When you’ve put your heart and soul into building your business with a particular company, it’s hard to make that decision to change course when things aren’t how they should be.
And when you’re sold out for the product or service you’re promoting, it’s hard to step back and get a big picture view of everything going on around you. You tend to get caught up in the value of the product itself, and the drive of those around you who are aiming for the same goal. This makes it hard to take an outside perspective of the marketplace, what is really happening (by the numbers and facts, not your heart), and if what you’re devoting yourself to is really right for you.
My mentor Lawrence Tam, Ambassador and Bonus Check in Less Than 45 Days. *Income Disclaimer: Results Not Typical, All Based On How Hard You Want To Work.
Thankfully, I had a mentor come into my life, Lawrence Tam, and over the course of a few months, I learned a lot from him, and when he made the difficult decision to leave his company and his team to build a new one with another company, I listened to him. I had built up a good deal of trust in him, and I knew he wouldn’t take a decision like that lightly. I was able to learn from his perspective on why he left his company (which I will get into in a bit) and apply that to the situation I was in with the company I had worked with for 8+ years.
The reasons can be different for all of us, we all have our own unique situations. Nonetheless, I believe it’s important you step back out of your shoes, analyze what all is going on in your team, in your company, and in your industry/niche from an outside perspective and decide if you’re truly putting your efforts into the best place possible.
…Because, if not, you and your team deserve better.
** Warning: This is going to be one epic post, a little long, but I’m going to make sure it’s packed full of great info that can help you decide if you’re investing your efforts in the right place. None of this is to talk you out of where you’re at now, just to give you my perspective of my personal situation, so you can then use that knowledge to analyze your situation.**
With that said, let me discuss what I realized about where I was at and how it helped me decide where to refocus my business efforts. It may not be the same for you, but it should give you some good guidelines to use to analyze your situation.
Here are the reasons that helped me choose to partner with ViSalus, I’ll go into detail on each point below:
- Momentum
- What People Need/Should Have vs. What People WANT
- Marketing to just Network Marketers or Mainstream?
- True Teamwork To Help Build YOUR Team
- Marketing Services vs. Products
- Technology
- Fun & Casual: Marketing To Today’s Society
- Are YOUR People on YOUR Team Making Money? Really?
1. You’ve Got To Go Where The Momentum Is
…not where the growth already was, and not where the growth might be in the future, but where there is incredible momentous growth NOW!
There are 4 phases of growth that network marketing companies typically go through.
- Formulation – the company starts off slow as ideas, services, and products are put together, improved, and refined. Early movers join the company and begin building teams. This is the time when most companies fail. I don’t know the percentage, but the vast majority of start-ups never make it out of this phase.
- Concentration – once the products are solidified, marketing is perfected, and if the company is in the right place at the right time, industry leaders begin to join bringing on board key “movers & shakers”. Growth begins picking up as the right people who can take the company forward jump on board. Many companies who make it through formulation don’t make it past this stage because of numerous factors, sometimes outside of their own doing: timing, marketplace, industry/niche, etc.
- Momentum – This happens when all cylinders are firing in the engine, so to speak: marketing is right on target, key players are on board helping bring in the right people, product is filling a big need in a large marketplace, and the timing is right. At this point people who were just IN THE GAME, not even big players, just in, can go seemingly overnight from a few thousand dollars per month to $50,000+ per month incomes, and $100,000 earners rocket into the Millions per month. This is the stage when what the company is doing has become self-evident and new distributors are joining the company to the tune of 30,000-40,000 per month.
- Stability - Eventually the growth slows, fewer new distributors join for the business opportunity as the name of the company/product becomes more widely known, and many people believe the market is saturated and don’t see an opportunity for themselves. You can still join the company at this time and make a great income, there will always be people to recruit and sell your products too…but the BIG lifestyle changing, freedom kind of incomes are earned back in the momentum stage.
Some companies have already had a period of momentum, when they went through massive growth, and then eventually leveled off into their stability phase, but still use that name brand recognition or statistics of past growth as recruiting tools for bringing in new distributors…nothing wrong with that, those are things the company has truly achieved, but just realize those numbers were all made from people who got in earlier. You can still make a great income if you hustle and sell the products or services that company offers, but can you build a huge team that can have success too?
Other companies are constantly in that concentration stage, preaching to you year after year that they are at that “2% tipping point” and massive momentum is going to happen at any given moment in the near future. They sell you on future potential growth…which may or may not ever happen. Personally, this is the kind of company I was involved with…it was just fine with me to take the personal risk and bet on them hitting momentum in the future, but after hearing that for all 8 of my years in business with them, I couldn’t keep telling that to my team…because I invest my time and efforts heavily into my team so they can find success too. And if they never find it, I feel responsible for that.
ViSalus is in the perfect place for you to join, bring in team members, and rest assured knowing they can achieve success right out of the gates. The company is just at the later part of the concentration stage and nearing momentum stage…but it’s not there yet! Which is super exciting!
