Make it Simple for Your Prospect

We’ve been talking about what prevents someone from becoming a rep.  And a big reason almost no one talks about is that prospects tend to think in complexities instead of thinking in simplicities.

We’re naturally good at over-complicating things, aren’t we?

Your job is to make it simple for them, so they understand it quickly.  Today, I’ll show you how I do it.

Your Job Is To Make It Simple

There’s a farmer who came over to my property (because he puts his cows on my property) when I was trying to figure out a backhoe. If you’ve never experienced a backhoe, here’s a brief description. 

There are levers in the front and levers in the back, and when you pull one front lever, it pulls the bucket up, and another lever is going to tilt that bucket, and there are levers for the stanchion and the boom on the back arm. There are a lot of levers. 

I was showing my lack of experience and he was watching. I climbed out of it, shook his hand, and talked about how confusing it was. 

He said, “Tim, it’s a backhoe. How complicated could it be?”

He’s a farmer, and he thinks in simplicities. I was thinking about all the difficulties and all the buttons and all the pulls and the levers and all of those things. 

After a while, every time I got back in that backhoe, I started laughing at myself because of how complicated I made it when it’s not very complicated. 

It’s just two buckets on the ends of a truck. 

That is an example of when I’ve looked at something from a complex standpoint, instead of seeking simplicity. 

That’s what I want you to do here: seek simplicity. 

Simplify It For Your Prospects 

When you’re talking to a prospect, a lot of times they don’t understand the fundamentals of business, so you have to break it down into a simple explanation, using the categories of a product-based business. 

The way that I explain this, and some of you may have seen it, is by showing the categories of a product-based business. Help your prospect see that they can do business in one of these categories. 

You can play in grabbing raw resources out of the earth, for example sand, concrete, soil, ore, oil, gold, diamonds, trees, animals, or water. These things are extracted. It’s going to take a bigger thing than a backhoe to do it, but that’s the idea.

In the next category it’s going to shift over into manufacturing. That’s where they take that sand and they make glass for cell phones or bottles and jars. Or they take other raw resources and make milk, cream, meat, lavender, herbs, veggies, vitamins and so forth. That’s in the manufacturing side. 

Next, there is taking those things into branding. That’s going to be legal, licensing, packaging, countries, and languages. 

From there, it’s going to go to a warehouse where they’re going to pick, pack, ship, and send to countries. 

If you look at that simplicity, there are really just four categories until it gets to the sale. 

Sales can go through a brick and mortar store, an online store, a sales rep, and also in other countries. 

The sales rep is acquiring the customer, and serving the customer. 

Why? 

Because you get the highest margins and the most security. That’s the simplicity of what network marketing is all about. 

There’s another category just on the other side of the sales category, which is called customer service. Yes, you serve the customers in the sales category. 

However, the returns, the complaints, the restocking, the shipping, and handling multi-countries is another business, which is in the customer service category. 

Network Marketing Simplified 

What I want to do, and what we do in network marketing, is partner with someone who’s going to handle all of these other categories. 

When you’re explaining what network marketing is, explain that its simplicity is that you are partnering with someone who does all of the raw resources, manufacturing, branding, warehousing and customer service.  

All you do as the network marketer is acquire the customers. 

The primary reason that we do that is because it has the highest margins. 

The margins are much smaller in any of the other categories than in the sales category. 

The person closest to the customer has the most margin. If you’re acquiring the customer, you have the most margin. It gives you the most security. 

That’s the simplicity of explaining the business. 

How To Get Customers

How we get customers can also be explained in a simple way.

This is called the Pipeline. The pipeline is the way that any person, business or organization acquires someone.

• If I were to have a regular job and wanted to get an employee, I would have to do these steps of the Pipeline.  
• If I owned a restaurant and I needed people to come in and eat, I would have to do the Pipeline.
• A college has to do the Pipeline to get students to attend. 
• A politician has to do the Pipeline to get votes. 
• Every church has to do this to fill the seats in the congregation.

What are the Pipeline steps?  

First, you generate a lead. How do you generate a lead? Well, it could come right out of your contact file. You just scroll through and call somebody or send them something. That’s generating a lead. 

You could run advertisements on Facebook or Instagram or Google, or locally, or on blogs or anything you want to do. You could do it in local newspapers.

You can do anything, however you want, to generate leads. 

Then you contact the person, and after they’ve responded you set an appointment for them to see a presentation. 

You follow up with them and you get a customer, or they go off of your pipeline board, and you do another one. 

But if you do get a customer, you serve them, and you make money. That’s the simplicity.

Income rises in ratio to quantity across the pipeline. 

That’s the simplicity of what we do. Don’t complicate it more than that. 

Also when you’re talking to people, don’t make it easier than it is. It is this simple, but don’t say things like, “There’s nothing to it. You’re not really selling, you’re sharing.” The process is simple, but the skills must be learned.

A Simple Explanation of How We Get Paid

The next discussion is how you get paid. 

There’s so much confusion on this. I believe that most reps are the ones that are creating most of the confusion. 

In the traditional world which most people understand, every company, whether it’s Nike, or Pepsi or whatever, has a cost to manufacture and various different things, and they have an advertising budget. That advertising budget would be to acquire, for example, Beyoncé, acquire a film crew and get them to shoot a video, and then pay for television ad space. 

It costs $50 million just for Beyoncé. And it costs extra if it’s on the Super Bowl or something like that. 

Kevin Durant gets $300 million to wear those shoes. 

There’s an advertising budget to pay celebrities. Everybody understands that model.

In Network Marketing, the rep is trying to acquire a customer. 

She buys the product straight from the company at a 30% retail commission, which means a 30% reduction in price. She sells that for an increased price of 30%. She’s going to make back 30% on the sale of that product because she bought it wholesale from the network marketing company. 

Note that there wasn’t an advertising budget spent by the network marketing company to acquire the customer. Nothing was paid to an advertiser for this one.

Where does the multilevel marketing part come in? Remember this person acquired the customer who purchased the product, and so she got a 30% commission. 

The company may (I don’t know your comp plan, but this is the concept), from that advertising budget that would normally have been paid to Kevin or Beyoncé, pay a 30% extra bonus to the person who acquired the customer. 

In addition, the person who brought this sales rep to the business and perhaps trained her, is going to get a little commission of 15% from the advertising budget, not from this sales rep. And then a 10% commission will go to the person who brought that person in, and maybe a 5% commission for the person who brought that person in. 

Now you say, “Well, all of those levels are going to increase the price.” 

Of course they do. 

But the HR department is who would have normally been being paid to acquire sales reps. That, too, gets paid out of one of these other blocks of company expenses.

When you break a network marketing company down, what you’re going to find is that they come in at around a 10% profit margin. After all commissions are paid and all costs of goods, and everything is paid, it’s going to be around 10%, which is about the average of the S&P 500. 

That’s the simplicity of how you explain it so that the person understands how to do it. 

What I just showed you is pretty much all I discuss with a typical prospect. 

Many times what I’m really doing is working with a person who has been in network marketing, but has gotten so many complexities, looking at so many levers that they can pull, that they don’t even know anymore what they’re trying to accomplish, and so I have to “unconfuse” the network marketer. 

Regardless of who I get to “unconfuse”,  I always explain these things that I just showed you. And once a prospect understands these concepts, they get it, because it’s simple and it’s brief.

Need help with your message? Here’s my training for what to say and how to say it. If you don’t have a team or haven’t recruited anyone (or less than 10 people), this is THE course you should get – Network Marketing Training Course