To build your network marketing or MLM business, you need to do two things: generate leads and convert those leads into members of your downline.
The bottom line is that to make serious money in the MLM network marketing industry, you need to learn how to “close” your leads and recruit them into your opportunity.
This is a very important point for many network marketers, especially new people, since most are not trained salespeople and find it difficult to pick up the phone and call a prospect to try to “sell” them on their MLM opportunity.
The article will cover the two most common methods of converting leads into team members for the network marketing industry: “active closing” and “passive closing”.
Active closing involves directly selling a prospect on joining your network marketing opportunity, either over the phone or in person.
Important points here are:
* overcoming objections
* learning why the prospect wishes to become involved in a home-based business and then appealing to their emotional “triggers”
* moving the prospect towards making a decision to join your network marketing opportunity
Since this method requires sales skills, it is often advantageous to enlist the help of an experienced salesperson, such as your sponsor or another member of your upline.
This can be accomplished by using techniques such as 3 way calling.
The downside of active closing is that often a person will feel pressured into making a decision, join your company, and then experience buyers’ remorse.
These individuals will simply never participate in the business, and eventually drop out.
This does not help you build your business at all.
For this reason, passive closing may be a preferable alternative for sponsoring more new reps.
Passive closing is a process where you allow a prospect to make their own decision to join your company, as opposed to “talking them into it”, as in active closing.
For passive closing to be effective, it is essential that you have marketing tools in place to do the selling for you:
* a high-converting lead capture page
* an autoresponder series that provides valuable information to the prospect every 2-3 days
Passive closing not only involves allowing the prospect to make their own decision to join your opportunity, but something much more important:
It attracts people to you because you position yourself as a leader.
Let’s look at how passive closing employs the powerful process of attraction marketing:
First of all, when you generate a network marketing lead, your thoughts should center on whether or not the prospect is qualified to join your business.
How do you qualify the prospect?
1. Call them and introduce yourself.
This lets the prospect know that you are a real person.
When speaking with the person, DO NOT try to sell them, but ask them questions to get a “feel” for who they are and what they are like.
Look for reasons why you may NOT want to work with the person.
The prospect will be influenced by this attitude of yours and be attracted to you because you are conducting yourself like a leader, not like someone desperate to make a sale.
The important point to remember is this: sponsoring the wrong people in network marketing costs you time and money!
2. Only give your contact information to people you get a good “feel” from.
Direct the prospect to a business overview page, or a recorded call.
Don’t chase them, let them come to you.
Remember, the individual is already in your marketing pipeline, having come through your lead capture page and being subscribed to your autoresponder, so they will be receiving marketing messages from you.
3. When they do call you:
Answer their questions in a friendly manner.
Other than that, remain silent.
By remaining silent and not asking the prospect to get started, this forces the prospect to keep the conversation going and fill those “awkward” quiet spots, often with questions like, “So, how can I get started?”
This is actually pretty powerful closing.
In conclusion, passive closing can be an effective method for sponsoring more reps, especially for new distributors who lack active sales skills.
By: Mark McCullagh