30 Actionable Network Marketing Tips & Ideas
Tips, ideas, methods, strategies. They’re all different words but they all hold similar meaning.
These are what you came here for today, network marketing tips, you landed on this post after all.
I’m gonna take a guess about you, you’re not here looking for some random feel-good tip, you want something actionable. Something that actually benefit you.
Well, good news because that’s exactly what we’ve done with this post.
Everything in here is something that you can take action on, no mumbo jumbo but real actionable network marketing strategies.
This list is constantly being improved and added to, so that you get the absolute latest and greatest ideas and methods.
GENERAL MLM TIPS
A lot of people in the industry talk about branding yourself over the company. While true and a good thing to do, an even better thing to do is to create and brand your own company, pick a company name, make a logo etc. You want to run a business after all, right?
Here are just a few benefits:
- No problem switching companies if yours ever shuts down
- You work in the industry instead of for a certain company.
- You can diversify what you sell and offer.
- You seem more serious.
- People who instantly write off all mlms might even give you a chance if you lead with your own company.
The most successful salespeople know a lot about their products and industry, more than most actually. Since selling products essentially is about recommending you need to be knowledgeable enough to be able to recommend properly.
If you’re part of a health-related company for example: Learn how nutrition works, what exercises works best, what good form is etc. Make it a hobby. Becoming someone people can turn to for advice will show in your results.
If you run your network marketing business as a real business there are a lot of tax benefits that you can gain. Of course it all depends on your country but most of them benefit businesses heavily.
Check out this post from Onlinemlmcommunity for some ideas.
The best companies in the world are very different but one thing the very top usually have in common is great customer experience.
If you think about it, you can’t really grow a business to that size if customers aren’t satisfied.
A quite impactful part in customer experience is the packaging of the product itself. While packaging might feel like it doesn’t matter and that the customer should just judge the product by how well it works, that sadly isn’t the case. People judge a products and company based on their whole experience, down to how even the packaging of their products smell.
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Take apple as an example, they are a pioneer in this field really, having gone as far as constructing how the box should smell when someone opens one of their products.
We’re not telling you to create some extremely expensive packaging and tamnpering with smell etc. Simply think about how you can use packaging to improve the customer experience.
Wrap them nicely, include small extras and gifts in your large orders etc. Whatever you feel your customers would enjoy.
Use holidays to your advantage with this idea.
- Make a list of holidays that fit your products, choose one that’s coming up.
- Create a package specifically for this holiday, lets say it’s valentines day. Include a mix of your products as well as other nice extras to complete the package.
- Advertise on Facebook – if you created a valentines day package for women, then target ads towards men in relationships saying something like: Forgot to buy a valentine’s day present? Here’s a ready made package that your partner will love
- This package is also great to contact your current customers about
This easy three step method puts your products right in front of potential customer, with a message the is bound to resonate with them and fulfill their need (having a nice valentines day present for their partner)
SALES
Here’s a small secret about pricing that will make customers way more likely to buy.
It’s called price anchoring, which might sound advanced, but is really very simple.
In short, it has to with creating packages at different price points to guide a customer to what you really want them buying.
An example of this is what movie theaters do with popcorn. They have small, medium and large. The large is quite a lot larger than the medium one but only slightly more expensive This leads to people finding it more “worth” and they’re therefore willing to spend the little bit more to get it.
Another example is creating 2 packages where you have your “standard” and your “ultra-premium”. The standard is a normal enough price but the ultra premium is a lot more expensive. They both have a decent amount of the same features, but the ultra premium has something like “unlimited x” that justifies its price. Most buyers won’t want the unlimited though and the huge shift in price for just a few things gives them feeling that the “cheap” package is a steal.
Getting a person to agree to a meeting can at times be difficult. But don’t worry, you have a trick up your sleeve. The two time method.
Instead of asking if a certain time works for someone you give them 2 alternatives to choose from. So instead of: Does Thursday at 4 work for you? We ask: What works better for you, Thursday at 4 or Friday at 2?
By using this method you actually have math in your favor as well. Think about it like this, in a normal situation the customer has two choices, either saying yes to the time or saying no. With the two time method there are three alternatives, two of which are yes, so instead of 50/50 you now have 2/3.
I hate to break it to you(not really), but if you don’t have customers buying your products/services, you’re not running a business. The very definition of business is an entity that offers products and services in exchange for money.
