What I’m talking about here is forecasts that are accurate.

Accurate enough to base key decisions on, such as whether to order more materials now, in order to be able to meet potential future orders within your stated delivery or lead times.

Accurate enough to be able to decide if you are going to avoid some short-term cash flow issues, or if you need some short term injection of cash – really critical in the smaller business.

Accurate enough to be able to decide when to let employees – or yourself – have time off for vacation.

Many production and operational processes are predictable enough – you, as the business owner or manager, have sufficient control over what’s going on, under normal circumstances.

But what about the sales operation? I mean, customers are in control, ultimately. You can’t force somebody to buy something – not legally or ethically (these 2 aren’t always the same thing!).

Well, you can reduce the degree of uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity that often reduces the accuracy of forecasts, by employing a solid, proven process-based approach to every aspect of your sales operation, not just to what happens once you’ve closed the order…

It won’t guarantee you sales success, but it will increase your chances of sales success overall. You’ll still lose some. But you should win more – partly because you’re better at selecting opportunities with a better chance of success for you, and partly because you’re better at ‘working’ those opportunities to a successful conclusion. You’ll also more likely be winning business at higher rates of margin or profit. And none of this needs you to have additional sales resources – such as sales people – or having to work extra hours – quite the opposite, potentially.

In future posts I’ll be exploring what these processes look like and how you can implement them.

For the moment, let me leave you with a couple of useful hints…!

1. Identifying the key players in a purchase decision, and understanding their position – how they see the need (or not) for the purchase in the first place, and what business results and personal wins they are looking for…
2. Connecting your products, services and/or solutions, in the minds of each key player (especially the very influential ones in this sale), to their individual required business results and personal wins.
3. Being very aware of what gaps you have in your knowledge (especially relating to points 1 & 2 above), what assumptions you’ve made, and taking steps, by way of an explicit strategy and plan, to reduce the negative impacts of these gaps and other knowledge, and maximise the positive impacts…

That’s a hint at some of the ‘what’ that is to come in future posts. The ‘how’ also comes later!

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I think this is an area we can all benefit from giving more thought to. In a nut shell it’s about evaluating the compensation plan from an MLM company – ‘cos what works for somebody else may not necessarily work for you!

Cheers

Martin

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It eloquently and succinctly describes the new paradigm that Web 2.0 and social media represent to the PR and advertising/marketing industries.

So many organisations simply don’t get it – they will though – they’ll have to. If you work for a big corporate, you may find your next VP of Marketing is a ’spotty youth under 20 who lives & breathes social media…’ (!).

To put it crudely – the old PR way, where you seek to control the conversation & message is out – you cannot control anything. All you can do is influence it. I recently was telling a good friend of mine who’s spent her entire working life in PR/marketing and is fast approaching 60 yrs old (and moved in quite high places) about Web 2.0 and social media marketing. Her response was interesting: “We’ll just not go to social media marketing then, if we can’t control the message”.

I told her simply – “You have no choice – whether you join in or not, people will talk about the company, its products, services, and what it seems to truly stand for. If you aren’t there to influence the message, your competitors might be, and do you want them influencing the message about you, in your absence?”

She knows this is the future, but as she said, it’s hard to turn the clock back on nearly 4 decades of fighting to be in control…

We live in interesting times!

Judge for yourself, read the blog entry I mentioned, here.

Cheers

Martin

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The first big obstacle for many to overcome is one of mindset – the need to treat your second income as a business instead of treating it as a hobby. That said, there are aspects of hobbies that make them attractive, and that can be carried forward in to making running a second income more attractive.

When you treat your second income as a hobby instead of a business it means you pick it up and drop it, just like a hobby. It is almost impossible to develop a big enough base of loyal customers on which to have any reasonable sustained income.

I did ‘this’ myself in the very beginning: I said to myself “Martin, this is a second income, you’re going to spend much less time on it than your main job, you’re doing it from home in your spare time. Enjoy it, and don’t think of it as work (that’s your day job!), but more like a hobby…” And I’ve seen stacks of others take the same view as well.

