MLM Success – How To Visualize
By Michael Dlouhy

You’ve seen this line before:

“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, man can achieve.”

This proposition has been proven time and time and time again throughout history.

How could David possibly beat Goliath? No way! I guarantee you, he saw it in his mind first, then did it.

How could one guy – Michael Dell – sell more computers than Big Blue, IBM, the greatest US company of the 20th Century? Do you think he had a picture? Do you think he had a vision to follow as he built Dell Computer?

How could that bunch of college amateurs on the U.S. hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics ever beat the Soviet team of professionals who had been playing together 10 or 15 years … a team considered better than any of the pro teams in the U.S. or Canada? How could that possibly happen? Do you think someone had a picture? Do you think it all began with a visualization somewhere?

I guarantee you it did.

As you listen in on our daily Mentoring For Free phone calls, you’ll hear stories of many people who are finally achieving what they wanted in life. Every one of them has a picture.

How do you think Ebay got started? Somebody wondered, “Hey – what about an online flea market?”

So create the picture of what you want in extraordinary detail. Write it all down, every little bit of it. Then taste it, smell it, hear it, touch it, see it. Once you have all the details filling in all your senses, you won’t need but 3 or 4 minutes a day to put yourself in that full-sensory replica of exactly what you will achieve. The more you experience it, the closer you will get to achievement.

That is how great successes have always begun. You can read more about how to create your best “success pictures” in my ebook, “Success In 10 Steps.” It’s a free download. Just copy that model. It works.

Another great article by my personal friend and mentor.

5 MLM Leadership Power Keys
By Michael Dlouhy

Focus on these 5 strategies to guide your MLM team to success, and you’ll be recognized as a network marketing leader.

1. Focus on the opportunity in every problem. Take the complex and make it simple. Then explore, discover and plan the best course of action to turn every problem into an opportunity.

You need to systematically investigate, evaluate, map, organize & communicate solutions.

2. Be bold. Picture in full detail the outcome you want. Then engage & inspire your group. Show them your compelling vision. Excite their hearts, minds, souls & spirits.

Learn to focus, create, shape, sharpen and publicize your vision as you encourage your team to embrace it and its inevitable outcomes.

3. Help your MLM team prioritize. Keep the agenda REALLY simple. Concentrate on training your people to:

a. Find prospects.

b. Follow up with prospects.

c. Build long-term value-based relationships.

d. Continue following up on a regular basis (at least monthly) by email & phone, building the relationship, until that person opts out or joins them.

4. Develop a strong plan and stick to it.

Strategic planning is critical. A good working strategy encourages your team to trust you and to follow through on the details of your plan. Be sure to design a system that lets you monitor their activities in some way, so you can know whether they are actually following through correctly.

5. Be trustworthy. Be fair, honest, and consistent when dealing with your MLM team. Your behavior reflects your character.

Focus on these 5 leadership power keys, and you will be successful.

You might have the greatest product in the world and it could work great but unless it’s priced right and has a good pay out you’re not going to make a lot of money. And just because you like the product doesn’t mean that others will also.

I think most network marketing companies have great products. If they don’t they won’t be in business very long. What you want to find is a product that everyone wants and needs and then recommend that to people. It also has to be priced right and be something that is consumed so they need more each month or so. And something that can’t be bought in local retail stores.

And you don’t have to use all the products in your company to promote them. There will be some products that you don’t use but are good and you can still promote them cause you know from others how great they are.

Also your products should be able to be retailed. If a person can sign up and buy the product for half of the retail price then you aren’t going to be able to retail products to make that 50 percent and you will probably only make anywhere from 1 to 10 percent. Wouldn’t you rather have a product that you can make more money on by selling it at retail then making a small percentage on the wholesale price?

How To Get Your Network Marketing Prospects On Autoship
By Michael Dlouhy

Key: How Your Company Business Model Drives The Behavior In The Field

A huge percentage of successful businesses, both online & offline, offer “autoship.” Autoship – also known as “til forbid” – means your company automatically ships product every month on a credit card order, until they are told to stop.

