Why Most of Your downlines Don't DO Anything and How to Solve It.

In this Network Marketing article I'll cover the main issues about why the majority of people in your downlines tend to do little or no work.  As with most of the articles I write, my focus is far more on the principles than on individual techniques or tactics.

I feel that being a professional and being a professional Network marketer is just the same. In both you need to understand the principles of the industry you’re in.  Once you’ve fully grasped the principles, then as new ideas, techniques, or tactics come along, you can quickly assess the relevance of what you're doing and put them in their proper place.

What you'll find is that principles very rarely change, yet the techniques and tactics can change quite frequently.  You only need to think of some of the approaches people have used to build their businesses like, for example, handing out audio-cassettes.  The example of the famous ‘Dead Doctors Don't Lie’ tapes is well documented. It was an incredibly effective approach, yet today it has had its time and moved on. The principles behind it, however, still stand good.

Now onto the question of why most people in your downlines don't work.  First, we need to discuss pain and pleasure.  These are, in effect, the only two motivators we all have.  We move away from pain and we move towards pleasure.

Interestingly, the more powerful of these two is the avoidance of pain, not the seeking of pleasure!  Think of your days at school when you didn’t hand in your coursework. Perhaps you didn't even start doing it until the day before the deadline.  It's only when the pain of the deadline was strong enough that you were motivated to do it.  It was a rare individual who would do the work as soon as it was handed out in order to have the pleasure of a job completed.

Another example might be if you decided to start looking for ways of making extra income. It wouldn’t happen just after you'd won the lottery, but when the debt collectors were threatening to come to the door.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with this - it's just how most human beings are.

Now, let's think about the traditional approach to motivating your downline.  The idea is to help them to build a compelling vision of the future - one that’s so powerful it will draw them into it.  It's rather like putting an elastic band between your two thumbs and moving your hands apart. The idea is that that tension between where they are and their vision of where they want to be will become so strong it will compel them to go towards that vision.  However, quite often this doesn’t work.

What can happen with this model is that the tension has to be so great to get people working, that the elastic band snaps.  In this context it usually means that the vision has to be so big, so glowing and so amazing, that people doubt they can ever reach it.  Or when they see how little the results they’re getting are and extrapolate that to the future, they can't see how it will happen. So - the elastic band breaks and the motivation is gone.

So why is there this reluctance to move towards the vision?  It’s simply that the pleasure of the final rewards and their vision of the future, is less than the perceived pain of doing business in the way most people are taught (for example - talking to everybody they meet within 3 feet.) Since the pain dominates, the work doesn’t get done and they don’t get the results they're looking for.
Always remember - people are more motivated by pain than pleasure.

There’s a quotation I came across that I rather like: “You don't need an alarm clock to motivate you to get out of bed, when all you do every day is things that you're passionate about and love doing.”  So how about adopting a different strategy when working with your team?

Instead of helping them to build this massive vision that in many cases, does nothing for them, how about making it easier for them to build a business?  In other words, take away the pain of doing the business and you’ll find more will do it.

Now do remember that the majority of people who join your team are not sales people.  They haven't the skills, the attitude or the personality type that lends itself to that approach.  It's perhaps as few as 5% of the population who meet those criteria.

So what’s needed is to find ways that ordinary people can build their businesses. This is where the supposedly ‘Holy Grail’ of totally duplicatable systems and the handing out of tapes come in – although in fact, no-one has yet actually found one. We know this because if they did, within a short period of time (perhaps months) the whole of the world's population would be recruited.