How a Newbie to Network Marketing got 53 New Reps in 4 Weeks doing it "Oldschool"

Hi Everyone!

I run an out source marketing company that specialises in selling for other businesses. Old school and Offline sales are what we do. We do Business to Business, Door to Door, Referral Marketing, Retail and Event Marketing. We are often paid for performance; if we don’t make our clients money we don’t get paid.

I am new to BN and Network Marketing and just wanted to give a bit of a background and the reasons why I can make an outstanding (I think) claim like this. (I am sure that lots of folks have blown me out of the water but this is how I did it with some old school sales techniques)

I have been looking for the right networking opportunity for a little under a year now, still looking. I jumped into a juice business without fully analyzing the market and decided that it wasn't for me. However in the space of 4 weeks I had managed to put 53 new distributors in my network and have close to 8k in gross volume and 3 promotions.

Please take my word for it, I am a NEWBIE when it comes to Network Marketing but I do know a thing or 2 about Sales and running teams. I made a ton of mistakes with this project but getting the bodies on the team wasn’t a problem.

By the way, I am looking for a strong mentor in the Networking Business and possibly a great opportunity. PM me and add me as a friend and let’s talk.

I will take you through, step by step, exactly what I did to make this happen.

There are 4 key concepts that we operate by in order to meet my clients needs in my day to day business:

1. Find Sales People. I deal with sales people every day. I found the best performers were people with sales history. As I understand it Network Marketing is all about leverage. It is the same in my business. If you recruit people that don’t know how to sell not only do you have to teach them about your product but you have to teach them the Sales Mentality and actually how to get in front of people.

2. Leverage. I look for trainers and leaders. I am sure that you have heard of the 80/20 rule. Most people’s instincts are to bring the lower performers, the 80% that do 20% of the production, up to the bar. We are all in this business to help people. However, if you concentrate 80% of your time with the 20% that are giving you 80% of your production you will be replacing yourself as a trainer/leader with performers, we call this our 80/80 rule, deserve the attention! The cream always rises to the top and if you concentrate on building leaders in your organization you will invariably be helping those on the bottom. The more helping hands you have the more help you can give.

3. Training. We have a habit of pairing newbies up with experienced salespeople. Trainers or Leaders is what we call them. The better the trainer the more people we give them. Our trainers get the new people that they train on their team hence increasing their opportunity in income overrides.

 4. See the people. We call it the Law of Averages, The more people you see the more money you make. It is a mantra in our offices. We virtually chant this during our training sessions. First one in the Field, First one to make Money! We tell our sales agents that “This is a Job! Treat it like one.” If you don’t go to work every day you will fail.

Like I mentioned previously, I treated this new campaign like a job. I hit it hard every day. I followed steps one through for religiously and when I lifted up my head from the grind I had 53 new reps working in 4 weeks time.

I started out finding the right people. I placed free ads on Kijiji and Craigslist and also put the job posting on my website. Around 75% of the people that I got were from Kijiji. You have to be careful though, you can’t spam the site and there is a limit to how many ads you can place in a month. You also have to change the ad significantly if you want to post multiple ads in different cities. I placed a basic help wanted ad that looked like this.

Sales Help Wanted

Experience an Asset

FT/PT and Seasonal Available

Full Training Provided

Fun Team Atmosphere

Room for Advancement

Team Leader Positions also available

Email your resume to Tina at …

I use a very simple tracking system for my ads. The contact name at the end of the ad tells me where the prospect is coming from. I place multiple ads and want to know what is working. 

I personally recruited 9 of the 53 from interviewing people that came from the ads. I preferred to interview face to face but a few were over the phone. I didn’t have an office or anything like that so I chose a nice quite and expensive restaurant where it would only cost me the price of a few drinks but gave the impression that I came to there often. I chose the off hours around 3 in the afternoon so I wasn’t disturbed by other patrons and arranged to sit in the back. I conducted the interviews with an attitude as if I was going to pay them $100k per year (no, I didn’t promise them 100k per year :) ). I wore a nice suite and acted the part of a Company Executive. I didn’t go into the conversation trying to convince them to join me. I was sifting through over 80 applicants and would only choose the right candidates and I made sure that the prospect knew it.

I would, of course, take anyone that decided to join. You never do know who is going to shine, however when I applied this filtering process the ones I wanted naturally filtered themselves out.

This was stage 1 of the interview process. The initial interview was designed to find the ones that I wanted to work with. Out of the 80 interviews that I conducted I found around 50 that had the sales experience, the right attitude in the interview and the “fire or Energy”.  Everyone else I put aside in a different pile, I will tell you what I did with them later. I also told them about the job, sales for a juice company, told them about the juice and how it helped people and about our expansion plans and how much opportunity we had. I didn’t get into too much detail and when they asked questions about the company I told them that if they are selected for the second interview they would get a full orientation. I told the prospects that I would call them the next morning if they were selected for the second interview and that I had a lot of interviews to consider.

I didn’t call anyone the next day!

I called all 50 the day after the day I was supposed to. This created anxiousness and what we call “Fear of Loss”.

Out of the 50 people that I invited I was able to get around 25 to the second interview. They had filtered themselves out due to no salary, work at home, not into juice….lots of reasons.

Stage 2, the second interview, was where I went into the pay plan. I did this first as it is the real reason why there were there. I broke down how to achieve the different levels and how to go about the sales. We spoke about the company and the great things we were going to do together. I also told them then that this was an entrepreneurial position. They already knew that it was commission from the first interview but now was when I told them that they had to invest. I explained it to them that everyone invests in the company and their health when part of this organization. How are you supposed to sell something  if you don’t know how it works?

Out of the 25 9 bought into the program, 6 on the spot and 3 after a day of thought.

Like I mentioned before I am a strong believer in leverage and in order for me to replace myself I had to teach each of the 9 how to do what I just did.

Just one problem, I couldn’t have 9 people placing ads on Kijiji and Craigslist for the same opportunity. I taught them to get out in the field and start networking. Speak to business owners and other strong individuals to get them to come to an interview session. For these people we skipped right to the second interview/orientation.

I told my people that I would keep advertising for them and any new prospects looking for a sales job would be handed to them. They would have to earn them of course! The top recruiters would get more leads from me from my ad placements. The rest I sent out Door to Door and Business to Business to generate the leads. I helped them close the leads until they were trained. I also spread out the interviewees that I personally filtered out in my interview process and gave them to everyone to contact for a “Second Interview” I only wanted to work with the strong people but I couldn’t ignore people just because they didn’t have sales experience.

Every one of the 9 people recruited at least 2 people and 3 of them did the rest. These 3 leaders were who I spent my time with. I took them under my wing, spent time with them in the field, spent time with their recruits etc. I taught them to place free ads and how to interview. They duplicated the system nicely and were able to take it from there.

Just remember, the main focus that we had when recruiting was Quality and they are all around you! I loved approaching business owners as they already had the Entrepreneurial Spirit, this is something you just can’t teach.

Also, I forced everyone to work in a team. We met constantly to give recognition, support and encouragement.

Just find a SIMPLE system of generating leads and converting to sales and be like a Rhino, charge and don’t stop!

All told, 53 people in 4 weeks…all by getting butts in front of bodies and leveraging

Now I am not bragging, this is just a result of acting like my self portrait suggests in my profile… :)

 I could learn a thing or 2 about online lead generation and conversions as well as guarding against attrition in your Network. I will keep studying up on BN, lot’s to learn. Any help would be appreciated!

Hope this helped everyone! If you have any questions at all about how to “do sales old school” please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, would love to help out!

Cheers,

Dustin Pritchard

Rhino Extraordinaire