I never talk to a prospect about our company compensation plan without telling them that they need to be on autoship. I start by telling them how Linda & I won the Diamond trip to Italy last year. A week before we left, our company President called me up and said, “Michael, I’ve got to ask you a question.”

I said, “Sure. What is that?”

He said, “Last Thursday, we noticed in your group that you had a 94% autoship.”

I chuckled and said. “Huh? It should be 100%!”

And he laughed and I laughed. I know that’s extremely high. And he wanted to know, “Well, how do you do that?”

I told him, “Because we explain it.”

Here Is What I Say To My Prospects

It’s designed for my company situation, but you can model it for your company. Just think about these points, and how you can relate them to YOUR business.

Here is what I tell my prospects:

If you’re going to join me in my business, you’re going to want to be on autoship for 4 good reasons. Let me explain that to you.

The first reason you want to be on autoship is, you can now write that autoship amount off your taxes as overhead, just like your advertising budget, because you’re going to use those products to give away as samples to somebody. That is an advertising expense. So you can write that off and get free product from the company.

Reason number 2: you do want to get free product from our company. We have X number of products, and if you’re only using 3 or 4 of them, you might never ever experience our Super Duper Energy Formula. Last month, they gave that away to everyone on a $100 autoship. This month they gave away their weight-loss product.

Now, you might not need to lose weight, but maybe your sister does. If you had a free product, you’d probably give it to your sister.

Reason number 3: you’re going to want to qualify for a free $2000 monthly car bonus. The only qualification for you to get the car bonus is to be on autoship.

When you join as an Instant PooBah, for $189, $29 of that is your kit and your 6 websites. There is no monthly hosting fee for your websites. You get $160 in product, and they pay an $80 fast-start bonus. And in 9 months, you qualify for the car bonus. In 9 months, they add up the autoship volume on your 3rd level, which is your widest level, and if you have a total for the calendar month of at least $2500, they pay you a 10% 3rd level bonus … starting at $250, and it caps out at $2000 a month for your car bonus. So if you had $20,000 autoship volume on your 3rd level, you’d get $2000 a month for your car bonus.

The only bad part of the car bonus is, you don’t have to buy a car. You can use that money for anything you want. Pay off your mortgage, pay your rent, your power bill, buy gasoline, pay for insurance, take a trip to the Bahamas. It’s YOUR money.

Linda & I use that money to invest in real estate. I have one guy buying a boat, another buying an airplane. The point is, it’s YOUR money. Do what you want to do with it. A lot of companies would force you to buy a certain make & model of car with your car bonus. With us, you can use it however you want.

So reason #1 is to write the product off your taxes as advertising, so you’ve got free product. Reason #2 is to get our free extra product every month. Reason #3 is to qualify for the free $2000 monthly car bonus, and … …

Reason #4: If you join as an Instant Grand Space Commander, that’s $499. You get $600 worth of product, and the $29 kit. You get the same websites, no monthly fees. And the company pays up to a $200 fast start bonus on that. So when you sponsor new Instant Grand Space Commanders, you have the potential to make $200 from every one of those sign-ups.

If you come in as an Instant Poobah at $189, you can get up to an $80 fast start bonus.

Now … there’s also a $29 level, if you just want to be an associate. You don’t get any product.

The main thing is, the autoship is the same for both the Instant Grand Space Commander & Instant Poobah. So if you come in at $499, you can leverage and earn a $200 fast-start on your recruits, and if you want to build income, that gives you your best value.

I Never Push Them One Way Or Another

I give them that information and let them make up their mind. And most come in as Instant Grand Space Commander.

Now here’s the point. If a person almost understands what I just said about the business, and about how they can write it off their taxes and everything, is there any reason they wouldn’t be on autoship?

