Let’s talk for a minute about prospecting.  It’s the one thing that will absolutely, without a doubt, grow your business.  If you stop prospecting, you turn off your cash flow.  Sure you may see some residual income for a time, if you have been successful in growing a business in the first place but if stop prospecting, eventually your income stream will become a little trickle.

I get a lot of network marketers telling me that they don’t like to make cold calls.  I can tell you that there was a time that I didn’t particularly care for it myself.  However, once I learned the right way to prospect and the many different ways that prospecting can be done, I grew to love it.

So, I want to caution you and say that you have to prospect and you have to prospect correctly in order to grow a business.

Learning To Prospect The Right Way 

The first step in learning to prospect is to recognize what you are looking for when you prospect.

The first thing that I teach others about growing a business is to lead with your product or service, not the opportunity.

Here’s why:

First, everyone has an opportunity.  If you want to seperate yourself from others (and you definately want to) you want to lead with your product or service.  When you lead with the opportunity, you sound just like everyone else with a great way to get rich.

Second, your drop out rate will drop dramatically.  If you lead with the opportunity and someone joins your business based only on their ability to make money, then as soon as they see that the money comes only after they build a big business, which requires that they work their business, they quit.  The average length of time that a person stays in a network marketing business is 60-120 days.

Third, people with follow a leader.  Others will buy from an expert in their field.  Noone likes to get the trainee.  (first name), you cannot position yourself as an expert in growing a large business, until you have actually done it.  It’s a little like taking stop smoking advise from a chain smoker with lung cancer.  So, unless you have generated serious income with your business, you cannot effectively lead with your opportunity.

There is good news.  By leading with your product, you can be an expert.  Everyone has the ability to become an expert with their products they market.  Let’s say that you are marketing a gas saving product.  You can study and understand all of the benefits and the values of that product, and you can position yourself as an expert in saving gas.

Listen, I don’t want to be the one to tell you how to opperate your home based business but if you know deep down that you could be a lot more successful if you only did something towards growing your business, then learn how to prospect effectively and then get out there and start prospecting.

You do have another option.  You could get out of network marketing completely and just keep doing what you are already doing, placing a limit on the amount of money that you can earn or you can make a change for the positive and grow your business, starting right now.

Prospecting isn’t the only way to grow your network marketing business but it is a very effective way to get sales.  If you don’t currently have the skill set to do prospecting or if you feel that the phone weighs too much to pick it up, then stay tuned, there will be more on the subject of prospecting.  I’m sure there will be a bit of information or two that you could use.