Network Marketing Retention

One of the most important parts of the retention process is helping the new team member survive the “change in thinking” that must accompany building any long term business.  Almost everyone is conditioned to immediate gratification situations like the microwave oven, drive through restaurants, and weekly paychecks.  The reality of a slow growth, start at the bottom and build type of income is alien to their lifestyle and their understanding of what owning a business actually includes.  They have joined your company and now they own their own business.  To them, that decision automatically involved risk.  With risk, they experience fear.  Fear paralyzes them.  With paralysis comes inactivity.  In the absence of activity, there is no growth.  Since no growth occurs, no product volume is created.  Without product volume, no commission is generated.  And without team members earning commission checks, network marketing retention suffers.

The only way to overcome their fear is to eliminate their feeling of risk.  In order to abolish the emotion of risk, you must help the team member change the way they think.

Now comes the tricky part.  You must be able to identify, based upon the personality of the team member and their particular circumstances, the best strategy to bring about this change in thinking.

There are many types of change strategies, but here we are only going to focus on two of them, incremental and transformational.  Neither is superior to the other and often times both are needed in order to bring about the personal growth necessary for the new team member to understand long term growth.

A scholarly definition of incremental change is a slow but steady, step by step process most often following a recognized program that presents small unrecognizable variations of change within an existing framework.  A more down to earth definition of incremental change is a process involving an identifiable goal and then taking the path that requires the least amount of dramatic change to get there.

Transformational change is entirely different.  Major leaps from known processes into areas of the unknown usually accompany this type of change.  In a nutshell, this type of change requires a complete paradigm shift and a preparedness to meet the challenges associated with it.

It is always best to begin with an incremental approach to change with new team members.  Here’s a suggested approach:

1. Meet them at their own level of understanding, and don’t try to force you level of business understanding on them.  Remember that they come from a “wage mentality” point of view and their entire lifestyle is fashioned from that picture.  This one step requires a huge amount of patience on your part.  Don’t assume that they understand anything about owning a business.  As you work to meet them at their understanding level, they will discover that you truly do care about helping them progress and succeed with this new business venture.  They don’t feel alone anymore, and that is the whole point – when you are alone, the risk factor is huge, but when you have company, risk becomes insignificant.
2. Listen to their description of where they think they are financially and then compare that to where they would prefer to be.  Spend a significant amount of time talking to them about where they are, how they think they got there, and what their current plan is to change the situation.  Take notes as you talk.  This simple activity affirms your commitment to them and you also have a backup set of facts to review if necessary.
3. Based upon their plan, help them set realistic (maybe even easy) business goals for the first 6 months.  As they accomplish the small steps, their confidence level increases and so does their understanding of business ownership and “wealth mentality”.  The objective is to build their confidence in the success possibilities of the business they just started and in themselves as an owner of that business.
4. Now they are more receptive to your coaching and you can raise the bar and step up the pace by presenting more challenging goals with their associated game plans.  Taking a risky vision and transforming it into a riskless picture is the ultimate objective.

To create a better picture of starting a new team member, here’s an example:

Your 4 year old son can easily sit on your exercise bike and ride with no feeling of fear at all.  In order to progress to riding a bike solo, we must take them through several steps.  We’ve identified the starting point and we have identified the goal, now let’s put a game plan into effect.  The flow works like this:

Riskless
Rides Stationary Exercise Bike

Cautious
Rides Bicycle With Training Wheels

Daring
Rides Bicycle No Training Wheels But Dad Holding Handle Bars and Seat

Risky
Rides Bicycle No Training Wheels Solo

By following this process, over time, the risky (riding the bike with no training wheels and no Dad) activity becomes riskless (riding the exercise bike in the home).  The same occurs with the network marketing team member,  what was once risky becomes riskless because of the mental change from wage thinking to wealth thinking.

You can find more information about network marketing, direct sales, and team member retention at Propreneurs.com.

Tags: network marketing, networking, retention, team member

This entry was posted on July 22, 2011 at July 22, 2011 and is filed under Entrepreneurial Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.