How to Meet People For Your Network Marketing Business

How to Meet People For Your Network Marketing Business

Meeting people and adding potential business prospects to your name list is crucial to your success in network marketing. In fact, the lack of names on your list to contact and share your business opportunity is one of the major stumbling blocks for most network marketers. Many network marketing business leaders will advise you to write down your “warm list” which consists of family, friends, co-workers, etc to expose your business and get it off and running. This is a great place to start. The people on your “warm list” are the people that you already know and they already know and trust you. But what happens when you run out of this “warm market” list of names? How do you continue to expose and grow your business? Well, for many network marketers, this spells the end of the road. They are unsure of how to meet new people offline to share their opportunity and they get frustrated and quit. The good news is that you don’t have to get to the point of quitting!

There are several ways to add names to your prospect list that can be done both online and offline. For the purpose of this post, I will focus on helping you understand and get comfortable meeting people offline as you live your life. In my opinion, learning to meet people offline and develop your people skills will make meeting people online even easier. So let’s get started!

Let’s face it, in today’s world where people would rather text you than call you, the thought of meeting a complete stranger in the marketplace, at a gas station, or in the mall can seem quite daunting. We have become a society that uses technology to communicate, but have forgotten the old fashioned way of simply having a face to face conversation with others. This makes meeting others even more complicated.

What I have found through my own experience in building a successful network marketing business is that the network marketer wants to meet people to expand his or her business, but they are not sure how to “break the ice” and start a conversation with someone. Walking up to someone and starting a conversation can intimidate even the most skilled people person out there. So how do you do this?

One of the best ways that I have learned and experienced in striking up a conversation with someone is to look for what I call free information. Free information is something that both you and the other person knows. It could be something like a shirt they are wearing, something that they are looking at in a store, or even the weather! When you identify the free information, all you have to do is make a comment on it and the conversation has begun! For example, If you are in a store and you see someone with a t-shirt with a college name on it, the obvious question that I would ask is, “did you go to that school?” Whether they answer yes or no does not matter. The fact is, you have now started a dialouge with them. The conversation can go in a number of different directions from there. I will explain more on that later. Another example of free information that you can start a conversation with is the weather. “Man, it’s hot out here today. Do you know what the temperature is?” or “We could sure use some rain, it is very dry.” Both of these examples are very open and friendly conversation starters. There are literally hundreds of ways that you can start a conversation with free information. Be creative and have fun with it!

Once you have “broken the ice”, you can now expand on the conversation. The best way to do this is to ask open-ended questions about the person. Open-ended questions are those questions that require more than a yes or no response to answer it. The person who you ask the question to will give you some more detailed information about themselves or the subject. In my previous example of the college t-shirt, if they say that they did indeed go to that school, you can ask them when they graduated, what their major was, what made them choose that school, what did or didn’t they like about the school, etc. Whatever their answer is, follow it up with another open-ended question in response to the answer that they just gave you. Resist the temptation to turn the conversation back onto you by responding to them about the school you went to, etc. Acknowledge that you heard their reply and then follow it up with another open-ended question. Keep this in mind, people like to talk about themselves more than they want to hear about you, and this is now the time to let them do it. This is the secret of a good conversationalist, and how I have had great success in building my business offline as well as online. 

The more you practice starting conversations with others, the better and more comfortable you will become. You will always run into the unfriendly person who may be having a bad day and really does not want to talk. Who cares! Just keep on moving and strike up another conversation. The key is, do not take it personal if someone is not friendly or does not seem to want to talk. You are looking for friendly people who you can connect with and potentially become business partners with. If you don’t connect, then they were not meant to be in business with you. Don’t worry, there are millions of other people out there just waiting for you to talk to them!

You can read another helpful post on the 5 Characteristics of a Likable Person to help you in communicating and developing your people skills.

Are you ready to start your own Network Marketing business now? I can help you! With years of experience and a great mentoring team, all you need to bring to the table is your ambition and willingness to learn. Click on the Join A Winning Team link now, fill out the information, and I will see you on the other side!!

To Your Success,

Ken Cloutier

Ask Why

The Most Important Question Ever

I was reminded about a key question on how to better connect with people a couple days ago and wanted to share it with you. It is always good to be reminded of things that can truly help you become successful when dealing with people! As you hopefully already know, people are mainly interested in only themselves and therefore, like to talk about themselves. A good conversationalist understands this and gets people to talk about themselves as a means of better connecting with them. There is, however, another type of question that you can ask people that will help you get to know them on a much deeper level rather than typical water cooler, basic conversational talk.

If you are meeting someone for the first time (or even know them on some level) and would like to find out more about them and get to know them better, there is a key question that you should ask them. For the most part, a conversation might take the form of if they live around the area or what kind of work they do. You might even talk to them about hobbies that they have, etc. Usually you will get a very general answer such as, I live over in _____ town, I work as a computer networker, or I like to play golf, etc. This is logical yes or no information. In order to really connect with someone, it doesn’t help to just know logical information about them. You will want to gain emotional information from them. What I mean by emotional information is information given by someone that has feelings or desires attached to it. How do you obtain emotional information from somebody that you just met or know on a very basic level? Very simple, ask the question: WHY?

Yes, it is that easy! When you as the question, “Why,” the individual will give you insight as to what kind of person they are. For example, let’s say you ask someone what kind of work they do. They answer that they are in computer networking. You could leave it at that and go on to ask another question, or you can dig a little deeper by asking why they chose computer networking as a profession. This will cause them to give you some additional insight into their personalities, likes, goals, dreams, etc. Do you see how this is more of an emotional answer that will help you to connect with them rather than the typical answers? If they say something like they got in that field because they already know computers and didn’t need to learn a lot, you can gain some insight about this person. If they said the same thing but they are working in computer networking for now to pay the bills but are really excited about another project that they have going on outside of work, you would get another perspective on the person and their ambition level. You got this insight all by just asking the question “WHY?” Keep in mind, this is just one example. I could give you hundreds more!

By asking people why they like or do something is a great way to learn more about the people that you are connecting with. This is how great friendships and business relationships can start. You have to be the person to ask the right questions to extract the information that will help to move the relationship further.

Don’t forget to grab my FREE 10 Day Blueprint series that will give you some other valuable success tips! 

To Your Success!

Ken Cloutier

 

 

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