MLM Master Class
The Secret of Network Marketing Success
By John Counsel
Respected author, trainer and columnist, John Counsel, spells out the little-known secrets of true success in MLM. In this exciting series of Master Classes, you’ll discover how to make MLM work for you to create solid, long-term income and lasting friendships based on integrity and trust.
The reasons why most people don’t succeed in MLM are simple and easily fixed – when you know how!
In this series of Master Classes we’ll explore those reasons and how to overcome or prevent them. But there’s one critically important key that will determine whether or not you succeed, even when you know these little-known secrets of MLM success: you have to take action. You have to actually put them to work in your business – otherwise you’re no better off than people who surround themselves with books they never read. They just think they know more!
Ideas and techniques are nothing more than tools. Unless you pick them up and put them to effective use, they’re of no practical value. You’re just fooling yourself.
This sums up the four vital differences that separate the people who are successful in MLM from the vast majority who aren’t:
- Successful people identify the processes that will produce the results they want.
- Successful people learn to master and apply those processes.
- Successful people teach those processes to their people.
- Successful people lead by showing their people how to apply those processes by dynamic, practical example.
The Four Cornerstones of Success
In another column (“Buying Barkers Eggs in MLM”, May 1996 issue of Australian Business & Money-Making Opportunities), I wrote about the Four Cornerstones of Success. These four cornerstones apply to success in any aspect of life, not just MLM. If you haven’t yet read this article, why not click on the link and read it?
While all four are indispensable to your personal success, the first – Vision – is the most important because it’s both the starting point (as the potential reality you intend to make real) and the finishing point – when it finally becomes actual reality.
Your ability to create a vision of such a potential reality will be one of the key determining factors in your success or failure in MLM. There are two kinds of vision you need to be able to create:
- a clear vision for yourself of what you want to ultimately achieve from your involvement in MLM – especially with the company you’ve chosen, and
- a clear – but limited – short-term vision for your people, especially your newer ones.
The Three Hallmarks of a Leader
Every leader, whether born or made, has the same three attributes which distinguish them as true leaders:
- The ability to create a clear vision of something that doesn’t yet exist.
- The ability to communicate that vision to other people.
- The ability to inspire and motivate those people to help realise that vision.
There are two things you need to understand about leadership before you can master the processes involved:
- Less than 1% of people have the natural ability to spontaneously create a vision.
- Leadership is a combination of knowledge, attitudes, skills and resources. So leadership can be learned – and taught. It can be duplicated… if you know how!
That brings us to an apparent dilemma … how can people learn to become leaders when less than 1% of the population has the natural ability to create vision?
The two appear to work against each other, don’t they? Surely, though, there has to be an answer (or why would I be wasting this space, or my time and energy?).
In fact, there is. And, as you’ll discover, that answer lies hidden in what I’ve already said so far. It’s just not self-evident.
Your ability to create a vision is limited only by your own creativity. And creativity is nothing more than your ability to solve problems.
To solve any problem – to produce a predictable, desirable result – you have to be in control of the processes that produce that result. In other words, the key to success is your degree of personal control over the processes involved. And those processes are a combination of specific knowledge, attitudes, skills and resources.
The problem is that we’re not naturally in control of anything much at all. In fact, we’re born totally out of control!
It takes other people with the necessary knowledge, attitudes, skills and resources to get us here and help us survive. Our lives are spent acquiring more and more knowledge, attitudes, skills and resources so that we increase our personal control over the things around us and the situations we find ourselves in.
It’s the essence of life itself.
So it boils down to this: the more control you gain over the necessary knowledge, attitudes, skills and resources involved, the more creative you become – to the point where you’re able to create a clear vision of a potential reality, because you know how to realise it!
So why do we need other people?
Because of the four cornerstones of success: you have the vision – and, therefore, the discipline that stems from that vision – but you don’t have all the time, effort and resources you need to realise your vision in time to enjoy it! You need other people’s time, effort and resources to add leverage to the process.
Can you see now why you need to be able to communicate your vision to others, and then to inspire and motivate them to help you bring it to reality?
And can you see why you need TWO kinds of vision? The overall vision – the big picture – to keep you motivated and disciplined so that you can provide the leadership required for the long haul, plus a series of smaller, short-term visions based on your own achievements – your present reality – that serve as the limited (but achievable and believable) vision for the people you’re leading toward the greater eventual reality they can’t yet envision for themselves.
Then, as you all move forward together, you leading by example, their control of the necessary knowledge, attitudes, skills and resources increases as they succeed until they reach the point where their control – and their own creativity – enable them to begin creating their own vision for the future.
Now they’re true leaders. They’re ready to begin leading their own organisations, following your lead and duplicating themselves as leaders from within their own teams of people.
This is the true power of MLM. It’s what makes it the most enlightened, intelligent, honest, honourable and potent form of free enterprise. No other business system offers this kind of exponential duplication because no other system allows – let alone encourages! – its people to become strong, independent, creative, visionary leaders.
The ever-present risk
The moment we lose sight of that reality in our own MLM businesses, and try to exert control over our people, forcing or manipulating them into achieving our own ends at their expense, we forfeit our right to be regarded as true leaders.
If you don’t yet have the ability to create your own vision, align yourself with an upline leader who does. Learn from them. Learn to create your own, limited, short-term vision, based on their reality – the things that they’ve achieved already.
If you’re a sponsor, make sure you don’t fall into the dangerous trap of trying to create too big a vision of the future for your people. Focus them on realisable achievements in the short term, then teach them the knowledge, attitudes and skills they need, helping them acquire the resources they need, so that their personal control over these things grows until they become creative enough to envision their own future reality, for themselves.
Forget the red Ferrari or the Learjet parked on the backyard golf course. Show them how to earn a bonus cheque in their first month instead!
That’s real.
And they can use that achievement – including the knowledge, attitudes and skills they learned in achieving it – as the limited, short-term vision for their own new people.
© 1996 John Counsel. All rights reserved. No reproduction by any means permitted without prior written consent of the copyright owner. This article appeared originally in Australian Business & Money-Making Opportunities magazine.
©1998 The Profit Clinic. All rights reserved. This page updated 1 October 2005.