Why should Network marketing be any different?
We recommend that before you do anything else, such as recruiting in your business, that you build up a solid base of customers.
MORE BENEFITS:
- You will earn more money right now
- You will feel more confident when you have money coming in.
- If your recruits follow your example and also focus on sales, you will earn more money in the end. A small team of high performance sellers earn much more than a large team of people who barely sell at all.
Don’t be lazy and expect someone else to earn you money, go out there and work for it!
Sales is best learnt by doing, the closest thing to doing it yourself is watching someone else do it in person. You can see what they do that sets them apart, take down notes. Be there as a help to them.
Create packages of different products from your company for different uses or situations. Say that you sell vitamins. You could have a kit specifically for single mothers that need to get their kids to take vitamins.
Basically: put together a package specifically for different groups and then target those groups when selling. Present that very package to them, stating that it’s been specifically curated for people like them.
A pretty wild idea for selling vitamins could even be a package for companies and their employees. Most people suffer from vitamin d deficiency during the winter months, which leads to seasonal depression, sickness and a general lower productivity. If you present this fact to the company in a way that highlights how it benefits them, it might very well be a huge deal where they buy for all their employees. It might even be something that they can write off as employee health, for taxes. Find the benefits, find the need/pain point and go for it.
A decent example is: https://crazyspoiled.com/ who put together a box for people curious about essential oils.
Did you that you are much more likely to sell something to a referral vs a cold lead? Almost a laughable difference. If you’ve been given a referral, you instantly have something that differentiates you from every other salesperson – their friend thought that they might benefit from your services.
If you have a long-term customer that is happy with your service, go ahead and ask them if they know someone that could benefit from your services.
Most people won’t buy until they’ve been exposed to a product or service 5-12 times.
Even better, develop a system, not for asking them if they’re interested in purchasing but to build a relationship. If you build relationships the deals will come. People want to make business with their friends.
Imagine that you sell home organization products, eg. things that help people become more organized in their home.
It can feel like quite a difficult product to sell.
How do you bring up the subject of organizing your home? It feels completely out of context in almost all situations.
There is a way that you can make it fit in the context though.
By creating the right context yourself through offering services.
Home organization products are heavily tied with a recent trend of having a professional organizer come to your home and organize for you. Imagine the synergy if you could both offer that service as well as selling your products.
What could be a more natural context to sell home organization products than when you’re organizing someone’s home.
It’s no longer selling, it’s recommending, which is a whole lot more natural.
Studies have shown that on average, it’s about 5x more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain and continue providing value to your existing ones. Make it beneficial to be a customer of yours, don’t just stop at them getting a good product, try and give them as many benefits as possible. If you sell health products then you can send a weekly motivating text about working out, or what your workout plan for the week is going to be.
To reach your goals, you need to know what they are. Sounds logical right.
Honestly, you don’t just need to know what they are, you need to know what it takes to get there.
Say that your goal in the coming year is to go full-time in your network marketing business, but to do that you need to replace the income from your 9-5. We need to break it down further than this though.
Say that your monthly income is $2500. To replace this, we need to sell enough product, so that our profit is the same or higher as that number.
How do we do this?
We calculate and work our way backwards.
- If your average order is $500 and your commission is 50% then you have earned $250 (not counting expenses).
- To get to $2500 we then need to make 10 sales in a month, or $5000 worth of sales.
With this information, your dream to go full-time is no longer just a dream, it’s an actionable plan.
A tip is to calculate your income based on products sales, not the sales of your team. Because that is the only true metric that you have direct influence over.
Imagine this, every single person you call has these three boxes in their head. And they all need to be checked off before they will allow you to pass. Whether it’s a receptionist, a business owner or your every-day mom they will try to quickly end your call if you fail to tick these three boxes.
They are as follows:
- Your name
- How you found them
- Why you’re calling
Remember to always tick these when you’re cold calling.
MARKETING
Wouldn’t it be nice if you were able to rank in the top of google for your company name?
Well, you can in your own local area, using a free tool called google my business.
Ever wondered what those map/business results were in google when you search for plumber or even a company name? They are all google my business profiles in your area.
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So how do you start?
Well, since we’re looking to be seen when someone searches for our network marketing company we want to use the following process.
- Go to https://business.google.com and create a profile
- Name your profile something like “mary kay independent distributor” (use your own company name of course.)