WRONG!! A hobby is a hobby. This means you can pick it up and drop it whenever you like, and the consequences are measured somewhere around the ‘zero’ mark.

You CAN NOT do this with a second income that has any meaning and significance for you. Successful businesses are run like business but this doesn’t mean there is no room for fun and enjoyment. Very successful owner-managed business are usually full of fun and enjoyment – the two seem to go together!

Cheers

Martin

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Every day more people stop to consider a second or extra income. They do so usually because they are needing extra income now, or because they’re looking to realise a future dream. Many of these people look at network or multi level marketing (or ‘MLM’) as the route to achieving these aims.

Making the right decision here is usually pretty important for those involved. What is amazing is just how many people are able to make an informed decision about something so important. I’m sorry, what I should have said is, it’s amazing how few people are able to make an informed decision.

There are plenty of myths and lies floating around about this kind of second income activity. Some have bad aspects to them, such as “only failures try multi level marketing”. Some have more positive aspects to them, such as “anybody can do this”. And with the advent of the Internet, it is even easier to find conflicting information and advice.

I had to find out about these things the hard way, as did my wife, when we started in MLM many years ago. Now, as the economies seem to be headed for stormy waters, more people are asking about MLM, and there are more opportunities than ever for them to be ’scammed’. This is a prospect that didn’t sit comfortably with me, and wouldn’t let me be, so I pulled together my own experiences, the experiences of others I’ve worked with, plus plenty of research that I’ve done over the years, especially in the last 2 years, and created the “MLM / Network Marketing Manifesto & Workbook”. My research draws on the work, writings and teachings of a wide variety of people, including Colin Powell, Anthony Robbins, Rich Schefren (who has worked with many big names in Internet Marketing, including Mike Filsaime, Jim Edwards, Hans Johnson, Frank Kern, Dan Kennedy), Robert Middleton, Bernadette Doyle, Jay Arthur and yes, even Albert Einstein!

Anybody considering creating a second income or extra income stream, and looking to do so with any combination of network marketing, multi level marketing (or MLM), and internet marketing, would benefit from downloading the Manifesto & Workbook fromhere and spending some hours working through it before coming to any decision.

The purpose of the “MLM / Network Marketing Manifesto & Workbook” is to help people like you come to an informed decision about

1. Whether to create a second or extra income stream at all, and if so
2. How to go about doing so with MLM / Network Marketing for maximum success

I’ve split it in to 2 main parts. The first part sets the scene, providing some definitions and giving an overview of the state of multi level marketing or network marketing as a business approach. The second part is structured around detailed descriptions of the 12 big obstacles to success that I’ve seen so many people experience. By the industry’s own data it seems 95-97% of mlm operators as I call them fail to achieve their desired outcomes. That’s just appalling.

These 12 big obstacles are listed below, followed by a brief description. You’ll find more on how to spot and avoid each obstacle in a separate article/lens.

1. Treating it as a hobby more than a serious business
2. No ‘outcome’ thinking & inappropriate expectations
3. The Great Myths of MLM – believing them!
4. Lack of strategy, being too opportunistic
5. Poor business design
6. Following the MLM company’s “Plan”
7. Poor decisions about what to outsource, and how
8. Not using leverage & scalability
9. Not playing to YOUR strengths
10. Not managing tasks, workload & processes
11. Not using the right metrics to manage business
12. Not engaging in Continuous Improvement

In future postings I’ll expand a bit more on each of these – they’re covered in full in my manifesto, which you can get when you sign up.

Cheers

Martin

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In these tough economic times so many sales people are told to “get out there and sell, sell, sell!” to the point where they get desperate. The same desperation can quickly develop in the network marketer if they fail to think and act strategically (see Obstacle #4 in my Manifesto. Download it here if you don’t already have it…) and only focus on the tactics.

