The saying “There’s more than one way to skin a cat” could not be truer than when we’re discussing ways to build our home based businesses. Home meetings, hotel meetings, social media, three-way calls, webinars, and these are just the start! Never has there been a time when network marketers have more tools available to them for building large businesses than today. It’s like being at an all-you-can-eat, and every station is one of your favorites. Where to start?
Here are 10 points of emphasis anyone can use to build a Championship caliber business:

1. Put yourself in the way of mentorship–Find someone to be truly accountable to ASAP. This could be your direct upline, or someone further up in your line of sponsorship, but you want to make sure this person is going to listen to what you say, review what you’ve done, and be strong enough to call you on the carpet for where you’ve fallen short. Someone who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings in the effort to stretch you towards your potential.

2. Set goals with the end in mind-Get a picture in your mind of what you want your business to look like within a specified period of time. Then figure out what associated work will lead to that result. Set milestones along the way to see if you’re on track, ahead of schedule, etc…

3. Embrace the Process-I’ve battled with weight all of my life, but at the times when I’ve been in the best shape were when I committed not only to the goal, but to the associated work. I can say I want to lose the weight, but I know that going to the gym 3-4x per week and eating right is the only way I’ll get there. Committing to the result without committing to the work doesn’t work

4. Work your plan, not everyone else’s-There are a zillion new ideas every day. Work with your mentor to formulate a plan, and then work it. You can add in other things once you’ve mastered the basics.

5. NEVER LIE TO YOURSELF-You know if you gave a championship effort today, and you know if you mailed it in. Lying to yourself is the fastest way to destroy your self-image, self-confidence, and ultimately, your results.

6. Take DAILY steps towards your goals-Do SOMETHING everyday towards your goal, this builds consistency and stability IN YOU.

7. Continuing Education-Leaders are Readers, and Earners are Learners. Period.

8. Find Someone to Mentor-The sooner you begin to share what you’ve learned and accomplished the more ingrained into your own mind it becomes.

9. Measure Results, but don’t Dwell on them-Never get to high after a good day, or too low after a bad one. The only variable you can control from day to day is the work you do.

10. HAVE FUN-If you’re not having fun with the business you’re doing, it’s not going to become more fun with another person involved. Enjoy it before your team is built, and your people will, too!

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Tiger Woods has one. Michael Jordan had one. Herb Brooks was one. Phil Jackson is one. If you look back through history, with very few exceptions, the truly great and influential people across all disciplines had this one thing in common-they all had a coach in their lives. Here are six of the best reasons for having a personal coach:

1. True Accountability
You know that your coach wants what is best for you-they’ve proven it by taking time out of their schedule to help you grow. In turn, you want to perform for them, to prove that you are worthy of their time. This is a very quick way to get pulled out of your comfort zone.

2. Brutal Honest
Your significant other may sugarcoat it for you, your Mom may think everything you do is great, but your coach is one of the few people you can count on to be honest with you, to the point of brutality. Its human nature to pull away from pain and towards pleasure, a good coach knows that facing and overcoming the pain is the only way for you to grow stronger.

3. Deeper Introspection
When you have a relationship with a coach you can trust, you know that they have your best interests at heart. That makes it easier for you to pull down the wall most humans have put up, and get real with the person who matters most in this equation-yourself.

4. Root Cause Analysis
A lot of people spend so much time treating the symptoms, without ever actually dealing with the actual problem at hand. Having that extra set of eyes and ears to bounce things off can never be underestimated. If your coach helps you get the real problem solved, it’s amazing that the symptoms disappear right along with it.

5. Keep the main thing the main thing
A good coach can be the difference between a proactive existence and a reactive one. It’s easy for any of us to become so bogged down with our daily responsibilities that we can often lose sight of the bigger picture. A strong coach will do a good job of giving you a hand out of the weeds when you fall in them.

6. Accurate external assessment
Your coach will view you with the eyes of someone who wants you to reach the potential you have inside. They will help you to maximize your strengths, while you minimize your weaknesses. Your coach will even draw strengths out of you that you didn’t even know you had.

If Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, two of the greatest individual performers EVER needed personal coaches, then I think we would all be better served having a coach in our corner as well.

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At my day job, I am the Recruiting Manager for a software engineering company. It’s not terrible as jobs go, but it is a job, and therefore it is evil and must be destroyed! Whew, sorry, I had to get that out! Anyway, there are a few lessons I’ve learned in 10 years of recruiting, which apply directly to this business. Grasp these concepts, and you can be well on your way to success in network marketing. Fail to grasp them, and you can roll the dice on Social Security and your 401(k).

