"It is only Wave 3, now making its entrance," states Richard Poe, former senior editor of Success magazine and author of Wave 3 The New Era In Network Marketing, "that finally offers the masses a realistic promise of financial freedom. Through new systems and technology, Wave 3 enables average men and women---not just super salespeople---to enjoy the fruits of entrepreneurship while avoiding many of its hardships. Wave 3 will transfer massive power into the hands of common folk, the power of self-sufficiency, self-management, and self-mastery.
This
is a dramatic assessment from America's leading business author and
commentator on the network marketing industry---a realistic promise
of financial freedom for average men and women through new systems
and technology. In the information era, the new technologies are
telecommunications, computers, and the Internet. They enable Wave 3
MLM companies to implement systems that take care of everything
except the person-to-person networking communications of their
products, services and business opportunities.
"If Wave 3 lives up to its promise," says Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth, "a whole new type of network marketing will evolve in which the distributor functions mainly as a human contact point through which the company's communications or information stream is channeled. Someone who doesn't have strong communications skills, strong selling skills, strong management skills will need them less and less. The idea is, 'You do what you do best, and we, the company, will do the rest.'"
What successful networking distributors do best are high-touch, person-to-person marketing communications. How you orchestrate your networking communications system is the value-added dimension you bring for growing the quantity and quality of your downline network that is your income-producing asset. Here are 10 steps you can use for enhancing your personal system to empower average men and women to achieve the success they choose for themselves in network marketing, the world's most explosive industry.
Two-thirds of Americans say money problems are their #1 cause of stress and one-third don't like their jobs. Even though half of us have better lives than 5 years ago, we face more stress than even before. But we're still a nation of dreamers with almost a third of men and nearly half the women setting their sights on running a business of their own.
These are the conclusions in Fears & Fantasies of the American Consumer, published by D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles Inc., a major New York advertising agency. The report is based on a survey of a 2,000 person microcosm of the U.S. population. "We sought a psychological profile of the American buying public," says DMB&B. "What we got was closer to a split image. On one side, a nation pinned on the rack of worry and discontent, on the other, a nation of optimists and dreamers." (Take the quiz---You Might Be An Average American If...)
We all have concerns---money problems, worry about the future, demands on our time, our health, the health of loved ones, our children, problems at work, stressed relationships, our dreams, our attitudes, personal growth, getting ahead financially, the IRS, the national debt, nuclear war...the list can be endless. Isolate those things in which people have emotional and mental involvement by creating a circle of concern.
As a person looks at those things within their circle of concern, it becomes apparent that there are some things over which they have no real control while there are others that they can do something about. Identify the concerns they can do something about within a smaller circle of influence. By determining which of these two circles is the focus of most of their time and energy, you can discover much about the degree of their proactivity.
Because they are central to the value-added dimension of their networking communications system, they have to continually work on things they can do something about. Aristotle stated:
Knowing how to develop the habits of excellence in their circle of influence is crucial. As such, Stephen Covey's landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a must-read if they are serious about achieving success in their network marketing business career.
"Reactive people," says Covey, "focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weaknesses of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization. The negative energy generated by that focus, combined with neglect in areas they could do something about, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink."
"Proactive people, on the other hand," he continues, "focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase. Proactivity means more than just taking initiative. It means that we are responsible for our own lives and that our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions."
Being proactive in one's Circle of Influence is an essential habit not only for developing their networking business but also for building a great human personality. The masterpiece of all creation is the human being at its best. One's personality is the orchestration of fifty-one qualities of being a particular person that distinguishes one person from others. It's been estimated that 85% of all success in the business world depends upon personality. This is especially true in the "high-touch" communications business of network marketing.
Howard Stevenson, the point person on entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School says that being an entrepreneur is a mind set rather than a type of individual that he defines as:
To produce effective long-term results, your networking communications must challenge conventional income realization assumptions with cutting-edge entrepreneurial thinking. The general public has bought into a program for financial failure. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics substantiates this with its report of the financial status of 100 people at age 65:
Here are eight assumptions for financial failure you will encounter as you share information about the personal financial freedom revolution with network marketing. Each assumption is challenged with concise entrepreneurial statements you can use in your communications.
1. Having a job is good and leads ultimately to wealth.
- This is the assumption of those who have incomes that are average or below.
- Wealth is when small efforts produce large results.
- Poverty is when large efforts produce small results.
- The answer is not to work harder but smarter.
- Your ultimate goal should be to acquire ownership of a generous source of income.
2. Debt is bad---avoid it like the plague.
- Consumer debt---you should avoid.
- Investment debt---wealth is the wise use of investment debt.
