The Profit Clinic

Here’s what works for me!

In this section, John Counsel outlines his four most consistently effective prospecting methods

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I get a lot of e-mails and on-line forum requests from people around the world wanting to know the most effective prospecting methods and tools. This seems to be the most frequent topic of discussion on MLM bulletin boards and e-mail discussion lists, too.

Which is hardly surprising. Sponsoring is like a funnel. You have a large opening at the top into which your prospects pour (hopefully!). Then they’re streamed into the filter, which separates those who are ready for your opportunity from those who aren’t. Those who are ready then pass down the narrow neck of the funnel to become new distributors in your downline organisation.

The funnel represents your presentation, your qualifying/disqualifying process and your pre-sign-up training (yes, you read it correctly… I said PRE-sign-up training).

But, no matter how well designed and built your funnel is, unless there’s a steady stream of prospects entering the top, nothing will emerge at the bottom.

On the other hand, if you have too many prospects flooding in, all at same time, they can clog the filter and nothing at all will get through… not even those who are ready. As always, in MLM, success is all about balance. Especially between quantity and quality.

As a professional marketer, management consultant and trainer, I’ve always invested time and effort in identifying the most effective ways to do things. Most people, however, especially in MLM, are obsessed with finding the most efficient ways of doing things, because they confuse the two. There’s a H-U-G-E difference.

Effective versus Efficient

In a nutshell, efficiency means doing things right – streamlining processes to make them work better. Important, but if what you’re doing more efficiently isn’t the right thing to be doing in the first place, you just end up doing the wrong things better than ever!

On the other hand, effectiveness means doing the right things, for the right reasons – and, preferably, doing them better (more efficiently).

Here’s an example:

Imagine you have a bicycle that you ride to work or school. It’s a single speed bicycle so, to improve efficiency, you embark on a personal fitness program to help you ride more efficiently, you strip it of all excess equipment, you reduce weight in any way you can, you fit racing wheels, tyres and handlebars and you wear aerodynamic clothing.

This is all well and good… but there’s no real leverage in these things. They just help make riding your bike to work more efficient… they reduce the work involved.

Now… if you were to add gears to your bike, you’d become more effective… boosting the results you gain.

You’d create leverage that allows you to reduce the effort required while increasing your speed. It would even out your input, so that you work less climbing a hill, and go much faster from the same effort on flatter terrain. You gain measurably higher results from less time and effort.

By doing all the other things – reducing weight, increasing personal fitness, streamlining the bike itself – you can still increase efficiency.

Efficiency tends to be a straight line increase on a graph. Effectiveness tends to be an exponential curve.

The difference is crucial to success in any kind of business. But, because of the exceptional leverage possible in MLM, it’s even more important, because it’s the core concept of this entire system of business.

So I look for prospecting methods and tools that focus on effectiveness rather than mere efficiency. (Don’t get me wrong… efficiency is important. But it’s what you do after you’ve built the most effective, synergistic, highly-leveraged system possible.)

Each of the following methods was chosen or developed to provide optimum leverage and effectiveness, and to allow effective duplication throughout my personal downline group. As a bonus, I've also included some insights into methods/tools that are effective, all right… but they damage or destroy your results because they're utterly self-defeating.

   
   
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