Family & Friends

Family & Friends

We all know how powerful feelings can be. They can propel us forward in achieving MLM success or they can hold us back. In either case they shouldn’t be taken lightly. So, when someone says to you “I wouldn’t want to make money off of my friends”, there may be a strong reason behind those feelings and it can take patience and excellent communication skills to get the person to tell you exactly why.

I have heard and seen this objection come across in two different ways.

The first scenario is when a person has already joined the business and you ask them to write a list or something like that and they say “I don’t want to contact my friends.” I’ve also seen it come up on prospecting, and that scenario is, “Is this one of those things where I have to call my friends?”

Often times I’ve had it where a person is truly concerned and when you drill down (carefully) and find out what their main concern is, you discover that the person doesn’t want to feel as though that they are bothering or pestering their friends and family.  That’s what they are concerned about, that’s what they’re worried about, that’s what their resisting.

Perhaps they have been forced into that in some other network marketing business before or someone has been like that to them and made them feel extremely uncomfortable.

When faced with these scenarios, there is only one way you can help your MLM prospect and that is to put yourself in their shoes. Feel what they’re feeling because only then can you actually help your prospect to be able to identify exactly the feeling that makes them raise the objection.

One critical communication skill needed here is to use the right amount of assertiveness. The right amount of assertiveness with the prospect means you’re never forcing them.  You may lead them gently, but you’re absolutely never forcing them. All too often I have heard tales of network marketing uplines insisting their people contact friends and family (the warm market) first.

This is a big mistake. Encourage yes by all means once you have given your people a renewed confidence but never force them to do this when downline building.

Take time and let the prospect feel you are not rushing them, that you are empathetic to their situation but also assuring them that there are ways you can help them.

For someone to give you this objection they would’ve had to have something occur or had someone tell them something.  You need to find out what happened, otherwise you could be walking right into a very difficult situation, but most important is that something is concerning your prospect about the industry.  Make no mistake about it, this is an MLM objection, so this to you should indicate they have doubts about the industry, so that’s the reason that you want to answer it by asking open questions.

So, for you to be able to help your prospect you need to know everything you can.  This way you can think on the same level they’re thinking on, so obviously your prospect has this strong thought going on in their head and you don’t know what it is.  They throw out this statement, “I wouldn’t want to make money of my friends.”   You need to try to figure out what their thinking about and don’t resist anything that they say to you.  If they want to get all dramatic and go into details, let them.

Just like in the MLM objection itself, let them say whatever it is they want to say because this is going to be very valuable to you.  Let me give you an example:

One lady said to me “I’m not going to have to call any of my friends, right?”  And my immediate reply was, “No, not if you don’t want to.”  So, really think that through just for a second.  Do you notice that I did not resist her? Then I asked, “What brought that up?”  And she had replied that, “Well, my husband said that I could do
the business as long as I didn’t contact any of our friends.”

Now that could have been the end of it, but then I realized that it perhaps it isn’t her issue, it’s his, and so I asked, “Well, do you know why he feels this way?”  And she said, “Well, he was in multi level marketing a long time ago and one of his friends still won’t talk to him to this day because of it.”

Can you see what kind of mess I would have gotten myself into had I had tried to force her to work the warm market?  It’s likely she would have gone home and told him and then he would have probably prohibited her from doing the business.  That’s the reason that I put so much emphasis on this concept of make sure that you find out what happened.  No. 1 is don’t resist and No. 2 is find out what happened and move on.

Need help getting your prospects to say “yes” to your business opportunity?  Tim Sales offers a free ebook, “How To Build A Huge MLM Business Working Part Time”

Tim Sales built an MLM business with an income of over $150,000 per month with 2,400+ new distributors joining per month. He now creates Network Marketing training tools for everyone in network marketing.

Be Sociable, Share!