3. Saving your money is a good investment.
- Do you know any millionaires who got there through savings accounts?
- It's not the money saved that's important, it's the discipline required to save it.
4. Failure is bad.
- Failure is a part of success.
- Develop a positive attitude about failure and learn from it.
- Successful people often have more failures than failures do.
- I would rather see a crooked furrow than a field unplowed.
- You don't drown by falling in water...you drown by staying there.
5. Security is good.
- Our entire society is obsessed with security.
- There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity.
- The more you love security, the more you avoid risk. If you avoid risk, you avoid opportunity which is the favorable juncture of circumstances for progress.
6. Wealth is measured in material possessions.
- Wealth is thoughts, not things.
- You can be rich, but not wealthy.
- Wealth is a state of mind...being broke is only a temporary condition.
- If money is your hope for independence, you'll never have it. The real security that a person can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.
7. Acquiring wealth is a win/lose game.
- I don't have to steal from your pile to create a larger pile for myself.
- You can get everything in life you want...if you'll just help enough other people get what they want.
- Don't compete, create. Find out what everyone else is doing and then don't do it.
- If both parties can't win, don't play.
- There is an infinite source of wealth.
8. It takes money to make money.
- You can become wealthy starting right now with whatever you have.
(The author would appreciate input relative to additional assumptions for financial failure as well as entrepreneurial statements challenging those assumptions).
"Another habit of highly effective people," says Stephen Covey, "is to begin with the end in mind. That means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction."
Plan now to take their secondary income career into retirement. It's prudent financial planning as social security probably won't be around when they retire anyway. Beyond that, as a social friendship business, it's ideal for their golden years---networking with people they enjoy as personal friends, walking the beaches of the world together and having one or more commission checks waiting for them in the mail box each month.
Since two-thirds of Americans say money problems are their #1 cause of stress and one-third don't like their jobs, an appropriate opening question for a needs/interests analysis is:
They
have two options. The first is reduce expenses. If they took the
quiz---You Might Be An Average American If..., they already know that
their largest lifetime expense are taxes. "It's not the rich nor the
poor who pay," says tax expert B. Ray Anderson, "it's the great
American middle-class. Their incomes, usually from salaries and
wages, are most vulnerable to the IRS and they do little to protect
themselves." (Death & Taxes)
"Thus,
they end up giving more to Uncle Sam than they should," Anderson
continues. "This class files 38 percent of the individual income tax
returns but pays 62 percent of all individual income taxes
collected." The answer that former IRS tax attorney Anderson has
developed over the years is for the mass of wage earners to adopt the
effective long-range strategy perfected by the rich to escape from
the "taxpaying class" or at least reduce the tax bite. What he
maintains is that by employing one or more of a variety of legal
strategies, average Americans can save many dollars that otherwise
would be lost to them forever once in the clutches of the IRS.
Some
of Anderson's favorite approaches are create a part-time family
business and organize a family corporation of one type or another to
gain valuable deductions or at least delay tax payments. There is a
certain sense of accomplishment in discovering that they have in
excess of 250 ways to save money on their taxes that the salaried
employee can only hope for. Over 89% of all the high income earners
in the United States are business owners. And remember, high income
doesn't always translate into high taxes.
Reducing the tax bite will free up dollars for accelerating debt reduction and elimination of interest, the #2 lifetime expense of middle-income Americans. "Americans owe more money now than ever," reports the Reader's Digest (August '98). "Over the past ten years, total household debt, including mortgages, has soared from 88 percent of annual disposable income to 95 percent. Most financial planners say that monthly debt payments for everything including your mortgage shouldn't exceed 30 to 35 percent." Keep in mind that the meaning of the word MORTGAGE in Latin is DEATH (mort) GRIP (gage). Minimizing the tax man's take by "hanging out the shingle" on their home-based business and kicking the money lender out of their life is a good start to improving their financial situation.
According to USA Today (5/8/95), the average Baby Boomer who earns $50,000 per year will need $1,000,000 to replace that income in retirement. For the average Baby Boomer, close to 40% of his or her lifetime income is used for taxes, and 30% on loan interest...leaving them only one-third of their income for living expenses, purchases, and savings!
The
second option for improving their financial situation is to increase
income. The primary issue, however, is NOT making more money,
especially if there's a direct relationship between the clock and the
dollar. It is, however, acquiring ownership of one or more
income-producing assets that once established, will continue to grow
and produce income for years to come. It's said there are five
possible ways to acquire an income-producing asset:
When you all begin with the end in mind by envisioning your mutual network marketing businesses as secondary income careers, you should be concerned about the preservation of your assets. The greatest threats are the Deadly D's---Destruction and Deterioration.
