You may or may not have heard the phrase, “The Fortune is in the Follow-Up”.  It is true, following up trumps all of the activities that you can be doing in your network marketing business!

It is not the system, the marketing activities in themselves, whether you love writing and posting or hate it, whether you love doing web pages or hate it, whether you love advertising to get folks into your sales funnel – if you do nothing about following up with all of those people then you will have no real results – your passive residual income will not grow!

ONLY 2% of sales or sign-ups are achieved on the first contact, which means that 48% of your team will talk to 3 or 4 people, and without a system facilitating the follow-up, they won’t, and they’ll then tell you that this doesn’t work, and eventually they’ll quit.

3% of sales or sign-ups occur on the 2nd contact

5% of sales or sign-ups occur on the 3rd contact

10% of sales or sign-ups occur on the 4th contact

>>> 80% of sales or sign-ups occur ON THE 5TH TO 12TH CONTACT.

Statistics tells us that 10% of sales professionals make 80% of the sales and the money. That is even more drastic in network marketing which is all about relationships. The largest portion of earnings in MLM are made by the top 1% which are the ‘red’ personalities. This does not mean that they are cultivating the best relationships for the long term, for the retention!

Building the relationship requires that you establish a know-like-and-trust relationship, in other words, your prospect must be able to get to know you, like you, and most importantly, trust you. These are simply not going to all happen on the first contact.

They certainly may feel they like you, but they may be asking themselves, “do I really know this person?” or “can I trust this person?”. If you are intent upon your agenda rather than helping them with their problems, the answer to that will probably be ‘no’.

The ways in which you approach people should not only be without an agenda, but should be in accordance with their personality type (read the post on ‘Personality Colors‘). You should also keep in mind the following  guidelines for your follow-up conversation.

These steps are required for establishing your relationship with your prospect (usually covering the first 4 in your first contact). You will want to ask questions that will establish:

• A connection with them
• What their background is, current employment, and home business activity
• What they like to do for fun (and what they would do if money were not an issue in their lives)
• What their problems are; time, money, personal issues, etc
• A Solution to their problems which can be provided by your service or opportunity
• What their (money) ambitions are; short and long term
• Consequences of doing nothing or something about it
• What are their qualifications; are they coachable? Can they invest enough to be on autoship for products in a MLM business?

After you establish the first 5 of these, you may wish to leave the others to further contact in order that you may establish trust. And it may be that with a personal coaching or mentoring service you never actually use that position to pitch your opportunity, but rather leave the decision up to that person as to whether they are actually looking and want to know about your particular business.

By the time you come to a point at which you want to present your product, service or business, whether they have asked you or you have decided they are ready to hear about it, you can begin revealing the details of your product or opportunity.

Whatever your goals, be sure that if you want success for your team, give them a system which provides for training in personalities and relationships, and encourages them to follow up! To test drive such a system, one that has training on all of these aspects of building a business, check out this leading edge internet marketing training and lead generating system. Your success may surprise you!

Wishing You Powerful Success!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 10:10 PM and is filed under Core Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.