Proper Response to a Network Marketing Prospect

One of the biggest fears for network marketing distributors is the fear of not knowing what to say when network marketing prospects ask certain questions. If this is a concern for you, it doesn't need to be. If you are relatively new to the industry or relatively new to your specific business opportunity, you should primarily be leveraging the talents of your up line organization and leadership to assist you in this process.

For example, whenever I get a prospect on the phone that has looked at some information one of the things that I like to do is to do a three way call. I will talk about this topic exclusively later this week, but getting a prospect on the phone with your up line or another experienced leader will eliminate most of the challenges you get when determining the proper response. This is because your leaders will already know how to properly respond.

However, if you ARE the leader or an up and coming leader, you will need to learn the proper responses when network marketing prospects ask certain questions and make certain responses.

The key to responding correctly is to put yourself in the mind of the prospect. Your prospect is responding in the way he or she is for a specific reason. This will become clearer to you over time as you prospect more people, but when you are able to identify what the prospect is thinking when you hear the response, you will be able to more effectively deal with the response.

There are two reasons why prospects offer objections in the recruiting process. They are as follows...

a) They are not interested and just want to blow you off.
b) They are interested and just need to resolve these issues before they make a decision to get started.

It is VERY important that you identify which category the prospect is in otherwise you will waste a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in the process.

For example, let's take a common objection that I'm sure we have all heard at one time or another. The prospect asks the following...

"Is this a pyramid?"

Whenever a prospect asks me this question, I always respond the same. I ask them "What do you mean? Can you elaborate further on that?

Here's why I do that. A lot of people automatically make the assumption that this is a negative. It might be. It might not be. A lot of people don't even know what a pyramid means. You might be thinking one thing, but your prospect might be thinking something else completely.

Case in point, I was doing a three way call for one of my distributors. Her prospect ask me "is this a pyramid?" I asked her to elaborate further on that. She responded that based on her understanding she could get paid not only on her efforts but on the efforts of other people and that was her understanding of a pyramid and she liked that about our compensation plan. It never even occurred to her about the negative definition of a pyramid, which is an illegal scheme where people get paid just to bring people into a money making opportunity without a real product.

This is why it's very important that you fully understand what the prospect is asking before you respond. You may assume one thing, but the prospect is asking something else entirely.

Also, listen to the tone of voice in a prospect. If a prospect is sounding aggressive and resistant, I immediately shut that down completely. I won't even try to close the prospect out in that case. My goal is to either disqualify them or move them on to the next exposure.

For example, let's use the pyramid example. Let's say the prospect says "Is this one of those pyramid schemes?" and they say it very aggressively. I will ask them what do they mean? They might respond, "you know one of those things where everybody at the top makes all the money and nobody at the bottom makes any money." I will simply respond no and explain how we get paid on the sale of the product. I will also point out that I have people above me that I make more money than and I have people below me that make more money than me. If they are still aggressive and resistant after that, I'm disqualifying them immediately. Here, I would say something like "You know what John, this clearly doesn't sound like a match for you, thank you very much and you have a great day." I would then hang up the phone.

So in conclusion, make sure you listen to the prospect, understand what is going through the mind of the prospect and respond not just to the question being articulated but what you believe is going on in the mind of the prospect. If you do these things you will find that you are much more effective in your responses to network marketing prospects.

Networking is Fun, Enjoy the Journey!