How To Close Your Network Marketing Leads
Generating leads for your network marketing business is one thing, but how do you convert those leads into members of your downline?
This is an important consideration for many network marketers since most are not trained salepeople.
There are two basic approaches to closing sales in network marketing, which we will call "active closing" and "passive closing".
Active closing involves selling a prospect on joining your network marketing opportunity, either over the phone or in person with your prospect.
Important considerations here are:
- knowing and appealing to the emotional "triggers" of the prospect i.e. why the prospect wishes to become involved in a home-based business
- overcoming objections
- guiding the prospect to make a decision to join your company
Since this method requires sales skills, it is often advantageous to enlist the help of an experienced salesperson, such as your sponsor or another member of your upline.
This can be accomplished by using techniques such as 3 way calling.
The downside of active closing is that often a person will feel pressured into making a decision, join your company, and then experience buyers' remorse.
These individuals will simply never participate in the business, and eventually drop out.
This does not help you build your business at all.
For this reason, passive closing may be a preferable alternative for sponsoring more new reps.
This method has also been called the "voluntary" close by network marketing maven Mike Dillard, who has used the following system with great success:
First of all, it is essential that you have marketing tools in place to do the selling for you:
- a high-converting lead capture page
- an autoresponder series that provides valuable information to the prospect every 2-3 days
Passive closing involves not only allowing the prospect to make their own decision to join your opportunity, but something much more important:
It positions you as a leader and this will attract people to you and make them want to work with you.
Let's look at how this works:
When you generate a network marketing lead, your thoughts should center on whether or not the prospect is qualified to join your business.
How do you qualify the prospect?
1. Call them and introduce yourself.
This lets the prospect know that you are a real person.
Ask the person questions to get a "feel" for them but DO NOT try to sell them.
Look for reasons why you may not want to work with the person.
This attitude will convey a message to the prospect that you are a leader.
Remember, sponsoring the wrong people in network marketing costs you time and money!
2. If you like them, give them your contact information.
Direct the prospect to a business overview page, or a recorded call.
Don't chase them, let them come to you.
Remember, the individual is already in your marketing pipeline, having come through your lead capture page and being subscribed to your autoresponder, so they will be receiving marketing messages from you.
3. When they do call you:
Answer their questions in a friendly manner.
Other than that, remain silent.
As Mike Dillard says:
"I don’t ask them to get started and I don’t try to keep the conversation going. Dead spots in a conversation ARE AWKWARD. You want to make them feel off-balance and then force them to fill the dead air.
My attitude is that you called me to ask me some questions which I will answer, and that’s it. Anything else that we discuss is up to you. Because you’re unwilling to keep the conversation going or try to talk them into getting started, you are in the position of power. In any relationship, the person who cares the least holds the power.
And you know what happens 9 times out of 10 because I didn’t take the bait and start chasing them? They fill that awkward silence with statements like, “So what’s next? How do I get started?”
This method of passive closing is not only an effective method for sponsoring more reps, it also addresses the common concern of new distributors who lack active sales skills.
If you are serious about growing your home-based business, Mike Dillard provides valuable tips like the one above to his email subscribers.
To get on Mike's email list, simply opt-in to receive the free video training for his Magnetic Sponsoring course, or his Building on a Budget course.
If you liked this article and want to keep up to date with the latest posts on NewSuccessOnline, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. New to RSS? Read this: What is RSS?
