Are you generating leads online or offline?
The retention-rate of distributors sponsored as online leads is significantly worse.
At the Network Marketing Forum two successful US-resident network marketers (in different successful companies) both of whom I respect greatly have recently told me (quite independently and spontaneously) that they've eventually and reluctantly taken the decision to concentrate on building internationally, and no longer to sponsor any internet-derived domestic US leads at all, because they're fed up to the back teeth of putting time, effort and energy into training people almost all of whom drop out of the business within their first 3 - 6 months.
All the people in my own company who have tried using the internet to generate leads (and we have no rules against it at all) have found that what they have ended up with is a collection of people who have been in many MLM's previously, never managed to make a living in any of them, dropped out of them, and moved on to another company, probably thinking that "this will be the one", without ever quite making the connection and realising that the unifying theme in all their previous experiences was that they tried to build their businesses online exclusively.
My belief
is that "internet leads" who do express interest in a home-based
business opportunity have usually expressed interest in many, over long
periods of time, and the reality is that they're very high risk for
continuing to do so after you put your time/effort/energy into getting
them started in your business. Some (perhaps many) will inevitably be lured
away to the latest, most hyped, most flashy new "pre-launch". This
very rarely happens in the case of offline-generated leads, whose
retention-rate is therefore much higher, partly perhaps because they're
so much less likely to be continually exposed to all the hype-promotions.
My feeling about this is that it's a bit like dating a philanderer
rather than a man who's actually looking for a long-term partner:
whatever their apparent intentions on joining you, quite often their
behaviour-patterns will subsequently repeat themselves.
I don't do anything difficult or clever or complicated at all in building my own business, but since I've been on the internet myself, more than 2 years of chat with other MLM distributors (in the two forums I frequent), some of them rather successful ones and many more not earning a living at all, have convinced me that our own retention-rates (for both distributors and customers, actually) are dramatically higher than average, which I attribute partly to the fact that we're not doing our business-building online at all. We're generating "real leads" rather than "virtual leads".
We have no "autoship" but my company audits very accurately (and accordingly to very strictly defined parameters) on a month-to-month basis the sales volumes, sponsoring numbers, personal purchases and so on of all its distributors. This information is (understandably) not publicised, and I can therefore do no more than invite you to take my word for it that it makes very impressive reading, with the notable exceptions of people venturing online to try to promote their businesses.
Many people, especially in the early stages of building their MLM business, make the mistake of measuring how well they're doing according to the number of people they're sponsoring. The learning curve is sometimes slow and difficult. People imagine that if their distributor-numbers grow steadily over their first few months, that they must be doing the right thing and securing their future. Sadly, it ain't necessarily so. All too often people are earning no more after 12 months than they were earning after 6 months. I believe that this "syndrome" is very common in businesses built up from online-generated leads and much rarer in businesses built up from offline-generated leads, because the medium-term retention-rates are wildly different and one can all too easily get a entirely false picture from the short term, which is all that many people ever really see because they change companies so often and never actually achieve anything stable, let alone duplicable.
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