- You need a physical address that is not your home usually, but there’s a way to get around this. Create a service area business around the area you serve Say your area of focus is brooklyn, then set your service area there.
This together with your company’s consultant finders and local adwords ads, will ensure that if someone searches for your company, you will be there to offer your services.
P.S In the area in and around New York, not even 20 people are doing this for Mary kay.
While yelp might be on the downturn it’s still a great place to add your business.
To use a fishing analogy, the more hooks you have out, the more likely you’ll have to get something or rather someone on the hook.
If yelp is ranking for your company on google it can be even better at giving you passive leads. If you work on getting reviews you can rise to the top of the rankings so therefore when someone searches mary kay in your area you will be at the top.
- Go here to create your business page: https://biz.yelp.com/
- Try to fill it out with lots of information and pictures, both because it makes it much more appealing and because the yelp algorithm prioritizes pages that are filled out.
You wouldn’t sell meat to a vegetarian, would you?
Ok.
Maybe you could try..
But it would be very difficult.
Why bother spending your energy trying to sell a product to someone who isn’t interested or has the need?
Wouldn’t you rather sell to those who could benefit from your product that might even already be interested.
So, how do we go about finding these “interested customers”?
We simply start with defining who they might be and what they might look like.
Start by answering the following:
- What category is your product?(health/fitness, beauty, financial etc.
- Who are the people typically interested in this category?
- What problem does your product solve?
- Who has that problem?
Selling products can sometimes be difficult.
Selling products without knowing who you’re selling to is even harder.
If you figure out who your target market consists off you can much more easily grow and work with your business.
Even better, you can go deeper rather than wide. Instead of “people who need to lose weight” your target market might be “single moms who find it difficult to find time to workout, eat healthy etc.
Have you ever wanted to reach the people in your area looking for your network marketing company. Do this and you can! (This requires you to have some sort of web presence to send these people to)
- Enter your company name into https://keywordtool.io/google to find keywords related to your company
- Copy these with the “copy all”-button and paste them into google keyword planner (https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner/home), to see if they have any volume in your area.
- Make a list of those that do have volume and you feel are relevant.
- Set up Google ads on these keywords specifically in your local area. This gets rid of the higher and more expensive competition on a more national or global basis. If you’re in a smaller country like sweden you can most likely start locally to then go national.
- Enjoy your new leads!
Bonus: make a list of the best selling products of your company and advertise for those as well, the people looking for them are sure to be highly interested in buying.
P.S.
This tip works the absolute best for those of you who are more in middle-large sized areas with a company that is at least a little bit famous.
Just check with your company’s terms of service if you’re allowed to do this. It wouldn’t exactly be fun to get kicked out for something so small.
If you’re interested in learning how to use adwords successfully, we highly recommend this course: https://www.ppccourse.com/
Most direct sales companies usually offer their distributors a “website” solution.
Most of the time this is simply a page “under” the company’s main site.
The main benefit of this website is if it allows your customers to purchase online themselves, while you still get the commission.
It can be worth paying for just to able to let your customers buy online, but the benefits really end there.
It will never give you any new customers, except for the very few people that go through the company’s consultant localizer. Since everybody has essentially the same site, they are competing with each other(and the main company website) which means that none of them will really rank on google.
Build your own website around the industry of your company, it can help you both rank for your company but you can go wider and rank for relevant topics related to your industry.
Facebook groups really are wonderful things, they exist around all kinds of topics, so most likely there is a group out there that contains your target market. Join it! But don’t go in there guns blazing with your product, trust and expertise are the name of the game in Facebook groups. Here your goal is to build up yourself as a knowledgeable person or at least someone that’s very helpful in the industry. If you become this person you’ll be in the perfect spot to recommend your products to these people, but not as a salesperson, but as someone they like and trust.
Here’s a small strategy that you can use:
- Start out with just answering questions and interacting with people’s content during the first few weeks.
- Then after you’ve been in the group for about 4 weeks you write a “giving back to the community” post.
Make it really long with lots of resources, basically something of immense value that people can’t help but enjoy. Ideally make it be about a question you’ve seen a lot in the group. At the end you can link back to your own site if relevant.
Pro-tip: message the admin of the group and explain your post and ask for permission to post it to give back to the community. If they accept, then make sure to tag them in the beginning of the post saying you got permission from the admin @name to post this.
