Back in 1989 I joined Amway. Shortly after I shared the business opportunity with my friends and family, Then I moved on to share it with my “warm market”. Those are the people you know but don’t really hang with regularly or what I call acquaintances.
Once some of those people get involved with your business, you start helping them and they introduce you to their friends and family group and so it duplicates. Eventually one of a few things happens. You never sponsor anyone else personally and you focus on “depth” or you need to start working with cold contacts.
For many network marketers this is a very scary thing and it certainly can be uncomfortable. The way we learned to do it in the 80’s and 90’s was to go out and meet people specifically for the purpose of contacting them about the business opportunity. I was initially, pretty uncomfortable with this but eventually got good at talking to people.
Cold Contacting Really?!?
Today it may be very difficult to imagine yourself walking up to a stranger and asking them if they would be interested in making more money. They might just run away or think you’re going to harm them in some way. In most cases people are very wary and closed off to strangers as they are constantly being bombarded by people begging for money, pulling a scam, looking to convert them or other more unscrupulous things. It is not a moment of openness generally speaking.
I live on the west coast and here the pace of life is very frantic. Its like that almost everywhere now. So many distractions. So many people; many of them looking down at their cellphones hoping no one talks to them. I saw a woman walking into a building lobby looking down at her cellphone and walk straight into a fountain and right into the water. Wow!
How are they going to notice you are interested in talking to them about improving their health or wealth? They probably won’t.
Today we don’t do things the old ways. They just don’t work very well and who has the time for it? Today we use technology to meet people and communicate more than ever. We may not all like it and wish for the old days again. But in business anyways, its never coming back.
It’s Like Online Dating
When I joined network marketing in 1989 we did not have the internet or “online” anything yet. Only rich people had a cellphone and it was the size of a lunchbox. We had no choice but to meet people face to face or call them on the land line phone and find out if they were interested. Since it was the only way to communicate it was not that odd to contact someone and invite them to look a t a business opportunity. I even called people out if the telephone book. Now who even has a phone book?
Today it’s different, but I don’t need to explain that to you. Today everyone has a cellphone. They don’t always talk on them I’ve learn from my kids. But they do communicate don’t they?
Today we have online everything, right? Even online dating. I now have friends who have met on a dating site, fell in love and have married and had children. In the 80’s and early 90’s that was completely ridiculous to think anyone would meet that way. Today it’s commonplace. This is because we don’t have time to meet other people, other than at work, school or church. That’s not the cold market however.
The same is in network marketing. We can meet our new business associates online. We can create content that allows them to find us and explore the business opportunity we have. And in a way we date and get married if we choose to work together and build a business. It’s a different way to do it that the “old” way but it works for many people now.
Not A Replacement For Building a Relationship
Keep in mind you can still meet in person after you have been communicating by email, text or phone. You can also have a video chat, or Face-time call. If your associate is a long distance apart from you you can still teach, train and support them. We can still get on an airplane and fly to another state to help someone build their business if we want.
You have the ability to expand your circle of cold contacts beyond what you normally would meet in a given period of time and continue to build a good business relationship using a combination of technology and in person methods. Whatever works best for you is the right answer here.
It really is a global economy and you can have a global network marketing business this way.
Discover a Simple Business that Pays a Full Time Income from HomeThanks for reading!
Mark Balderrama