Imagine this situation: you’ve been talking to a prospective recruit for weeks, building a rapport, telling them about the details of the products and compensation plan on offer, and so on. You have so much in common it seems, that they are 100% going to sign up any day now. Except they don’t. Much to your surprise. You see, they went with another mlm operator, with a different mlm company which actually offered a slightly less attractive proposition.

So how come you’ve lost this recruit? All that time you spent is now wasted – you can’t get it back. For many mlm operators, especially in the early days of start-up, time is a very scarce resource, and you can’t afford to waste it with all this effort to recruit an individual who then doesn’t go for your downline – perhaps one reason why the automated downline building and recruitment websites are popular…

What you didn’t do was think about your strategy – you were only focused on your tactics. What does strategy in selling actually mean? Well, in this case of ours you didn’t think about competition, in the form of the other mlm company. You didn’t think about the fact you were selling to more than just 1 person – you didn’t have to influence 1 person to decide to go with you, you also had to get their spouse on board. What your competitor did was to get the spouse interested and ’sold’ on their offering as well. What you did was not even realise the sales situation was more complex than you thought. You can’t just ‘get out and sell’ like this and expect a good return for your efforts.

So as you set about your recruitment campaign, think on the following:

• Who is your ideal recruit – what kind of people do you want in your downline? (And are you prepared to reject those that don’t meet your criteria?)
• Who else other than the recruit needs to be ’sold’ on your offering?
• What needs to happen for all parties involved to feel comfortable giving you the ’sale’?
• Your biggest competitor is not some other mlm company or even downline builder, it’s the inaction of the prospect/recruit – what can you do to overcome this apathy?

It’s my experience that most sales are lost not because of price or an unattractive proposition but because of a lack of a process for making sure both the tactics and the strategy are taken care of. Now while it’s true you can learn a little more about processes in general in my Manifesto (see Obstacles #5, #10 specifically), it seems to be the case as well that having a process seems to require more time, and so operating a sales process may mean that you can only build relationships with 1/2 or even 1/4 of the number of people that you could without a process. Yet you are more likely to have a conversion rate of 80% than the much lower rate (less then 20%) when no process is followed. So while you may seemingly talk to less the relationship is a higher quality one, and you are engaging with just the kind of people you want.

Simple maths tells you that for the situation with the sales process, 0.8 x 0.25 = 0.2 or 1 in 5. And if you have a conversion rate with no sales process of at best 20%, you will, at best, have 1 in 5 successes. Which relationship will be the more enjoyable and fruitful in the longer term? The numerous but quickly and arguably, shallowly engaged one, or the one where you take more time to really understand what is going on, and where there is a deeper personal connection. Which situation is going to result in the person staying with you longer?

So, with your next sale/recruit – are you on the verge of a tactical victory, or a strategic disaster?

Happy recuiting & selling!

Cheers

Martin

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As I see it, automating your sales process is a key element of overcoming Obstacle #8, and when done so with reference to Obstacles #5 & #7 then the customer experience will be great, speedy and you will be selling stuff even though you’re not there… or even awake!

What I believe some of the posters on the thread I mention at the start of this post are suggesting is to automate the recruitment process. And I say a most emphatic No! Why? Well, Obstacle #1 is all about treating this whole thing as a serious business. If you were seriously thinking about joining an organisation that said it was serious about being very successful, how would you feel if the only way in was to fill in an online form and then get on with business? I know I’d be very unimpressed. I’d have a ton of questions I want good answers to before I invest my time with a particular employer or business. As the MLM operator I want to be sure I’m only signing up people who I can work with, who ‘get it’, who have energy and self-reliance, etc. For me to be sure of this I’d want to meet each person at least once, if not several times, maybe have both formal and informal interviews, possibly even do some assessments and tests – this is serious stuff after all!

So just because automation is easier and more convenient for you, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do – remember Obstacles #5,7 & 8!

Good luck!

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Jacqueline’s posting is courtesy of Michael Lemm who also runs http://www.homebasedbusinessforums.com

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