All right, guys, welcome. Welcome. Really excited today to talk a little bit about sales and marketing. Over my career I’ve had the opportunity, and sometimes the pain, to deal with both sides of this coin. And it really is an interesting conundrum at times to try and separate out the difference between sales and marketing, because many people would say there isn’t a difference and many people would be wrong. Honestly, marketing is a skillset that is entirely different than sales.
I started selling bikes and skates as a 17-year-old kid. At that time, don’t ask me to market those bikes or skates. Selling something, providing some value that somebody needed. That was pretty simple. But now off too often I see people who tried to jump to sales but don’t know how to market, even in the world of MLM. The Direct Sales Association is a lobbying group that covers and helps direct sales organizations, network marketing organizations to lobby Congress and to get the things that they need, so the laws don’t come up and bite them. The Direct Sales Association has helped to define the difference between a Ponzi Scheme, a pyramid scheme, and what network marketing is, and that’s a very important role. But here’s the thing, whether it’s a direct sales organization, where you’re directly selling a product, or it’s a network marketing organization, the two are very different. We’ve lumped them all together, because so many network marketing companies are part of the Direct Selling Association, but direct sales and network marketing are different. Let me explain how.
I’ve been in sales for a long time. I worked with Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 100 companies, and I’ve worked with small start-ups and across the board. If you don’t have value, nobody’s going to listen or want to purchase, what do you have to say or what you have to offer? In my career, I’ve said probably more times than I can count, if something costs $2 or $2 million, if they don’t see the value, it’s too expensive. I bought a lot of junk for two bucks. I’ve made my way through the dollar store from time to time. But what I’m telling you is if I don’t get more than $2 worth of value out of something, I’m not going to spend that. Likewise, I’ve been able to sell a product in the past that had more than $2 million worth of value. I didn’t charge $2 million for this particular product, but the value is there, and they saw the value. They realized what could be done with the product was going to enable them to do much greater things, so the value was there.
Here’s the problem, and I had somebody explained this to me in a way once that really made a lot of sense to me. Hopefully, it’ll resonate with you guys as well. Direct selling is like a dog, and network marketing is like a cat. What do I mean by that? I’m a dog person. My golden doodle is actually here running around the house acting like a crazy animal. I love her to death, but when I open the door, what happens? She comes running and is all excited to see me and practically tackles me at the door. If any of you guys have seen the Flintstones–ancient, ancient cartoon. Shoot, it came out more than 50 years ago. Actually, plenty more than 50 years ago. The last episodes were recorded more than 50 years ago now. They had a dog. It was actually a dinosaur, but his name was Dino. Anytime that Fred came home, Dino came and tackles him, and Dino comes up and just mauls him and is so excited that he’s home. He can’t wait. He’s just overfilling with excitement and joy and jubilation.
In direct sales, too often we are Dino, we get a prospect or a customer coming up to us and we just verbally vomit all over them. We tell them everything that they ever needed to know about our company, the particular product that we’re selling, the opportunity. Why so many people who’ve made millions of dollars, and why you’re so excited about it, where in reality what would be the most effective is to treat them more like a cat, and when you see a cat…
Now I grew up with a cat. Our cat’s name was Butterscotch growing up, but we just called him cat. I don’t know why that was. When Butterscotch would walk into a room, or when I came home from something, his response was like, “Oh, you’re here.” And then he take a few paces away and look back, and be like, “Nice to see you.” And then he continued to walk away. He was walking away. And so what’s the immediate reaction that somebody has to, that they kneel down and say, “Here Kitty, Kitty,” That is what the difference between sales and marketing is. Marketing, we’re drawing people in. We want people to come to us, and we want to give them that experience, but we don’t want to give it to them unless they’re absolutely willing to work for it, to want it and to crave it. Everybody wants attention. A cat gets attention because he acts like he doesn’t care. Now that cat, I wouldn’t, I would lean down and pick him up or whatever. Instantly as soon as I picked him up, that cat would start to purr. I’d pet him, and he would just sit there and purr. We’d sit and watch TV on the couch, and he would just sit there. He was a nonstop purring machine. He loved it. That cat lived for like 18 years. It died a long after I actually left my parents’ home.
Don’t be Dino where you maul everybody, you slobber all over him. You’re so excited that they might actually purchase something from you when in reality they just weren’t a little bit of information or they wanted to be polite. Here’s the key. The way that you get them to be excited is you give them more value than you’re taking from them.
What does that mean? That means that when we give value, people want to reciprocate. They want to reciprocate. Sometimes that’s with their wallet. Sometimes it’s with a review or a kind word. This happens most often; my wife and I love to go out to dinner. If I get a great server, I let them know and I usually pay. I usually show up with my wallet—Well, I always show up with my wallet to pay for dinner–but what I mean to say is I give them a great tip. Tipping is one of those lost arts. I think in a lot of ways it’s frankly unfair to the server, because so many people are just lousy tippers. I pride myself on not being a lousy tipper, but I’ll tell you, if somebody messes with me and like screws up and isn’t apologetic, or it’s just rude as a server, guess what? They’re not getting a good tip.
