Network Marketing statistics - If it’s a numbers game - what are the real numbers?

You've probably heard many people saying that Network Marketing is a numbers game, but very rarely do they say what the numbers are.  When top earners disclose how many recruits were needed to get them to that position, it does get very revealing. 

Network Marketing has traditionally been seen as a ‘sales’ business and therefore sales techniques have been used. When people use a ‘mud against the wall’ approach - that is - they fire off in all directions, using the ‘hard sell’ approach and  hoping to hit as many people as possible, the numbers recruited can run into the hundreds. 

The next question to ask is what happens to all those people who’ve been recruited?  In fact the dropout rate can be as high as 99%!  In other words, for every hundred people recruited, only one remains.  The outcome is that another hundred need to be recruited to find another person who’ll stay!

So now to the final question - “How long will it take to get your business operating steadily and productively?” 

Well, if you're looking for multiple hundreds of people because the dropout rate is so high, then you're probably looking to recruit five to 15 people each and every month. 

With such high numbers what you have to do is to continually place advertisements, buy leads and use Safelists etc.  That in itself is a time-consuming process, but it also requires talking to lots of people on the ‘phone each week which will add up to thousands each year.  This means you never have the time to build relationships with people let alone support then – even if you’re working full time. As a consequence they feel isolated, become disillusioned and finally drop out because they don't have a good enough reason to stay.

Now contrast this with the ‘relationship building’ approach. 
This approach recognises that people buy from people they ‘know, like and trust’. So - when people are relationship driven - that is - they believe in creating a relationship first and, if appropriate, a business relationship second - 40 people recruited over a period of three to five years is much more the norm.

With the relationship driven people however,  typically one third of their recruits do nothing, one third do a little, and one third do a modest amount, consistently.

So with this model, how many people do you need to personally recruit to your front line to build a significant income?” Figures tend to average around 12 to 14 people, all doing a modest and consistent amount of work over an extended period of time.

In the relationship-driven process three to five years is quite adequate to build a solid business.  And that means not having to find even one person each month.  If you're only looking to find about 40 people in total with around 12 to 14 working consistently, then it's not going to take a huge amount of recruiting.  Because its relationship driven it takes a while to find each person, or put another way, it takes a while for each person to be attracted to you.  However, if your target is only one person each month, then through the natural process of going out, living your life and meeting new people, this is highly likely to happen. 

While the ‘mud against the wall’ approach does feel like more is going on, the impact from it is far less significant than working the new MLM paradigm of building relationships.

So – which method would you prefer to use? More importantly, how would you like to be recruited – through the ‘mud against the wall’ or the relationship-building approach?