You love your company and the products, but you feel stuck. You hesitate to promote your business or talk to people about it.  You procrastinate making phone calls or sending a text message to start a conversation. 

You are reluctant to connect with people and promote your business.  

To help you and your team get past this, you need to figure out what causes this “reluctance.” 

The dictionary definition of reluctance is: unwillingness, offering resistance or opposing. 

It’s like this — as network marketers, we know we have to connect with leads in order to build our business but there is often unwillingness or resistance to making these connections. 

Could be making phone calls.  Could be sending a text message, sending a DM (direct message) via social media app, or even putting a post up on one of your social media channels. 

Instead of promoting and connecting, I’ve seen network marketers bury themselves into a guilt ridden corner and mentally beat themselves up.   

Sound familiar?  

Let’s take a closer look at this topic, because I’ve got some pointers to get you and your team over this giant stumbling block.

Learn The Pipeline 

This diagram is what I’ve named the Pipeline. Every business in the world must do the steps in this pipeline in order to make money and have success. 

Doesn’t matter if you’re in real estate selling homes, growing the church congregation, or recruiting students to attend a university. Every business, including network marketing, must be willing to learn how to do each of these components of the Pipeline. 

And I should add it’s not enough to just “know it.”  You’ve got to do them. 

The steps of the Pipeline are what I like to call the subcomponents of success in Network Marketing, and they are:

1. Generate leads. 

2. Contact a person, That could be through text. It could be through social media. It could be a phone call or even an email.

3. Set an appointment to see a presentation.

4. Give the presentation. It could be a video. It could be you sitting in a coffee shop. It could be a Zoom call, etc.

5. Follow up until you get a yes or no. 

6. And finally, if you do those steps well, you get to service the customer, and that’s when you get paid. 

That’s it.  That’s the game that equals customers and reps. 

In my 30+ years of experience in this industry, I’ve found that most people get hung up on the “Contact” step. That’s where most of the reluctance happens. Sure, it can happen in the Presentation step and even the Follow-up steps too, but the area where most people fail in the industry is right at the beginning with Leads and Contact. 

Chicken List 

It’s very difficult to achieve real success if you are afraid of talking to people about your business. 

A “chicken list” is a list of prospects that you’re scared of calling. Often people think they will call their “chicken list” after they get successful.

But they need these people in their business to create the success.

Typically, your fear is based on you feeling the people on the list are somehow above yourself because of their status. But if you were to examine this more closely you would discover that it’s not that the people on your chicken list are any better than you, it’s that you don’t have confidence in your ability to communicate easily.

If you knew you could communicate easily and effectively without making any mistakes, you could, and would talk to anyone about your company or products without hesitation. 

You would have confidence. 

You would have certainty. 

And there’s NOTHING more rewarding than having that feeling.  

So, what does it take to have that certainty? And what might cause a person to be unwilling to make calls and connect with people?  

I’ve come up with a list of items that “cause” a person to be unwilling, resistant or opposed to connecting with prospects.  

If you need more certainty about the Network Marketing business model and the industry itself, watch this video. 

If you need more confidence in talking to people and want to know exactly what to say, in any conversation, learn how to invite professionally.  

Identify What’s Stopping Your Success – 9 Point Checklist 

This is a good checklist to help a person in your organization find out why they’re not successful. 

It’s written from that perspective. . .however. . .if you’d like a nice jolt of reality, hand this list to someone in your downline and ask them to check and make sure you do all these things too. 

1. Have they decided exactly what they want to achieve with their business?  Ask them what it is. Have they written a plan of how to achieve it? Ask them if you can see it. 
2. Are they working that plan? Ask them to show you where they currently are on the plan.
3. Do they know all the “parts” (the Pipeline) that make up building their business? 
4. Do they have a lead source? Ask them to show it to you. 
5. Do they know how to get customers?  Ask them to get one while you watch. 
6. Do they know how to service customers?  Ask them to show you how they go about doing this. 
7. Do they know how to get distributors? Ask them to show you how they go about getting one. 
8. Do they know how to train distributors to go and get customers?  Ask them to introduce you to someone they have trained and then ask that person to demonstrate getting a customer. 
9. Do they know how to train distributors to go and get distributors?  Ask them to train one while you watch, or introduce you to someone they have trained and then ask that person to demonstrate how they get a distributor. 

Whatever a person can’t do or show you is the reason for their reluctance.

Afraid of Rejection

I’ll be blunt with you — “afraid of rejection” is garbage. 

Here’s proof — when anyone says that this is the reason for their reluctance you can easily call their bluff.  Simply hit record on your cell phone and ask them,  “Invite me to look at your business.” 

They can’t do it.  Why?  

It’s not fear of rejection… the recording device doesn’t reject you. 

Being afraid of rejection, out of one’s comfort zone, call reluctance, and any other fancy phrase a person can come up with is only a mask to cover up what they don’t know how to do.  

Being afraid of rejection, out of one’s comfort zone, call reluctance, and any other fancy phrase a person can come up with is only a mask to cover up what they don’t know how to do.  

I don’t care if the person has been in sales for 20 years — if they don’t contact leads, it’s because there is something about the business they don’t know how to do.  

Fear, or specifically fear of rejection, and/or call reluctance is the same animal — not being able to predict an outcome. That’s the basis of all fear.  

The person just simply can’t predict what will happen if they do something.  If you go bungee jumping — it’s the inability to predict the outcome that causes fear. 

When you defuse bombs (like I did in my past profession with the Navy) — it’s the inability to predict the outcome that causes fear.

So don’t buy your downline’s excuses — run your distributors through the checklist above and train them on whatever they can’t do.  

Don’t you buy your own excuses either.  

The solution is simple — get trained, get your distributors trained and start contacting people and move them through the Pipeline.  

Your business will grow by leaps and bounds when you do. 

 If you don’t have a team, haven’t recruited anyone (or less than 10 people), this is THE course you should get – Network Marketing Training Course