Here’s a real tip for you guys. See what I did there! Here’s a real tip: Be Willing to provide value long before you’re willing to get paid for it. What do I mean by that? In direct sales, in network marketing, in MLM, whatever acronym or designated you want to use for it, the money that comes is long, long, long overdue as compared to the value that you give. So if you are willing to give value and give so much value, people will reciprocate. If you’re willing to go out of your way to help other people and to be helpful in general, people will reciprocate when you need help.
I’ve gone through periods of unemployment in my professional career, and guess what? The initial people that I reach out to are not recruiters. Let me say that again. They are not recruiters. The people I reach out to are the people in my network. People I call friends, people who will commiserate with me a little bit. “Gosh, that stinks. You lost your job,” and at the same time say, “Hey, I know my buddy and this ABC Company over here who’s looking for somebody who needs your skillset, JR. You can go and help them. Here’s the person you should get in contact with. In fact, here, send me your resume, and I will forward that over to them with an email introduction to grease the skids to make things easier.” Those referrals is what can make our businesses grow like wildfire. You want somebody who doesn’t need you coming to you.
What I mean by that? When you’re trying to grow your business, you don’t want somebody who needs your opportunity. If they need your opportunity, they’re going to be desperate and they’re going to push. They’re going to be overzealous about things to the point where they scare people off. I’ve done this sadly in my career, as well, where I’ve just been so overly persistent and on top of things that it became a turnoff. People started ducking my calls and avoiding my emails instead of taking my call because I was providing more value. I was able to turn this on its head a bit and in my follow up actually provide an increasing value. When I’ve done that, I’ve seen greater success overall. It’s the same thing with our network marketing business. If you provide value, people are going to come to you.
Too often, I see people providing value by slashing price gas. The absolute worst thing you can do, especially if you’re using social media and 21st-century technology like we are, chances are you’re going to have friends in both in your business, as well as outside of your business that have intersecting groups. We’ve got some people on our team who we’re neighbors with and now we’re able to work together in this business is awesome, but here would be a problem. I’m not saying this happens. The problem would be is if we decided to go and say, “Hey, we’re having a holiday sale and get everything else, buy one get one free or get my cost or offer something like that.” Now, all the sudden, I’m undercutting my friend and my teammate who’s trying to sell the same products but can’t afford to undercut the price or needs that extra income that would come in the discount that maybe somebody else would offer. Don’t do that. Provide value in different ways. Provide value in a way that’s going to make your offer that much better than everybody else’s.
That is one of the big things that we’re going to be learning about. It’s actually one of the things that I’m working on right now. I’m working on the 21st-Century Recruiting Kickstarter. I plan to have this out by the end of the year, so in just a couple of weeks. My plan is going to take some time during the holidays. Get it pumped out and have it ready for you guys. You guys can actually sign up to pre-order it, if you will, and pre-order, it’s free. I’m giving this away. It’s a five-video series. It’s going to be a little over two hours of total content around recruiting and around how you can kickstart that, especially as you move into 2019. Everybody’s going to be looking for a little bit of extra excitement.
I’m excited to share this with you. You guys can go to podcast.MLMRenegade.com, and you can actually sign up for that and as soon as it comes out. I will have that for you. I’m still working on a couple of items there and getting it tweaked, but I will have it by the end of the year. But when you guys go there, you can get this Kickstarter so that you can actually understand what making an offer is really about. It’s not offering a discount making offers. V is providing value, that is not necessarily intrinsic only to your product or service, but it’s something that you can add the reason for them to come to you. A value that that only you can provide. And so, the 21st-Century Recruiting Kickstarter’s going to help provide that for you and also give you a brief glimpse into the world that we’re entering. I’m really excited here.
I’m coming in the first quarter of 2019 the 21st-Century Recruiting masterclass. The 21st-Century Recruiting is going to go live. This course is going to be huge and in-depth, hours and hours of content. It is going to help you to understand how we’re growing our business in network marketing, how we’re using utilizing these 21st-century techniques to actually grow our business and let us do things, like the trip that my wife and I took to Africa in April with our company. That was using some of these tips and tricks. Africa was amazing, by the way, different story for a different day. I can tell you is these things will change your business. Now, is it going to make it turnkey, you just turned something on and suddenly your business blows up? No, it wouldn’t. It won’t. Anybody who says differently is absolutely lying to you. But what it can give you is the tips and the pathway forward so that you can get recruiting in an automated sort of fashion, so that you can get recruiting to people who are maybe not acquainted with you right now. What that’s going to allow them to do is to onboard and to join your opportunity and your team in a way that’s going to make life easier for everybody on it.
So that’s all I’ve got for today, guys. I’m excited for it. Again, go to podcast.MLMRenegade.com and you can sign up for the for that Kickstarter. Once we have that out, I will make sure that we get that out to everybody. And please send your team, send your friends. Everybody it is free. I’m giving it away. This is part of me adding value to you because, ultimately, that is what I’m here for. I want to add value into your business because then we will have an opportunity to do some amazing things together. Have a great day.
Hey, thanks for listening. And please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. If you’d like some free training for your team, go to podcast.MLMRenegade.com and get your free 21st-Century Recruiting Kickstarter.