The destruction of your mutual asset can be wreaked by the very MLM company with which you are all affiliated. The #1 cause of asset destruction in network marketing is a virus called GAAP...Greed, Avarice, Arrogance, Pride...that tends to inflict corporate management, usually starting with the president or principal owner. If your networking asset has ever been destroyed by this virus that became a full-blown disease, you all qualify for the T-shirt: "You might be a seasoned network marketer if...you've tried to save face as you MLM company was going in the toilet...while losing your ass-et."
The second of the Deadly D's is deterioration of the networking asset. The causes of deterioration, attrition or fall-out are numerous: a lotto mentality, stinking thinking, destructive attitudes, the perception of getting something for nothing, an absence of effective mentoring, lacking a sense of purpose or mission, being activity-focused rather than results-focused, a poor system of communications, working a compensation system that favors "heavy-hitters" and re-enforces the 80/20 rule (i.e. the "Stutter-Step Take-Away Plan" or perhaps suffering a massive coronary from a one-legged Binary).
Now, don't let the Deadly D's discourage or dissuade them from developing a secondary income business career in network marketing. Remember Richard Poe's assessment that "it is only Wave 3, now making its entrance, that finally offers the masses a realistic promise of financial freedom...a future world in which men and women will no longer cower before bosses and bureaucrats, but will stand tall, like the pioneers of old, masters of their own destiny."
Planning their portfolio is an extension of their needs/interests analysis. To plan effectively, they need to understand the network marketing industry. The programs of network marketing companies can be divided into three primary categories: (1) product, (2) service, and (3) support. These three categories can currently be subdivided into more than seventy divisions. (Index of MLM Product, Service, and Support Divisions)
In Wave 3, it's now possible to access almost any product or service through network marketing distribution that can be accessed through traditional distribution. The big difference, however, is that in traditional distribution, the worker-bees are employees and con-sumers (wage slaves and buyers who pay retail). Network marketing distribution elevates the status of worker-bees to that of business owners and pro-sumers (people profitably positioned and participating in the process of promoting products and services).
Their lifestyle analysis will help you identify and prioritize their household and business expenses. Match these areas of expense with MLM product, service and support divisions. Select one or two areas they can transfer purchasing from traditional to network marketing distribution...areas in which they have a passionate interest (i.e. nutrition/nutraceuticals, personal care, telecommunication, or debt-reduction education). Their area of passion will indicate their primary focus, such as a product program. Secondary programs to consider might be a service program like telecommunications, as they'll want to convert this area of expense into income and possibly a support program such as debt reduction and home-based business education. (Lifestyle Analysis)
A paradigm of Wave 1 and Wave 2 network marketing was that one could only be successful working one company. That was true, but it was also an either/or world. One of the megatrends identified by John Naisbitt in the early '80s was "from either/or to multiple option." It's just taken the network marketing industry a little longer to catch to other industries like automobile dealerships and financial services. With the advent of Wave 3, however, this trend to multiple option is changing the network marketing landscape. During Wave 1 and Wave 2, a network marketing distributor who tried to work more than one program was labeled an "MLM Junkie." The new technologies and systems of Wave 3, however, will empower networkers to intelligently diversify and develop multiple income-producing assets.
When a person chooses you and your upline as their sponsor/mentors, their making a business decision equal in importance to that of selecting an MLM company, perhaps, even more so. By definition, a sponsor is one who assumes responsibility for some other person. A mentor is a trusted counselor, guide, tutor or coach. Do you and your upline have a support system in place that will value-add the technology and systems provided by your company? If you don't, your "net" may not be "working" effectively.
"To define networking, you have to look at its components---Net and Work," says Jan Triplett author of Network's Guide to Success. "As any good fisher-person can tell you, a well made net is made up of line tied together to make a mesh that will catch and hold fish. The best ones are knotted at each corner to increase the strength of the net with each mesh connected to the others to increase the net's holding capacity. And, we all know what "work" is---something that takes time and effort, for which we get some reward (monetary or otherwise). So, networking is a system that is created by people who take the time and effort to connect themselves to each other so that they are mutually beneficial to each other."
Perhaps the best image of the network structure comes from the late University of Miami anthropologist Virginia Hine. She described them "as a badly knotted fishnet with a multitude of nodes or cells of varying sizes, each linked to all others either directly or indirectly."
In the networking structure, these nodes or cells are small groups of talented people working together to produce spectacular results.
Here are some practical suggestions for creating a "knot" in your network by yourself and a core group from your upline, downline or sideline to strengthen and increase your nets capacity for enhancing the ability of average men and women to have a positive and powerful financial experience.
