It’s funny how a little time can change things. Last week at this exact moment I was enjoying a free day after the No Excuses Summit and hanging out on the strip in Vegas, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the value and wisdom I’d received over the past few days.
Over the weekend I identified some key changes I needed to make in my marketing efforts and I’ll be sharing those with you in blog posts over the coming weeks. One common trend amongst all the speakers was they suggested simple step-by-step systems for just about every problem faced by home-business owners today.
One area that came up a lot was recruiting, and frankly until I had a system for recruiting I was lost. So I wanted to share the basic process I use and inject some insight I took away from Paula Pritchard’s lecture.
Step 1 – Getting leads
This is by far the most difficult part typically, but once you use a funnel it becomes quite automatic. Your company may pay you for selling its product but you won’t sell any product without leads, right? I’ve had success with online lead generation techniques such as article marketing, SEO and Facebook PPC. If you need help generating leads online watch my free webinar on setting up a web funnel here and I’ll give you access to a $1,200 marketing course absolutely free.
Step 2 – Qualifying leads
Once you have traffic you need a way to qualify people. This allows us to save time by only talking to prospects that have shown an ability to follow certain steps to qualify for our time. I can have all the traffic in the world but unless they are people who take action and buy something eventually, I’m just wasting resources. For example, I may have on or offline advertising drive to a telephone number that has a voicemail message instructing them to leave their name and the best time and number to reach them.
Folks that leave a message have shown me they can follow instructions and also that they are interested. I’ll use wording in the message to position a few key points which further qualifies the prospect’s interest level.
Step 3 – Opening the connection
Paula had some great advice about talking to folks for the first time and because she’s had such success with her approach (she was the first woman to ever reach Diamond in Amway) I’d like to share a bit of her approach here. First, she positions herself as “just running out the door” then further qualifies the prospect with a probing question such as “were you really serious about building a home-business?”
I like a question here along the lines of “what are you looking to achieve?” because it will let you get to the person’s “Why”, or their reason for being interested in the first place. With that information, you can form a connection and ascertain how to best position your offer.
Step 4 – Setting the meeting
From there Paula may build some quick personal rapport and set a time for the meeting. This could be a home meeting, an online presentation or a follow up call. Personally, I like to have them watch the company presentation online but the goal is to get the prospect to commit to a time to watch the presentation and also a time for you to follow up with them. She emphasized the aim was to keep the call to under 3 minutes and I have had success with this as well.
Step 5 – Handling objections
Once someone has seen a presentation I like to ask them “What did you like about it?”. I want to identify what resonated with them and focus on the positive, not the negative aspects. From there I may answer any questions or get them on a call with my upline or other business partners. I’m trying to identify how ready this person is to sign up and if there are other objections that need to be addressed before that can happen.
Step 6 – Closing the sale
After the last step you need to say something that closes them into a decision. There are many ways to approach this buy I like to probe for a commitment level by putting it on them. Paula’s exact wording was “What other information do you need to make a decision?” and I think that’s such a powerful statement. First, you’ll identify if you have any more objections to address and also the person’s response will tell you how to proceed.
If it’s definitely not for them, fine, go for a referral. If they have some objections address them and ask the question again. If they have no objections, sign them up.
That’s all there is to it. I hope you’ll get some use out of this process, once I put the following map in place a lot of things clicked in my business.