There’s only one time a guy told me, No, he couldn’t afford it. And I asked him what he did for a living. He said he worked for Home Depot. So I told him that when he goes in to work on Monday, change his withholding from 1 dependent to 9 dependents. The government will never challenge it or check it. They’ll take $50 to $70 a week less out of your check.

And you’ll get $200-$300 a month more money in your pocket that you can build your business with. At the end of the year, when you file your taxes, all you have to do is claim your home-based business, and you can write off all the money your’re spending on your business because of that. (I’m not a tax consultant, and you need to talk with your tax consultant to verify this.)

If you explain that, you’ll get 90% or more on autoship. Why would they not be on autoship if they understand how this works?

Now here’s the point. Maybe you build a group of 1000 reps. But if you only have 100 of them on autoship, what good did you do? So you’d better build from the top down, having your front-line leaders on autoship.

Make sense?

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Why Most Network Marketers Do Zero Retail Business
By Michael Dlouhy

Is retailing product a true network marketing opportunity?

On this planet, the lifeblood of any company is retail sales to the end consumer. Think about this, Business models drive the behavior in the field.

Would you agree with me that every product – doesn’t matter what it is – a bottle of water, a coke or Pepsi, an aspirin, a vitamin, a liquid nutritional drink – it could be any product out here … if the quality and quantity of all the ingredients, are exactly the same, I ask people, “Would you agree with me that the wholesale manufacturing cost of any product is within pennies of each other?”

And the answer I get is, “Absolutely, no question about it, that is true.”

Now here’s where the problem comes in.

Marketing The Product To The End Consumer

Let me you a story. Companies A, B and C, these are real companies in real life. Company A hired a doctor to formulate the best vitamin product on the planet – and they did. it’s something you can take all at once. It doesn’t interact with any of the other ingredients. Works great. That company is marketing that product. They are a fairly large company, publicly traded.

Another company comes along and what’s so funny about the story is the COO, the bean counter for the first company, sold his piece of the pie and became a distributor with company B.

company B has a binary compensation plan. Now the first company is a stairstep break away comp plan, second company is a binary. So A is the stairstep, B is the binary. And the binary plan is just one left, one right.

Now, that guy said “Whoa! We had this great product with company A … now we want it with company B. So they go and hire the doctor away from company A to formulate them the best product.

And I would ask you another question. When you are a publicly traded company, you are not spending your money. You are spending investors’ money. So when you put that dot, the comma, the zero on a check, does it really matter to you? Does it really matter where you put it? Absolutely not, it is not your money. It’s like you shopping with my credit card.

So they hired the doctor. What that cost, I have no idea. But they told the doctor, “Make us the best vitamin product!” And he said, “Well … they’ve already got it in company A. But we could take that same formula and I could increase everything one gram.

So He Added One More Gram of Stuff To The Stuff

So every capsule of THEIR new stuff had one more gram in it. Great, no problem, So they created that product.

Now, company C came along, The founder of the company said, “Whoa! Company A, company B, they have got a great product. It’s not patented. Don’t need the doctor. Four manufacturing companies make the identical product. All I need to do is get the formula, take it to our manufacturer, see if they can improve it.”

So they did. So they took the same formula and added to it, improved the formula.

Now, here is the reality, I am going to give you the retail sales price on all 3 company’s products.

Company A: $114 retail
Company B: $104 retail
Company C: $39.95 retail

But Isn’t The Wholesale Cost Identical?

Now, you agreed with me that the wholesale manufacturing cost of any product is within pennies. So why the big spread? If you joined Company B, I know for fact that you can buy that product at the super duper low wholesale price of 79.95.

Now, you got to ask yourself this question, since Company B’s wholesale price is double the retail price of company C. why the big difference? Well, first, you need to understand that the business model drives the behavior in the field. In company A and B, the business model promotes the behavior of recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit. Why? Because normal mortals will not pay that kind of money for product.

