MLM Success or Failure? It Turns On 1 Thing

I had to start this four times.

I just keep getting too worked up.  This really ends my semi-annual 3 day rant, and it just pisses me off on so many levels it’s astounding.

It’s personal responsibility.

When we close the door on personal responsibility, common sense vanishes.  The absence of these 2 things, personal responsibility and common sense, is the friendly harbour for every blood-sucking bottom feeder in the networking industry.

You know who and what I am talking about?

Two Major Groups

Group 1: The magic systems

All those ‘magic system’ peddling, lead promoting sites and gurus who are going to tell you how to have an endless supply of ‘ready to buy’ prospects and how they got rich.  With this ‘magic system’ and ‘attraction marketing’, people line up.  Mostly well intentioned but inexperienced and fearful folks. and plop down $20, $30 bucks a month or more.

Once they log in, it’s one upsell after another.

And all these clowns have deals with ‘coaches’ who work at $200-$400 a more per hour, 5-10 hours minimum.

Let’s think this through.

Let’s just say you had really discovered an online marketing system that created a wonderful downline for you.  Would you put your team and yourself in competition with every other line in your company and with every company and every rep in the world?  Of course not.  Your team?  Want to put your team in competition with everyone in the world?

These self serving, greedy, lying thieves are not about helping you.  They are about making money on your inexperience and fear.  And the ‘deal’…like 3 and yours is free…quickly gets you and a few keep people on your team promoting for them, and no one seems to notice they are no longer building their business.

Where’s the common sense?   Why in the world would someone offer this amazing system?  And offer you a ‘deal’ to promote it?   It disappeared with personal responsibility.

Group 2: Personal coaching

Why would brilliant  MLMers, allegedly masters of the ‘time leverage business’ swap their time for money?

These blood suckers pull upwards of $4000+ out of people.

Starts with a ‘free conference call’ to help your team…CDs, events and eventually personal coaching.  If they are that good, why wouldn’t they just take that time and build another line and get paid over and over and over again?  Gee, I’ll take a stab here.  They find it easier to make money on MLMers instead of doing it themselves.  Truth is, I know several of these folks and deep down inside, they don’t really believe in network marketing…and their full time job is making money on MLMers.

Neither group bothers me

Now, don’t think for a minute that I am pissed either of  these groups.

Now make no mistake about it, my beef is not with them, I’m not pissed at either group.

The lack of personal responsibility with network marketing companies and with the leaders is where my final rant is aimed.

Let’s face it…a lot of people are looking for help who don’t know much about the industry are easy targets for these over-promising dream weavers.

They shouldn’t be easy targets.

Why are they?  Why do people urinate away more money and time on tools than they do on their businesses?

The companies don’t understand the industry, relying on leaders to take care of the small stuff and creating a doubly harmful environment for the most important people to a new company, the brand new reps.

Want proof?

A Very Sad Trend

To generate volume faster, to make a ‘big’ splash and get, ahem, momentum, companies allow leaders to put up sites, replicated sites and promote tools.

It’s not long before leaders are competing for monthly website fees, bodies for the ‘event after the event’ and fighting with each other.

Look, there is some very cool technology out there…but there was 10 years ago too.  It comes and goes.  What does not change, is, in the end…we need to talk to people and learn how to run our business.

In the absence of this from a company, a single standardized system…the door opens to the bottom-feeders I mentioned above.  When the company actually allows reps to peddle these systems that they get ‘branded’ to the field, it creates the worst possible scenario. – leaders who are actually allowed to build a business within the business.

This is not entrepreneurship.  It is a recipe for bleeding volume in the USA market within 2-4 years of the company putting itself on the map.   It’s worse than you think because it allows leaders peddling sites and systems to gather information on downlines under you…and they are not your upline!  Preposterous.

Two of the most wonderful success stories in the last 7 years finds both companies virtually hemorrhaging volume in the states…and all their real efforts are in foreign markets.   You can look it up.  Most MLM companies have grown in bell-shaped curve over the last 10 years.

Why?

They are not teaching the reps, in conjunction with the leaders, what to say and what to do.

Everybody knows duplication is a total myth in and of itself.  I can no more duplicate a group than I can duplicate the mango sitting on my desk right now.  Duplication is a by-product of education…and while all the ‘newest, best-est, next billion dollar companies’ claim they care about reps, they have zero training and compound the problem by allowing reps to build businesses within the business.

And I am shocked and dismayed at how many companies keep talking about being a billion dollar deal but don’t do the things the billion dollar companies do.

Can you imagine someone saying they have a better way than the Mary Kay Way…and offering a website for 50 bucks a month?   Think MK would say, OK?  Or Art Williams?  OMG!

I’m really sad, not mad

A top earner I had a ton of respect for is now offering a $50.00 a month website…so sad…instead of rolling up her sleeves and teaching her people what she knows.

And, get this.  Has not used it yet nor sponsored anyone with it.   As leaders, you must test before testimony.  Period.  No exceptions.  And she once told me she agreed with that…and it was unethical to do it any way except the way I suggested…test before testimony.   I guess I was talking ethics and evidently, she was talking money.

Network marketing is a skill based business, we bring people in, teach them what to do, do it with them, then do it with their people.  Good old fashioned personal responsibility.  When we recruit someone we are doing so, in essence, by stimulating their ‘dream chamber’ and we are telling them we are going to help them.  Since no one can teach what they do not know, this means we need to learn what to do.

The company policies we find in the last 10 years in MLM is, “don’t tell us how to run our company and we won’t tell you how to run your business.”  Sorry guys, we are dependent on one another in many ways.

This is not only devoid of personal responsibility.  It is irresponsible.  And where there is no personal responsibility, there is no common sense, and the companies and leaders might as well be feeding new people to the sharks.  And…as you know, there are a lot of sharks out there happy to take newbies money.

What’s Needed

A collaboration between companies and leaders, all teaching from the same material, all honor the educational system they agree on.  It’s the pathway for authentic success and  sustained success.

There is, of course, a handful of leaders who won’t agree.  They’ll say, “that crushes the creative spirit” and every single one who has said that to me is – you guessed it – selling subscriptions and has a business in the business they paid someone else to build.   Just like there is a handful of new reps who, even if a standardized system was available for company AAAAA would look for a short cut so s/he didn’t have to talk to anyone or do anything.

Someone needs to stand up to the companies with me…not to take them down…but to help them understand this insanity of letting leaders build businesses inside the business and reps hearing about 40 different systems does not work.  Make sense?  Are you with me here?

It’s called leadership and no one has a right (ethically) to get on stage and say they care about the field and love the reps and that it is now OK to dream again.  You know, all the ‘big picture’ bullshit, if they don’t have a plan for the reps success…which is teaching people, step by step, what to do, what to say and how to run a business.

What are they doing instead?  Instead of leading they are doing the worst possible thing – creating an environment where by reps are encouraged to build businesses within the business, compete with other leaders instead of working in harmony and tragically, crushing the one thing they claim to be promoting.

Personal Responsibility.

Billion dollar company?

How?

Leveraging the US market to build a world wide story, allowing whatever  so volume will build faster and you can leverage the US story of success to open dozens of countries?   I’ve had enough of this crap and the leaders who know better and do nothing about it.

Why am I so pissed?  Do these ‘big picture’ thinkers realize how close they really are to doing something special?  How wonderful this would be if they would take the time to do it right instead of taking shortcuts at the expense of people’s dreams to do it fast?

What can you do?  Take responsibility from you down.  Learn the skills that will help people get a yes, work in depth with them and teach them to teach others what to do.

OK, I’m done…I am ranted out.

believe

mark januszewski

world’s laziest networker