Hope is not an MLM Strategy – Try Skills & Scheduling

Hope is not a strategy.

Women spend more time picking out shoes in the course of a year than planning their financial future.

Ladies, don’t get mad.

The average male spends more time planning a vacation than planning his financial future…and he also spends more time watching ESPN than planning.  YIKES!

 Hope is not an MLM strategy

The key to success is a written plan of action.  It’s really the blueprint to success.

Does that mean shoes, vacations, and sports are a waste of time?

Hardly.

Balance is the key.  Work hard, play hard seems to carry two enormous benefits.

When we plan and execute, we feel better about ourselves.

Everybody says the joy of doing the things we enjoy is far greater when we ‘feel’ we’ve done our best at work, and I certainly, at this point of life, know that is true.

The difference between watching a ball game when I know I’ve avoided my responsibilities and it’s a distraction versus doing my best at work, then watching ‘the game’ is massive.

Avoiding the ‘Main Thing,’ recruiting, and hoping things will work out better tomorrow just doesn’t work.

Hope is not an MLM strategy.  Period.

Get a Written Plan of Action

The difference maker is a written plan of action.  I discovered ‘OATS’ many years ago and the ‘ball game’ or vacation feels like something I have earned.

For most people, a written plan is the missing piece.

OATS is a written plan of action for the week and doing it every Friday has dramatically altered the effect of life’s wonderful distractions.  Pure joy.

Best part?

It only takes about 5 minutes.

Here’s how in two simple steps.

1. Determine how many hours you’ll put in every week.   Spend 80% of your time recruiting for yourself and for your teammates.

2. Do OATS.

What’s OATS?

O – Objectives.  What are my objectives for the week?

I found the best thing to focus on is the number of contacts.   I like the number 21.  These 21 represent people you actually talked to.

A – Activities.  What activities do I have to do to hit the objective?

Dial the phone.    According to AT&T (and I’ve done it enough to know this is accurate), you’ll reach someone about 20% of the time.  So I’d have to make about 120 or so dials.

T – Time.  How much time will it take to complete the activities so I hit the objective?

So let’s take a 10-hour commitment weekly, leaving plenty of time for fun.  After all, there are 168 hours in a week.

15 dials an hour is 120 dials, piece of cake.  That is 8 of the 10 hours.  I’m on target.

S- Schedule it.  Last little thing is to write it into your appointment book.

If it isn’t written is simply is not true.

All this takes about 5 minutes and leaves me 2 hours leeway for administrative work.

Try it out…and looking for those shoes, planning a vacation or going to a ballgame will take on a different feeling altogether.

Upping the Ante

Having more money to do those things just enhances the experience to another level.  How do we up the ante?  If we are going to make some money we need to learn some skills.

By a wide margin, the first 30 seconds of the conversation with prospects has more to do with the outcome than anything else.  I discovered a network marketing skill called Instant Rapport years ago that converts about 80% of the prospects to an instant ‘yes’.

Between OATS and some easy to learn, easy to teach skills, upping the ante was easy.

The next level of joy comes from understanding that your teammates will ‘copy’ your behavior if you know that getting duplication is a skill, not something you hope happens.

believe

mark januszewski

world’s laziest networker