A while back I heard a very interesting remark by one of the top online network marketers, Ray Higdon and that remark was:
"Most people get into internet marketing based out of weakness. Because they are scared , they are scared to call their warm market."
I thought about that for a long time and Ray is probably right, why? When you look at some of the stories of people online they all Online Prospectingtalk about the old school of network marketing being dead that the only way forward is to get leads online. There are however, some inherent dangers in following that strategy only. You can read more in this article "Online Network Marketing".
Now I built my business offline, with family, friends and people that I knew and looking back at the people who are the leaders in my team, not one of them is a family member, or a friend or even someone I knew.
Now here is the interesting thing, even today, fifteen years on, not one of my warm market has built or is building a substantial business.
The leaders are all people that came from offline methods of prospecting (I was not aware of online methods as this was between 1996 and 2000). Every single one of them was a cold market lead who became a warm market prospect.
As some of you know my wife and I live on our sailing yacht here in the Med most of the year and have done so since 2002. We generally only visit our home in the UK once a year usually for my wife's birthday, and even though we are living our dream, the majority of our family and friends still say it will not last!!!
They started out saying "It will never happen, or sailing off into the sunset, ha, ha, no way". So what is my point? My point is if I were starting today, starting with my company now, I would ask every single person that I knew to look at my business opportunity. Why? Well what if I had not asked them all those years ago? They would probably have said why did you not tell me about it.
Non of them can say that today, they all knew what we were doing and they chose not to run with it, and even though some of them still say it will not last, I can say at least I gave them the choice and that is all we as network marketers can do.
My recommendation to anyone who has not mentions their business to their family, friends and acquaintances would be, to go out there and get it done, tell them about your opportunity, ten years from now you will be glad you told them.
Here is one of Ray's zero rejection approach for your warm market that you can use, and it goes like this:
Do me a favour, if anyone mentions (Your Company) to you promise me you will come back to me and talk with me about it. Your company here is obviously the name of your network marketing company.
So for example if your company is Gold Widget Collecting then you would say "Do me a favour Mark, if anyone mentions Gold Widget Collecting to you, promise me you will come back and talk with me about it. And then leave.
Now Mark is either going to say OK I will or he will say what's Gold Widget Collecting? Now you know what to do from here... you can give Mark your DVD or your presentation or whatever your teams method is, and no one can actually say no to this, meaning no rejection.
A great tip from Ray, plus your friend, your family member, your acquaintance can never say to you "why did you not tell me about Gold Widget Collecting."
Let me know how you get on and I would love to hear your thoughts on warm market prospecting. It's also important to learn how to integrate the Internet into your marketing strategy and to learn Online Prospecting and use it every day.
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This Online Prospecting article was originally posted on my Empowered Network Blog. To learn more about the concepts discussed here visit my Online Marketing Tips blog.