Network Marketing advice - Who do you listen to?

In this Network Marketing Tip the core principle, like all of the new paradigm ideas, can be applied to your entire life.  It will bring benefits everywhere you apply it consistently.

As with every other principal in the new MLM paradigm I urge you to run it past your own, personal experiences. 

Don’t run it past what you think is right, or what you believe should be true about network marketing, I urge you to compare it to your actual experiences.

I have friends who’ve built very successful and stable businesses and are now in retirement.  They never went to the company events, they certainly never went on stage and they were very rarely referred to.  So – amazingly - very few people are going to find out exactly how they built their successful network marketing businesses.

Now contrast this with some of the guys you see on stage at your company events.

You've been seeing them for years and, even though they may be tremendous speakers, funny, insightful or inspiring, you have to ask the question – “Why are they still walking across stage?”  If they’ve built walk -away income and are able to retire, why haven’t they?

Now certainly some people love teaching, some the adoration of being on stage, and some the power, but many are walking across the stage because they haven’t yet built the business they’re looking for! 

So in reality what can they possibly teach you?  The bottom line is – only what they themselves have been doing - and unfortunately what they’ve been doing hasn't given them the business they’re looking for. So why would you want to listen to what they have to say?

Now this next point is rather subtle, and it certainly took me a while to grasp it.  For sure you have to do something in your business, and ideally do it consistently, over time. So bearing that in mind, just examine the following thoughts.

If you've been regularly going to your company or group meetings, you'll be familiar with the practice of inviting one of the top producers that month to tell everybody what they did. 

It makes sense to learn from the best!  Many people then spend the next month trying out these ideas, only to find that the results are really no different from what they’re already getting.

The next monthly meeting arrives and nothing is to be seen of that last speaker.  In fact it’s incredibly rare to see the same person twice.  It’s more common to find that someone who was on the stage as the top recruiter or top customer gatherer has quit the business a few months later.  So what's going on here?

Just to get the concept clearer, consider the following.  Let's say that everyone in the meeting was given three dice to throw.  The person who got three sixes was invited on stage, told how wonderful they were, and asked to describe exactly how they threw the dice to get the sixes.  Now obviously in this example, how they threw the dice has nothing to do with the outcome.  It's just by chance they got three sixes.

But wait a moment! In network marketing the same truth can hold.  For example, you could spend months putting flyers out with no results then just one month later, just by chance, a large number of people respond to that flyer.  You haven't changed anything and there was nothing new about the process, its just one of those chance things. That – after all – is how things like the lottery work.

So when someone is telling you what they did to achieve amazing results, be clear that what they did actually caused the results rather than it was a chance thing.  Sure they did some work, but was this particular thing they did definitely linked to the result?

Now let’s go back to the meeting. Everyone is waiting with bated breath for that new killer idea, that one MLM tip that can take their business forward, because everybody is looking to recruit 10 people a month – just as they’ve been told to do.  But now there’s a mild degree of desperation and they’ll jump at something without properly evaluating what they're being told, particularly because it’s coming from the mouth of someone who is “succeeding!” 

So I urge you - as you listen to those around you telling you exactly what you have to do to build a business - assess it very carefully.  Does what they're saying make sense from your perception of how the world works?  If not, then you're going to need a lot more information and explanation as to why your intuition and good judgement should be suspended.

The core principle here is pay close attention to who you’re listening to and be careful about what information you take from them.  Check it against your own experiences, what you want to do, and also what you enjoy doing. 

It’s probably true that there’s no killer method out there to build your business. Ultimately, true success is only going to come from building relationships with real people who you can really help.