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to watch and hear. At the same time, they are authentic and persuasive in communicating value. To achieve top levels of success in your network marketing business, you have to make your presentations count by communicating rich possibilities for your prospects to step into while creating true value for your products or services.

5. BE PERCEPTIVE

Powerful persuaders are alert to everything that happens during a prospect’s interview. They are not preoccupied with personal problems, with airline schedules, or even with the next call they are going to make. They know that building their network marketing organization always begins with focusing on the presentation at hand. Powerful persuaders tune in to their prospects and look for the motivating forces in the life of each. Once they discover that motivating force, they play to the motivation. To add power to your persuasion, learn to read your prospects and to discover the motivations they have to want to join you in partnership to build a residual network marketing income.

6. PROBE

Novice networkers often do a lot of talking, in the belief that dumping lots of information on their prospect or customer is surely the way to get them to see value in their company, products, and opportunity. They ramble on, clueless about what may be important to the prospect or how their company’s offerings might contribute to their lives.

That’s why silence is so threatening to most novice networkers. The instant a prospect pauses to take a breath, the amateur will jump in with a sales spiel or some additional information, just to break the silence.

But powerful persuaders use questions to diagnose the needs and concerns of a prospect much as a skilled physician uses them to diagnose the problems of a patient. They become masters at asking penetrating questions, and they use those questions to draw prospects into the selling or enrollment process.

7. PERSONALIZE

The most powerful word in selling and prospecting is “you.” The emphasis on “you” marks the difference between manipulative and nonmanipulative presentations. Manipulative prospecting is self-centered. It focuses on what

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the networker wants and needs. Nonmanipulative prospecting is client-cen- tered. It focuses on the needs and desires of the prospect.

A person who is looking at the business proposition you are offering wants to know just one thing: What’s in it for me? If you want to add power to your persuasion, personalize every part of your presentation to meet your prospect’s own personal needs and wants.

8. PLEASE

Powerful persuaders seek to close sales or enroll new distributors by pleasing their prospects. When prospects become excited about the idea of owning what you’re selling, they become customers. When they become excited about realizing how your income opportunity can have an impact on their lives, they become associates and partners in your business.

Professional salespeople know that they can’t force their prospects to buy. Their challenge is to make them want to buy. So they seek to please them in so many ways that they create the desire to buy. Successful networkers know that they can’t make their prospects build a networking business. Sure, they might talk the prospect into enrolling and maybe even buying some products, but if the prospect is ever to build a significant networking business, the prospect must eventually become self-motivated and take the consistent and persistent actions required to achieve significant levels of success.

9. PROVE

Savvy networkers don’t make statements they can’t back up with facts and stories to demonstrate their points. And they don’t expect their prospects to accept at face value everything they say. They are always prepared to prove every claim they make—to back up those claims with hard data, with test results, and with testimonials from satisfied customers and successful business builders. One of the best ways to persuade by proving is to give proof statements from people who are happy with your products or services. Thirdparty endorsements go a long way in building credibility for your claims and for your products.

Facts combined with testimonials are very persuasive. Learn to use them, and become a powerful persuader. An old cliché says, “Facts tell and stories sell.” The masterful networker uses facts to appeal to the logical, leftbrained aspects of the prospect’s personality while adding stories to entertain and enroll their emotional side.

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10. PERSIST

Call on good prospects as many times as it takes to persuade them. About 80 percent of sales are made on the fifth call or later. It takes at least three fol- low-up contacts to enroll most successful network marketers. Yet studies have shown that:

•Fully 50 percent of network marketers call on a prospect one time and quit.

•About 18 percent call on a prospect twice and give up.

•Some 7 percent call three times and call it quits.

•About 5 percent call on a prospect four times before quitting.

•Only 20 percent call on a prospect five or more times before they quit.

It’s that 20 percent who enroll the majority of future associates and generate 80 percent of the sales through their persistent efforts. You don’t have to become a dynamic personality to consistently sell or enroll. You don’t have to put pressure on people or outtalk people to accomplish your objectives. In fact, putting pressure on your prospects is ineffective in producing a result or in developing long-term leaders. It also leaves so many prospects who do not choose to become involved with a very bad taste about those obnoxious, pushy network marketers!

The most effective thing you can do is to apply your own intuitive skills and savvy to these 10 ways to add strength to your persuasion. To master the art of persuasion—as well as selling and enrollment—you must also learn to recognize and work with different personality types.

There are eight different types of personalities:

1.The balkers. These people are indecisive. They can’t make up their minds. It takes a lot of patience to deal with them. Sooner or later, you have to support them in moving the action in a forward direction by asking, “What would keep you from making a decision to join us today?”

2.The talkers. You can control the talkers by asking questions to keep pulling them back on track. Use simple questions they can answer “yes” or “no” interspersed with questions that allow you to develop rapport, identify what’s important to them or missing from their lives, and support them in seeing how your offerings can contribute to their lives.

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3.The clams. Keep drawing them into the conversation with questions to make them talk. Ask for advice or for their opinions.