The Direct Selling Association has stated that when a company hits a point of 30,000 new distributors joining per month for 3 consecutive months, then it is finally into momentum. Where does ViSalus stand on this? In February of 2012 (last month as of writing this), they had a record number of new Promoters (distributors)…just 13,000!
This means you have plenty of time to get in and start building a team before momentum hits. This opportunity has NOT passed you by!
2. Sell What People Want And Will Readily Pay Money For
…not what somebody “needs” or “should have”…yes you can sell those things and make a good income…if you’re good at sales.
But the point to network marketing is to build a massive team of people who are out selling a product and you earn a small percentage off of every sale from your team.With that being the case, you want to market something that people WANT, not just NEED.
Why? Because if it’s something that people need but don’t necessarily have a want or desire for, that should be an immediate red flag that, no matter how good the product really is, it’s going to take a certain amount of training to equip your team with the right skills to go out and sell that product. In network marketing, you want as few roadblocks and speedbumps as possible in order for your team to grow quickly and easily…and extra training needed to help your people get started slows things down unnecessarily.
In the company I was recruiting into, the service was great, but didn’t fulfill an inner desire people had, it was just something good to have…so it took extra training before a person could really get going, in order for them to understand the service and how to market it properly…extra hoops to jump through that slows the growth of the team.
And then, when you do have everyone trained up and ready to go, you still have the issue that the service/product doesn’t fulfill a core desire, so it’s easier for them to decide they would rather spend their money on something else.
ViSalus offers health and nutrition which many more people are becoming aware of these days, with concerns of what exactly is in all that processed food in the stores. Additionally, something like 60% of customers join The Challenge because they want to lose weight. And losing weight is a huge burning inner pain that people want to correct, in order to feel better about themselves and live a healthier life.
Offering a product that offers a solution to a pain or fear makes it easy to enroll lots of customers…and that’s precisely why ViSalus has an outstanding distributor to customer ratio of somewhere around 7 customers for every distributor!
3. Don’t Just Limit Yourself To The Network Marketing Niche
This is a problem I’ve noticed just recently. Many companies have “network marketing lingo” all throughout their marketing info, presentations, and live events. Talk about compensation plans overrides, spillover, matrices, upline, downline, hotel meetings, and all that stuff honestly turns off a good portion of people out there who are open to earning extra income and starting their own business. They’ve been burnt in the past, or they have just a negative preconceived notion of what network marketing is, so anytime they get the vibe that your company is “another one of those mlm deals” they high-tail it the opposite way. So the only people these companies usually bring on board are people who have already tried 10 other network marketing opportunities!
Now, sure, you can’t appeal to everybody, and many people don’t have the business/entrepreneurial mindset necessary to be a good prospect for your business. But that’s not exactly what I’m getting at here. The best way to explain this to you is to tell you exactly what I see Visalus is doing right, it’s something genius really.
It starts with the 3 for Free program, where a customer can get their monthly product for free each month if they have 3 active customers referred through them. These people didn’t hear any talk about compensation plans or anything like that, they just knew that getting their product for free each month sounded awesome!
Those same people who worked hard enough to refer 3 and get their product free, can then be approached about the opportunity to also get paid every time they refer new customers…because somebody was already getting paid when they referred those 3 to get their product for free, and it might as well be them!
Additionally, once a person is involved with the business opportunity, they will never hear a training on the compensation plan…it’s simple, just go out and help people become Rising Stars (enroll 3 promoters) and then help those Rising Stars get into their Cars (have 6 rising stars to earn your free BMW bonus).
Basically, almost everybody today would love to have way to earn more money and have more time freedom. It’s just that many of them don’t THINK they want anything to do with network marketing based on what they know about it…so change how you market your opportunity and speak to all those millions of people outside of the network marketing niche, appeal to them where they are at right now!
And that’s exactly what ViSalus does perfectly!
4. True Help From Leaders To Build Your Team
We Build In 3's - That's How We Roll!
This aspect of team growth was truly eye-opening to me when I first started with ViSalus. In ViSalus you only build 3 groups (legs), so every additional Promoter brought on board after #1,2 & 3 have to be placed somewhere on the team. So this means if you get in early, you’ll have the advantage of having many people placed on your team who join later one, from one of the leaders above you…if you’re out doing work and proving your worth, they reward you with additional team members!
And this isn’t like a binary compensation plan…binaries flat out suck…In those you only earn as much on your team as your weaker legs produces. But in ViSalus, you earn 5% off of your team’s production, whether you recruited them or they were placed on your team!
In all of my 8 years with the company I recruited into before, NOT ONCE did I have a distributor placed on my team. In my company’s case, it was a unilevel breakaway plan where it was more beneficial for the leaders above me to keep recruits front line. Because they were so high up in the compensation plan, the differential pay between their new distributors’ production and their level was much greater than if they had placed those new recruits down into my organization.