1. Create an identity and mission statement for your group's "knot" (i.e. The Peak Group---"Networking Success Through Synergy, Systems & Support")
2. Compose an Info Pac of materials for enhancing networking interaction that can be immediately accessed by Fax-on-Demand and an Internet web site. The Info Pac might include: (a) cover page, (b) welcome letter, (c) support team info, (d) upline info, (e) networking profile form, (f) conference call schedule, FOD/VOD phone numbers, & Internet addresses (g) getting started checklist, (h) prospecting communications action plan, (i) prospecting interview scripts, (j) flyer for faxing & mailing, and (k) networking chart. (Info Pac Sample)
3. Organize a networking communications management system for your downline. This can be done in a 3-ring binder with five sections: (a) Company info - condensed talking points about the company history, management, products or services, compensation plan and support systems; (b) Networking System - for Info Pac materials; (c) Actions Plans - for prospecting communications; (d) Reports - for commission and genealogy reports; and (e) Database - for copies of network profiles and copies of downline distributor applications.
4. Promote "high-touch" networking interaction by helping your downline become better acquainted. This can be facilitated by encouraging people to compose a "networking profile" on themselves and exchanging profiles as well as photo business cards with other networking associates.
5. Duplicate your networking "knot" by encouraging other groups of talented people to organize "knots" with their own identities, mission statements and systems.
The best counsel I can recommend is to pick up a copy of Richard Poe's Wave 3 The New Era In Network Marketing. Chapter 3 is entitled - "How To Spot A Wave-Three Company" and by itself is will be worth the cost of the book.
"There is no such thing as a great MLM company," says John Milton Fogg, editor of Network Marketing. "Distributors are responsible for their own success...The best the company can do is stay in business."
In summary, Richard Poe lists 8 steps for selecting a Wave 3 company, but get the book for the details.
The Greatest Networker on Earth spent three years building His networking foundation of 120 followers. In just one day, this group exploded to 3,000 people and the world was turned upside down in a single generation.
"Once you understand the construction process," says Don Failla in How To Build A Large Successful Multi-Level Marketing Organization, "you will be motivated and encouraged every time you see a new high rise office building under construction. Notice that when construction begins, it seems like it takes months and months, almost forever, before you see it begin to rise out of the ground. But once it gets above ground-level it seems to rise about one floor per week---it goes up FAST!"
"So picture that tall office building," Failla continues, "as your own organization as it will be someday and ponder what you will have to do to get it. When you first began to sponsor those first three serious people, you were digging the foundation with a shovel or a spade. But notice that when you dig down into the second and third level by teaching your people to sponsor, that's another 9 and 27 people, and you have to bring in the bull-dozers. When you have taught your people how to teach the people in their group to sponsor, you are well on your way to bedrock and you are now beginning to excavate with steam shovels. When you have begun to see the 81 fourth level people, you have reach bedrock. Now you can start going up. When you are five deep in your organization, it means you are now starting to 'become visible' and your building will rise up quite rapidly."
You can access foundation networking charts for your networking business system as well as those in your downline from this menu:
(Two first level legs) For binary and 2-wide matrix compensation plans.
(Three first level legs) For unilevel and 3-wide matrix compensation plans.
(Four first level legs) For unilevel and 4-wide matrix compensation plans.
Just as a formula for success is needed, so is motivation. Perhaps, the greatest motivational force in the world is the power of personal example. Charles Kingsley was once asked the secret of his radiant, useful life and he replied, "I have a friend." Such can be the effect of one personality upon another.
The Greatest Networker gave his followers more than a formula. The power of His personal example as a friend literally changed people's lives. In network marketing, we are in the people business as well. Because of this, we need to know how to use the power of personal example and personality to build long-term, meaningful relationships. How can we develop qualities that can impact successful achievement and eliminate those traits which tear us down.
Here are some of the character qualities with a brief explanation that He lived that can immeasurably enhance networking effectiveness.
Compassion - an attitude of intense commitment to and appreciation of another's person.
Kindness - the ability to promote another's good without self interest.
Humility - the ability to accept a negative assessment of myself from someone without argument.
Gentleness - the ability to accept adverse circumstances without bitterness.
Meekness - strength under control.
Patience - the ability to accept another's offenses against me without retaliation.
Bearing With - the ability to accept another's faults or differences without resenting that person.
Forgiveness - the ability to accept another's change of heart without record keeping.
Love - the ability to develop the above qualities in one's personality and conduct.
We are all familiar with the advertising jingle..."reach out and touch someone". Centuries earlier, Plato took this thought much further with his emphasis on the quality of one's touch and its empowering effects. "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet."
Thomas Curtis Clark has written on this very particular experience as follows:
Copyright 1998-2003 Innovative Networking Publications,
Inc.
Phone: 719.540.2200