users may simply be that they haven’t been called on in a while and asked if
they might be interested in placing an order. Or, if the customers were intro-
duced to a distributor who is no longer actively building a business, they may
not know how to order additional products. These former customers repre-
sent a gold mine right under your nose. When approached courteously and
professionally, many will reorder products or services, while others will be
open to learning how you and your company might enhance their lives
through your income opportunity.
Remember, prospects are everywhere. Casually talk to other parents at
your child’s after-school baseball game. A customer or potential business
builder could be sitting right next to you! What interests do you share with
your prospects? Do they play golf? Consider joining them for an afternoon
round. Always be thinking, “How could I create value for this particular
prospect that would allow him or her to experience the value of working in
partnership with me and my company?” If you make sure it’s not threatening
and it is easy for them to explore the possibilities of working with you to de-
velop a second income, your prospecting efforts can be much more successful.
Your goal is to make sales and identify prospective business builders as
you go about your daily efforts. Proper research, preparation, and legwork
will lead to dramatically enhanced results, in contrast to a more haphazard
approach in which you just hope to run into people who may need your com-
pany’s products or have an interest in your income opportunity. Look at it
this way. Imagine that you’re in the plant business. You grow houseplants and
carry 12 varieties, each of which blooms in a different month of the year, so
you have a different plant available each month of the year. Each of these
plants, however, requires 12 months to grow from seedling to full bloom. In
addition, each plant requires attention once a month. This attention includes
feeding, watering, pruning, and rotation. So you set up a schedule in which
you plant the seeds a year in advance and then every month do what is re-
quired to continue or start the growth of each plant. The payoff doesn’t come
until a year after you’ve started, but each month thereafter a new plant will be
ready to sell. You’re all set—unless you forget a step some month, in which
case you probably won’t discover your oversight until many months down the
line. By then it will be too late. In the plant business, you can’t plant the seeds
on the thirteenth of the month and expect to have a sale on the first.
The development of your network marketing business also requires
investing in a future payoff. The time lag between planting your seeds and
reaping the rewards varies. Each month, however, you must do what is nec-
essary to ensure a future yield. The maintenance and growth of your busi-
ness requires that you: (1) continually replenish your source of prospective
customers and potential business partners; (2) qualify prospects to deter-
mine if they possess the sort of commitment necessary to achieve success in
network marketing; (3) study the needs, wants, and dreams of each prospect;
194 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO NETWORK MARKETING