4.The skeptics. With the cynics, use a lot of raw data. Pour on the proof statements and documentation. Keep getting agreements as you go along. Never argue or make these skeptics wrong. Instead, listen to their concerns and assist them to see the value you are presenting.

5.The sarcastic souls. Sometimes they’re hard to take, but keep your cool. Find out what’s behind their sarcastic remarks. Laugh at their sarcasm. Listen to the concerns that underlie their words. Support them to see the value.

6.The egotists. Resist the temptation to tell them off. Feed their egos by asking their opinions and giving them compliments. Win them over by giving in on all minor issues. Empower them to choose your company and join your team.

7.The bullies. They get their way by acting tough. Be nice, but stand your ground. Don’t run, don’t fight—just stand. In the end, this is a business in which we get to choose who our business partners will be. Perhaps you might decide not to invite some people with poor attitudes to join you.

8.The timid ones. Take it nice and slow; don’t rush them. Concentrate on building their confidence. Network marketing is a business where anyone willing to work on themselves along with their business can be successful.

You have to deal with different types of people in selling your products and services and in interviewing for potential business partners. The better you become at discovering and dealing with each of the different personality types, the more successful you can be.

Remember, prospects always do things for their own reasons—not for yours or mine. You’re thinking: “I wish this prospect would go ahead and make a decision. . . . I need this enrollment. . . . Besides, I’ve got another appointment!”

But the prospect keeps thinking: “Why should I spend this much money? Is this the best opportunity I can find right now? Can I really become successful in this company? What’s the big rush?”

If you want to move an evasive prospect to action, you have to give that prospect a strong benefit for acting promptly. And here’s where you can usually separate the novices from the real pros. The novices start to become desperate. They forget about maintaining their all-important posture and instead become needy. This energy may further turn off their prospect. After all, who wants to partner with a desperate person?

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That’s not a visionary prospecting strategy, not the high-level posture that works effectively with people who are supposed to be attracted by your professional skills. In fact, it often creates precisely the opposite effect from what you want. The prospect starts thinking: “Maybe this person is not such an expert, after all! He or she must not have much business! Maybe I’d better take a closer look at this whole thing!”

Real professionals take the opposite approach. They develop rapport and determine what is important to or missing in the prospect’s world. They create true value, showing prospects how they can impact their lives for the better with the products and/or income opportunity. They focus on the prospects’ key benefits for becoming involved in the business immediately. Their energy says, “I’d love to work with you in partnership to create a lifechanging income for you and your family—but I am certainly not attached to you having to do anything!

It’s called “hot button” selling and enrolling, and it works like this. You find the prospect’s primary motivation for buying products or joining your business and zero in on that motivation. You keep asking questions until you find the prospect’s strongest reason for acting promptly, then you reinforce the client’s own reason.

One of the simplest and most powerful formulas for success I’ve ever discovered came from Frank Bettger, a man Dale Carnegie called the best salesman he ever met. Frank Bettger said, “Show people what they want most, and they will move heaven and earth to get it.”

So I always figure that if people are not willing to do whatever it takes to get moving, I have not yet discovered and shown them what they want most. When you have done that, you don’t have to worry about pinning down evasive prospects. They’ll pin themselves down.

Learn how to persuade more effectively, and you will boost your selling and enrolling power.

Nido Qubein is an international speaker and consultant. Visit his web site at www.nidoqubein.com, write to Creative Services, Inc., P.O. Box 6008, High Point, NC 27262, or call [phone].

Chapter

14

Why Won’t They Listen to Me?

Kim Klaver

When you talk to someone about your business or product, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to get them to listen? You use the scripts and blurbs the company or your upline has provided—show- ing the solid technical or scientific track records. But still, getting

someone good to listen seems to be almost impossible these days.

You may be happy to know you are not alone. In describing the death of the once hugely successful TV ad engine (for cereals, personal care and cleaning products, for example), marketing guru Seth Godin writes that unlike 25 years ago, “you could never afford to introduce Cap’n Crunch today, regardless of who made your commercial. Kids won’t listen. Neither will adults.” His conclusion about the challenge of marketing today: “Consumers are hard to reach because they ignore you.”1

Over the past few years, my students have told me the same thing. When they start to talk about their business or the product, the other person’s attention somehow wanders off, and they mutter, “Oh, that’s nice. Say, what’s for lunch?” If the old TV audience isn’t listening anymore to the usual commercials and the standard pitches, neither is the audience that is being presented with network marketing products and opportunities. This may be in part because over the past decade in our industry, there have been massive changes and often failures that have affected us all. It has become a familiar story: promises made and not kept, hype and allure that turned out to be false once someone got into the business.

I believe the direct sales/network marketing business model is one of the most sophisticated business models available. We have plenty of evidence that it does work, in spite of the many network marketing companies that are no longer in business, and in spite of the many who have attempted to build a successful business but were unable to make it work. I am person-

1Seth Godin, Purple Cow (New York: Portfolio Books, 2003), 12, 15.

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