Sep 11
20
How much support does someone REALLY need?
To set the table for this question, let me share with you some comments made on my Facebook wall earlier today:
since there’s a more than 95% FAILURE rate in this industry, I’d say that means that there’s something VERY wrong with it… companies are NOT set up properly, the role of a sponsor is VERY important to new and inexperienced people…
For far too many “sponsors”, their idea of “training” is to throw a bunch of worn out email and pdf’s at the new recruit and tell them to “get on the corporate rah rah” call… … which can be great… but are more like eating Chinese food… awesome while it lasts and, 20 minutes later, you can’t remember what you ate (heard) and you are hungry all over again.
Let me first say that I believe any sponsor worth his salt is going to provide training and support to his team. It’s not even a statement that needs to be made because….well, it should go without saying.
With that said, though…..how much support does a new distributor need? Obviously it’s a question that will have many answers depending on who you ask. But it makes me think about how things were when some of us joined the industry years ago.
When I got started in my first serious endeavor, I went home from the meeting with
– a company catalog
– an 8-page booklet packet of 8 1/2×11 sheets that looked like it was a 10th generation copy of how the pay plan worked
– the “pink copy” of my enrollment form
– a cassette tape about the company
That was it. And that was probably more than a lot of the old-timers got when they joined the industry 10 and 20 years ahead of me.
And yet, I made it work. I enrolled 6 people in my first month. Within 90 days I was earning enough to quit my job. If I needed something and didn’t have it, I either figured out how to do without it….or I create what I needed.
Back in the old “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie” days, thousands of people got started and received little more than I did. Maybe a few copies of the cassette tape to hold them over until their own order came in. A booklet that explained how the tape system worked. A price list for products. That was about it.
A friend of mine joined Excel telecom in the 90s. He got a few nicer materials than I did but it was still nothing to really write home about. Most of it was company “propaganda”….no real sales tools or instructions on how to start building a business.
Fast-forward almost 20 years. Even the most LAME network marketing company offers 10X the amount of support that I (and many of you) lacked when we got started. And, from what I see, it seems that most companies offer at least some or all of the following:
A full schedule of conference calls
Recorded calls
PDF files
Weekly webinars and “over-the-shoulder” video training
Replicated squeeze pages
Printed materials
Autoresponders
Company sponsored promotions
List-building tools
Social media tools
And I understand that some of the things that we offer are a bit more complicated than the old days of “make a list of people you know”. But, at the same time, whenever I hear people who say they “couldn’t make money because they didn’t have any support”……
….I find myself thinking, “Really? You honestly think you didn’t have any support? You’ve got 100X the support that many of us had when we got started. And yet we had more desire than excuses. ”
So it all begs the question: are people in our industry REALLY lacking support? Or are they lacking in self-reliance?
What do you think?