I haven’t seen anything create as much momentum and growth in an organization as this, because when you have a waiting room full of new promoters that you can place anywhere on your team, you can call through your organization and hold contests, offering your new promoters to those who bring in the most production, or have a 3 for 1 where you reward 1 promoter to everyone who brings in 3 promoters…now that’s powerful!
5. Marketing Services vs. Products
This one should be very simple to understand. When you offer a service you are limited to selling one service per individual, and to make more money you have to enroll new customers. However, when you sell products, customers can buy as many of what you have to sell as they want, they aren’t limited to just 1 of everything. So, you instantly can earn more money because of the amount that can be sold to each customer.
Many times when you sell a service, you’re paid an up front commission for that sale and then a residual commission that is much less every month or year that the customer keeps your service. I know in my case I would earn a couple hundred dollars for one year of service, but only about 1/4 of that every year after. Don’t get me wrong, that was awesome, it was still residual income, work once, keeping getting paid years down the road.
But if you sell products in ViSalus, you earn the same commission every single month as long as they keep buying, it doesn’t drop down after so long.
6. Technology
Another easy one to figure out. Does your company give you every possible advantage in the marketplace, over your competition, and also for convenience and making your job easier?
You’re investing your hard-earned dollars and precious time into building their brand, so they should equally invest in tools and technology to make your job easier.
ViSalus is just incredible, always investing heavily in new technologies to build the ViSalus and Body By Vi brands…and our home-based businesses as well.
ViSalus offers an awesome back office with web & social media tools, custom capture pages, videos, YouTube videos, group offers for both customers and promoters.
What I love the most though, is the impressive mobile app and swiper that allows you to enroll customer and promoters on the fly, wherever you are at the time. Meeting with a prospect at Starbucks and they’re interested in signing up? No need for carrying around paper applications or a laptop or having them sign up when they get back home. You simply enter their personal information and swipe their credit card right their on your smartphone! Check this video out:
7. The Style Of Meetings & Events
Many network marketing companies used to be based around the hotel meeting once per week structure, and everybody was taught to “dress for success” and come to the meetings all decked out in suit & tie and professional attire. And if you think about it, this all stems from days past when everybody wore suits and ties to work if they had a nice inside job.
That’s not the case anymore at most workplaces, many people dress casually, and in the day and age of the Internet millionaires and everything else like that, many people just want to dress comfortably…they don’t want to be confined to a stuffy suit and tie, or wear clothing they typically aren’t accustomed to wearing.
But many companies still stick to this professional atmosphere, which can be great for recruiting in professionals but for the masses, the mainstream, the companies who are adapting, making live events more casual, laid back, and fun, are the ones who are seeing massive growth!
And that’s exactly where ViSalus has positioned itself…all the grassroots growth, sales and recruiting happens through fun Challenge parties held in new promoters’ homes, and live events are a blast with music, casual attire, parties, and more fun stuff that people love.
Think about it, people work all week, most of them at a job they don’t like, or even hate, the last thing they want is to get all dressed up and go to stuffy hotel meeting…this is a business they are supposed to want to do on the side that will get them away from what they don’t like – not give them more of the same!
8. Are People On Your Team Really Making Money?
Everything I’ve touched on and covered so far are important points for you to consider about your own situation, but none were as important to me as this point. My goal has always been to help other people on my team succeed and get what they want in life, and if I focused on that, my rewards and success would come as a natural result of that.
But I came to a point where I really had to be truthful with myself and answer my own question of “was I helping people get into the right network marketing vehicle that would allow them to start making money right away?”
And from results of people on my team, the answer was No. Most people who were working hard on my team, weren’t seeing the results they needed to keep going. But some people whom I trusted, had hard-working people on their teams who weren’t making much money, move to ViSalus and began making $500-$800 a month right away, with the same effort!
So, in the end, what ultimately led me to ViSalus weren’t all the things above, or greed or anything else, but my desire to truly help my team make the money they deserved…and we’ve found it in ViSalus.
For more information here on the blog about ViSalus, check out this video review page that I put together.
There is nothing else out there like ViSalus. Just do it, and do it, and do it!
FACT #1: What you ate this morning is less healthy and packed with more calories than our products.
FACT #2: 70% of U.S. population is overweight or obese. Diabetes is almost epidemic. It’s getting worse.
FACT #3: People are broke. They need help. Millions are looking every day for a legitimate way to make more money and gain control.
Solution: ViSalus.
Did I Cover Points That Hit Home To You?
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Brent’s Cell: 620-252-5494
Here’s what’s unique: You have never seen so much due diligence information about a legitimate home business program like you are seeing on this page. We are serious. And we are looking for other serious people.
Questions? Call me personally at: Brent – (cell) 620.252.5494
I help grow my teammates’ businesses so just let me know who invited you.
March 31, 2012
ViSalus