They’ll only buy the product to be in the business. So that business model creates the behavior of recruit, recruit, recruit. Now, company C, because it’s $39.95 retail, that creates a behavior of retail, retail, retail. And you can prove it with these numbers.

To make $10,000 a month on the residual auto ship volume in Company A, you need 1400 – 1600 people. Company B, you need 2200 – 2400 people, Company C … you need less than 400 people. Same product. Same people you are selling to. So the big question is, can average part time people ever build a group of 2400? Or can they build a group of 400 easier? Think about that.

So The Business Model Drives The Behavior In the Field. Always!

Why is your product so expensive? Here’s why, the company need a big, big, big, big, big building. It’s so comical. They say, “Oh, we’re debt free.”Yeah. They’re debt-free off the backs of the distributors, they stole the compensation plan to build the big building. Doesn’t help the reps at all.

Think about this for a second. Companies A, B and C, and the breakage … that’s all profits that they make out of you, the distributor. Breakage is the difference between the wholesale cost and the retail cost, that mark-up from 39.95 retail to the 79.95 wholesale. That pays for the big building, the company jet, pays for all that.

A few years back, a prepaid phone card company charged $2 or $3 a minute for prepaid phone calls. You bought a prepaid phone card back then for a dollar a minute. But these were collector’s cards. (”If you don’t scratch the back of the card off, and don’t use the time, it makes it more valuable.”)

So this plastic card, which cost maybe 25 cents to create, was selling for $2 a minute. And the company convinced the people not to scratch it off, so they never had to pay for the phone time.

Isn’t that amazing? It’s no wonder network marketing gets a bad name.

One way to build your business is to sell products at retail. And to do that, you must join a company with value-priced products. It’s important that you look around to find that. Don’t settle for a company that charges 2 or 3 times the product value. Consumers are smart. You will always struggle to build with that company.

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The Big Myth of Sponsoring MLM Distributors

In the real world, when you talk to 100 people, you will get 10 retail sales and 1 new distributor IF you have a value-priced product.

Think about this. You talk to 100 people. You get 10 customers, 1 distributor. If you’re in a business model that is all about getting distributors, because the payplan does not drive the behavior of getting retail customers …

You Are Losing BIG-TIME!

If your payplan is only about recruiting, and your products are over-priced compared to the same product at Wal-mart and your payplan does NOT pay you 30% or 40% on retail sales, then your chances of long-term success are very, very small.

THAT is the road of destruction.

So ask yourself 2 key questions:

1. Are my products priced competitively against the same thing (or similar) at Wal-mart?

2. Can I earn 30% or 40% commission by retailling product … or does all that money flow to the upline?

For long-term network marketing success, you need to be able to answer “Yes” to both questions.

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Vampire Network Marketing – Why No One Sells Retail To Mom!
By Michael Dlouhy

If you talk to 100 people, 99.9 of them will tell you they’ve never sold product retail to Mom. Why?

It’s because:

1. Products are too expensive.

2. You don’t feel right making money off Mom.

What’s the answer?

You must have value-priced products that you’re not ashamed of. The problem in network marketing is, companies have such massive overhead, they have to charge tremendous prices for their products in order to pay a commission.

When that happens, you cannot sell to Mom retail, because you know the price is way too high. So you’re always selling wholesale – and probably, not just to Mom. Most people can’t sell MLM products retail to anybody!

If your payplan is all about wholesale – in other words, it’s “recruit, recruit, recruit” – where is your retail profit?

If you’re in a business opportunity and it’s always about “recruit”, new blood, new blood, new blood … it’s called Vampire Network Marketing. You need to ask yourself whether you can have long-term success in a business where nobody sells products retail.

Hint: there’s a real logical answer to this question.

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When starting a new job you want to know how much money you will be making. So why wouldn’t you want to know how many people you need in your downline to make the amount of money you want to make a month? Here’s what my mentor Michael has to say about that:

How Many Recruits & Customers Do You Need To Earn The Income You Want?

How can you set an income goal when you have no idea how many people you need on your team?

