’s the percentage that our students typically makes sales, between 60 to 80%. If I want to meet with ten people, then I would recommend multiplying that number by five. So 5×10 (people I want to meet with) = 50 Leads that I need. Or If I want to meet with 5 people, do 5×5 = 25 Leads that I need.
Say we have a goal of 4 new customers a month, then I need to meet with 5 or 6 people, multiply that by 5 and it means I need 25-30 new Leads/Names. I’m not saying this to discourage you, I’m saying this to encourage you so that you understand what you actually need to do so you can hit this goal.
If you wonder, “why didn’t I enroll four people this month?” Here is one way that can help… You could have someone host a class, or a party, or a group event. Invite 25 people and then five or six people show up. Now you’re good, you can get three or four new customers from that. That’s one way to do it.
Another way to do it is asking people one on one. If you ask every single person you meet within a month and you average five referrals, guess what? You have enough referrals to meet with ten people again the next month. Do you see how that works? That’s something that’s really cool.
Now, if you think, “That’s a lot of referrals Tasha, I think you’re full of it.” … because this is not a goal that anyone has ever talked about before. But when I was selling Cutco, I used to average between 15 and 20 referrals. I was selling to women in their 30’s and 40’s that had jobs or their spouses had jobs, and I’m pretty sure that’s the target market for most network marketing companies. I had so many referrals that I actually didn’t have time to call them all.
When I was selling Cutco, I started in Orange County, and I lived in Anaheim. I went to college in San Diego and between my junior and senior year, I had to figure out how I was going to sell in San Diego. BUT, I just asked people, I would ask them for the referrals, I think I was asking for 25 at the time. I would range somewhere in the middle, between 10 and 20. Then I would ask, who do you know who lives in San Diego? I ended up with two, three, four names- I can’t really remember how many, but I do remember I got two appointments, one went nowhere, and the other gave me 15 referrals and then I got two or three more, and then those people gave me 15 referrals.
I ended up selling over $10,000 in knives in a span of seven or eight months … I worked super part time because I was carrying 20 units in order to graduate early so that I could open my office because I had been promoted. I graduated with a bunch of names that I never had time to call.
Statistics show that it’s 89% of people are willing to give referrals, but only 11% of salespeople ask. I know that some people will not do that, I know that many people will if they trust you and you had a good sales conversation and you ask with structure and professionalism. This is a goal that you should really start to look at and really start to think about how to solve problems around.
Just to recap: Most Important Yet Most Neglected Goal in Network Marketing is Lead Generation.
We can do this a few ways:
- You can ask customers after their first appointment for referrals, after maybe a followup appointment.
- You can ask them when you’re calling customers back to check on them. That’s your lowest probability but a lot of people will need to do that if you didn’t do it in the first two.
- You can even ask no-sales, in fact, they’re more likely to give you referrals sometimes.
- You can also go to vendor events.
- These are things that are low cost, they don’t require digital marketing experience to be able to get enough referrals to continue to feed your business.
One last thing … and you want to multiply your appointment goal by five, to figure out how many you need.
Now, this is all fairly clinical, so I just want to get to the heart of this for a little bit. If you do want to make an impact, you need to actually try. Impact doesn’t happen when we just sit around and wait for people to come to us. We have to go meet them where they are, and what that means is caring for our customer’s friends and family as if they’re our own friends and family. Caring about solving those people’s problems, or the community problems just as much … I just think that is really important to think about and to set that goal on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis.
You can probably drop all the rest for a little bit. Now, my recruiting students, you keep your recruiting goals, but the rest of them, they’re all gonna happen naturally as long as you execute with skill. I hope that you start setting this goal and really start thinking about what would happen if someone ran out of people to talk to.
I hope that this video was helpful for you. And if you want to check out some of our free training on making sales go to emergesalestraining.com/freetraining.
I’m looking forward to hearing back from you. Leave a comment, let me know how this worked for you. If you have a question, go ahead and leave that there as well and we’ll be able to help you out the best we can. Have a great day.