By doing this you start building a name for yourself in your industry, but not as a salesperson but as someone people can trust to help them(because you already have with your comments and posts).
Becoming better is all about learning from your past experiences, and what better way to do that than to actively review and analyze them.
- Write down your last 10 deals/sales
- For each one, answer the following
- What was the size of the deal (in money)
- Who was the person (age, gender, social group, job etc.)
- What needs & problems did you find out
- Did they buy yes/no and what do you think was the reason
- Keep piling on other interesting things that you can think of.
- Find similarities and write these down
A buying signal is just what it sounds like, a signal a person gives off when they are ready to buy. You’ll encounter plenty if you’re an active salesperson. There’s one thing you can do to close more deals with them.
Write them down.
You can then practice so that you recognize the signal next time as well as how to respond.
A classic example of a buying signal is “How much does it cost?”, this is one of the more direct ones but it gives you an idea what you’re looking for.
It’s almost impossible to have a sales meeting without receiving any objections.
An example of an objection could be when the customer says that they’ll think over the offer and ask to get back to you.
An objection is often just a tactic that the customer uses to stall the process, in order to get rid of you. Your job is to find if there is a basis in the objection and overcome it.
As you attend more and more meetings you’ll notice that you receive some objections over and over again. Write these down and then spend some of your downtime trying to come up with ways to overcome them, it will help greatly the next time you encounter it.
LEADERSHIP & RECRUITING
One of the biggest plagues of the network marketing industry is the face that a very large % of people who join leave the industry very fast.
This of course has to do with many things but one of the larger ones is them not getting any results soon enough. The best result is money in their pocket and the quickest way to do that is to help them make their first sale. After a person makes their first sale, they’re over that hump of “I can’t do this” which then lets you train them further to make more sales.
This tip might be a little bit unethical and we don’t recommend it outside of very specific circumstances, such as when you might need just a few more recruits to reach that next rank. Slowly building your network of recruits that actually sell products is much more effective in the long run.
There is something out there called mlm genealogy lists, they are basically list of current or previous members of mlm companies.
These people have already been warmed up to the idea of an mlm company, you just have to convince them to join yours. Get on the phone and call them up.
This isn’t unethical per say, but if you want to take this to the next level the tip below is something even more effective. Though it might be a bit opportunistic.
Say that you’re a consultant in Mary Kay, when another makeup mlm company shuts down their distributors are likely looking for a company to continue their business with. This is where you come in. If you begin contacting these people, then they’ll be highly likely to join if you make a convincing pitch. Many of them are usually eager to get into a new company where they can keep their customer base.
There are 2 ways you can do this:
- Keeping your ear to the ground and using google to search at times – essentially keeping tabs on what’s going on the industry. Most news sites usually write about companies shutting down.
- Use google alerts – set up and alert for something like “mlm shutting down” or go even more specific
In a regular business you are best off being strategic about who you recruit.
Sales teams usually have their own district in order to not compete with each other but rather boost the team’s sales as a whole.
While network marketing functions a bit differently, it’s still a good way of thinking.
Try to focus on recruiting people from others towns than your own. If you recruit people in your own town you’ll build up competition for yourself, both for selling and recruiting.
This of course depends on the size of your town, but oversaturation is a very real thing.
Try to be strategic about your recruits, not just about who they are, but also where they are from.
If you’re in a large city it doesn’t matter as much since there’s generally people to go around for everyone but if you want you can divide your city into districts where different people sell.
Having someone who lives in a location is also more convenient for getting to meetings and the like, compared to maybe having to drive for a while to get there.
A better way to go about it’s to try and recruit people from different locations and build up “districts”, sort of like how sales teams are structured. This both help keep competition at a fair level and you reach a broader market.
A lesson that sales managers quickly learn from their salespeople in any normal company, is that generating leads and doing the planning is usually the toughest/most boring part.
Essentially, salespeople are the most productive when they have a ready made plan and they can just take action on the selling part.
If you give sales people a ready-made list of leads with phone numbers they can then just start contacting these people. While direct sales is a bit different where everybody run their own businesses this is still a great method.
It might result in you taking a hit to your own sales for the time being but helping out like this will benefit your team in the long-run. This can be something great to do for newer team members to get them started and then eventually transitioning them into generating their own leads.
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