Training Part 4 - Week 2

Multi-Level Marketing Training - Week 2

Once the recruit has a good understanding of the product it is time to move on to the sales process. Selling is the act of transferring ownership of the product to the prospect in such a way that both the salesperson and the customer feel good about the transaction. 

There is no chance that you will teach any person how to be a good salesperson in a single week. It is therefore essential that you have a canned sales presentation that your new distributor can learn and employ. The best way to do this is through a party plan approach. 

I had an MLM company that sold children’s bath products. We had a bubble bath with small fish in suspension, angel powder that turned the water different colours and Kaleidofoam which was a shaving cream in different colours. 

Out network would connect with a mom who had small children and get them to set up a Colour Workshop. This was a group of her friends who had small children. The Distributor would then go to the mom’s house and present the products using a visual process. They would turn glasses of water different colours, get everyone to play with the shaving foam and have the children hunt for fish in the bubble bath. The idea was to get the moms and the children involved with the product.

At the end of the fun, the distributor would hand out order forms and ask the moms to fill in the items they wanted to purchase. The moms would fill in the orders and make payment and the distributor would deliver all the orders to the mom hosting the workshop.

As you can see, this requires very little skill as the entire process was pre-designed. The distributor simply needed to follow the process step-by-step and the result would be a successful sales presentation. Simple!

This method has been used to good effect by Avon, Tupperware, Mary-K and many other direct selling companies. 

If your product does not lend itself to a group presentation you will need to create a canned presentation that works in a one-on-one scenario. It needs to be simple, duplicatable and effective. You must be able to teach it to your grandmother and she should be able to make sales by simply repeating the presentation. Duplication is everything and if you can’t find a way to teach your people to make a sale with ease, your business is going to struggle.

Even if you are the best salesperson in the world it is impossible to sell if you don’t have someone to sell to. Finding prospects and making appointments is, therefore, a necessary skill.

Making an appointment

As I mentioned before, you will never make an inexperienced distributor effective at making appointments without a canned script and sound strategy that they can implement. It is up to you to develop this script and strategy and then test it to make sure it is effective.

In my company, we taught the new distributors to start with a soft target - their friends and family. They would attend these presentations with their upline and practice their presentation and order taking skills. At the end of the presentation they would hand out a form and let it be known that the host of the workshop would be getting a selection of the products as a thank you for hosting the workshop. She would then ask if anyone else would also like to get some free products. Inevitably there would be one or two people who would volunteer. In this way, she would always have more presentations to look forward to. Every week she would phone people off this list and arrange a workshop with these people. Simple and effective. 

The mechanism for sales training has 4 steps

Let’s assume you have a killer presentation that is compelling and easy to duplicate. I will also assume that you have created an effective prospecting and appointment making mechanism. Week 2 is all about teaching your people to make appointments, present the products and make sales. 

1. The sponsor takes the recruit through the scripts and helps them memorize the pitch.
2. They role-play each part of the sales process until the sponsor is happy that the recruit is proficient.
3. They then make their first four appointments together.
    a. On the first appointment, the sponsor does the sales pitch and the recruit watches.
    b. On the second appointment, they do the sales pitch together.
    c. On the third appointment, the recruit does the sales pitch and the sponsor watches.
    d. Finally, on the fourth appointment, the recruit does the sales pitch on their own.
4. After each sales presentation, the sponsor and the recruit analyze the process and adjust as necessary.

If all your sponsors follow this process with each recruit, their retention and sales volumes will be exceptional. The result will be stable long-term sales.