POSITION DESCRIPTION – Capturing the requirements of the position allows me to capture a vision of what my ideal candidate looks like, and compare every candidate I come across against that standard. It allows me to clearly identify their strengths and weaknesses, and evaluate where my opportunities to learn new things to help my new employee may come. Do you know what qualities you want your next distributor to have? At one point in my business, my only qualifications were a pulse and a social security number, and the pulse was negotiable! What a surprise that I wandered in the wilderness for so long!

RECRUIT QUALIFIED APPLICANTS – My employer’s primary business is software engineering, so I target my recruiting efforts to people who either; are software engineers, were software engineers, or want to be software engineers. I can’t make bee keepers into software engineers, no matter how hard I try, no matter how nice they are, and no matter how sharp they seem. If you have non-negotiable qualification traits in mind that your prospect doesn’t have, THEY ARE
NOT QUALIFIED, AND YOU CANNOT MAKE THEM QUALIFIED. If you sponsor that person, more than likely, they will end up being the “If THIS person can build it, ANYONE can build it” story of your business.

FIND PEOPLE INTERESTED IN YOUR POSITION – Cold calling, at work or in my business, is the bane of my existence. Reason being, cold calling provides the greatest chances for failure of any activity that can be performed, and for no other reason than the person is just NOT INTERESTED. If you want to hunt for whales, you have to fish where whales swim, it’s just that simple. If the candidate is not interested in my position, it’s not my job to make them interested, or convince them about how great my company is, tell them how many levels deep the commission structure pays or how many celebrities are on our team. Conversely, if they are interested, it is definitely my job to find out what it is about my opportunity that they need, and highlight how we can help them achieve it.

ASSESS THE CANDIDATES WANTS – In particular, assess them against the available role. Does the person want additional training that we offer? Does this candidate want to be a part of a team, and have a personal mentor, and does our opportunity provide them both? When this is in place, there’s little to no selling involved. You’ve identified that person’s needs, and how you can meet them.
Recruiting for my job, just like what we do in network marketing, is not a sales function, but a marketing function. This business becomes easy when we keep the main thing the main thing: build a network of qualified people, and market our opportunity to them. Keep this in mind, and the rest will come easy!

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Has this ever happened to you? You go to the latest conference for your network marketing business, and the speakers get you so excited that you can hardly sleep. You and your team commit to each other that when you get back home, you’re going to tear this thing up!
Once back home, you realize that it’s back to the mall to meet some new prospects (suspects). The idea makes your skin crawl, but you are in submission to your upline/mentor, because they have “your best interests at heart.”

You have already made a big burly list of everyone you know, and blew through it within your first 60 days in the business, with little success to show for it. But hey, “Some Will, Some Won’t, So What,” right? You grab your spear out of the closet, and go to Border’s or Wal-Mart in search of Moby Dick, because you have that “blind faith” that your upline/mentor couldn’t possibly steer you wrong. So, why no results?
This article is going to discuss the top 4 real reasons people quit.

1. NO QUALIFIED LEADS – With few variations, network marketers are taught to build as large a list of names as possible, include everyone, and then systematically go through that list in search of potential team members. This approach is about as effective as picking up your local phone book, starting with the letter A, and calling everyone from Aaron to Zuckerberg. You wouldn’t recruit a mechanic to be CEO of a financial services firm, so why treat your MLM business differently?

2. NO REAL MARKETING TRAINING – What most network marketers end up using is some form of network prospecting and/or convincing, but usually very little marketing is involved. Marketing is a process of reaching out to potential customers with a message designed to sift them into two categories: qualified and unqualified. It has nothing to do with talking someone into something you will have to talk them into every day, because they really weren’t qualified in the first place. There is a place for friends and family in your business-as customers. When they see your success, they will ASK YOU for more information on what you’re doing. Market to someone who is looking for what you’re offering.

3. Lack of Money – People get involved in network marketing to make money, and they can’t if they don’t have any leads. But if they don’t have any money, how can they generate leads? It’s a vicious cycle, and the average network marketer’s answer to this challenge is “A Winner Will Find a Way.” That may be true, but a Leader will blaze a path for their Winners to Follow. If you have educated yourself on how to successfully generate lead traffic, you can easily teach it to the people in your group. In fact, you should reach the point where you can help your distributors monetize the leads who say NO to their businesses. That’s a value add!

4. Duplication – Whatever you are doing, promoting or marketing, your team will do, promote or market. Really, most of them will only duplicate 50% of what you do, say or promote, but that’s not the point here. Continuing the same pattern that has resulted in your own frustration, doubt and lack of success will undoubtedly lead to frustration, doubt and lack of success for your team members, and the eventual death of another network marketing business.

At the end of the day, network marketing is about relationships. Evaluate the relationships you want to have, who you would like to have them with, and how you would like to be seen in the industry. You can’t eliminate quitting, but you can make it easier to pinpoint why they quit, and shore up that area of your business.

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