I ask people that question all the time, and most of the time, I get a blank look. They don’t have a clue. They’ve never figured it out.

But the fact is, every income goal set by any rep with any company requires a certain number of recruits. What is that number in YOUR company?

If you don’t know the answer, you don’t have a prayer of achieving any income goal.

I asked a guy this question recently, and he said, “Oh, I need 5,000 people to make $10,000 a month.”

I told him that was a very quick answer. How did he know it?

“Well, we make a dollar a bottle. And everybody goes on a 2-bottle autoship, so I’ll need 5,000 people to make $10,000 a month.

How does this play in the REAL world? First of all, 5,000 people … you KNOW not everybody will be on 2 bottles of autoship. Not everybody will be on autoship at all. So you’ll need way more than 5,000 people in the plan. How realistic is that?

But you’ve got to know those numbers.

Lots of people set income goals, but there’s no reality to it, because they don’t go that next step to figure out exactly how many people it will take in their organization to meet those goals.

They don’t know if they need 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 100,000 … they just don’t know. Once you know the formula, you can apply it to any goal you want. You can have a $1,000 a week goal or a $5,000 a week goal. You just need to understand what type of group you want to build.

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Some companies change the amount of product you have to buy to get your commissions. This is mainly so they can make more money. Instead of making it so they get more distributors they increase the price of the product or the amount you must buy.

You Don’t Produce More Milk By Squeezing Harder

Network marketing companies are like a dairy farm. If you needed more milk, would you squeeze harder, or would you get more dairy cows?

Companies call it “raising the bar.” Suddenly, distributors have to buy MORE product to qualify for commissions. So the company forces the distributors to pay for the new $28 Million Home Office. Or the 100 new operators in the Call Center.

Companies that charge reps $19.95 or $29.95 or $39.95 a month for the website to look at their downline genaeology … THAT stuff should be free.

That $20 or $30 or $40 a month is virtually 100% profit to the network marketing company. They want to increase their bottom line. But instead of getting more cows, they squeeze harder.

More Squeezing

Companies that change compensation plans are squeezing harder. They know their reps have built to maximize rep income from the current comp plan. So a totally different comp plan will ALWAYS throw a monkey wrench into the rep’s design and increase the income to the company.

Companies that want more milk start changing comp plans, they charge for more Back Office doohickeys, they force you to order more product to qualify for commissions.

Or they do the RIGHT thing, and get more cows.

Which way does YOUR company play it?

Do you know who the people are that are the head of your network marketing company? What kind of experience do they have? What did they do before they started your company? This is the number one thing you should know before you join any company if you expect to have a company that’s going to pay you in the future.

If Your Company Leadership Is Bad, You’re a Goner!”

Before you join a network marketing company, be sure to check the background of the company leadership to make sure they have MLM experience, with integrity. A simple Google search will often surprise you.

Not doing this background check is a common mistake, often fatal to your business. When the management team has built a downline themselves, they respect you. Companies are nothing without us – the reps. If they could sell their products themselves, they’d just put some magical ad on the internet somewhere and people would come to buy in droves.

But it does not happen.

Why? Because it takes you and me to build the relationships with the prospects, so they buy from us.

And how do you know if your company leadership has integrity? Simple. Read their company Policies & Procedures. Then you will know.

99.9% of the people you talk to want to build a business and then retire and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

But these companies have come in the backdoor like snakes in the night. They’ve changed their Policies & Procedures, adding phrases like “ongoing sales”, “ongoing recruiting,” “continuous”, “regular meetings.” You cannot retire – even though they’ve promoted early retirement as one of the main benefits of their business! It’s amazing.

If you retire, they can legally terminate you!

Does that show any integrity? Does that show any respect for the reps who built the company, who brought the business to them? Absolutely not.

Your Policies & Procedures are THE contract between you & your company. They are written by the company lawyers. You’d better know for certain what YOUR P&Ps say.

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