Leading Industry Expert Reveals 7 Secrets to Finding Endless Qualified Prospects

Finding an ongoing supply of good quality prospects once your warm list runs out seems to be a major problem with most people in mlm. Do you fall into that category? If so, read on. In this article I aim to de-bunk the myth that qualified prospects are hard to find. They're not - if you know where to look. Let's start by looking at your warm list. When you started in your mlm company you were probably asked to write down a list of 100 names of your friends and family. And then you were asked to call them (or maybe your sponsor suggested they would do it on your behalf). How did you feel about that? Probably awful! Even if you made the calls, you would have got, on the whole, a negative response. But, you were told by your upline that the no's are OK. Because for every nine no's you'll get a yes. Well, statistically that's probably true, but when you're starting a business, you want lots of yes's, don't you?! And once you'd worked your way through your warm list of prospects, then you moved on to cold prospecting methods. Methods such as cold calling, stopping people over the frozen peas counter in the supermarket, prospecting the tele-sales people who call you up..and so on. Let's put some marketing reality and truth on this with Secret #1: In actual fact, your 'warm' list of friends and family, is nothing more than a list of cold prospects. Yes, that's right. Your warm list is actually a cold list. The reason is all down to a fundamental of any marketing exercise, and that is knowing who your target market is. If you were opening a toy shop, your target market would be parents, grandparents and relatives of children. If you were opening a book shop, your target market would be people who read books, or people buying presents for people who read. If you were opening a shop selling special coffee beans, then your target market would be people who drink coffee. Do these seem really obvious to you? Well they should be. Do you think any of these shop owners went to all their friends and family to persuade them to join them in their business, or to buy their products? Probably not. The lesson you can take from this is that your warm prospects are not among your friends and family. The reason being is that, on the whole, your friends and family are not your target market. Some of them might be interested. Most of them won't be. So before you do anything else, I urge you to sit down and work out who your target market is. Who exactly is going to buy your products, or join your opportunity? (Hint. The answer is not 'everybody'!). Secret #2 A warm list is actually a list of people who have already purchased your kind of product, or - better still - purchased from you. In mlm, our product (in marketing terms) includes our business opportunity. So that includes people who are already buying our product or service, or people who are already in mlm or actively looking to buy into a business opportunity. If you've worked out who your target market is (from secret #1 above) and overlay it with where they go to, where they shop, where they congregate online and offline, you can put yourself right in front of a proper qualified warm list. Secret #3 In the highly professional world of Direct Marketing, companies will carry out marketing to both cold and warm lists of people. Their response rate and conversion rate (ie people who respond and people who go on to buy) is always considerably higher with their warm prospects than their cold. How they know this is that they test, test, test. In fact Direct Marketing agencies test everything. You can take a leaf out of their book and test too. This is such an overlooked part of marketing, and it makes such a huge difference to your results. So set up a system that means you can test and measure every bit of marketing that you do. Test the amount of responses you get. And test the amount of conversions you get: either people joining you as customers, or people joining you in your downline. Write down everything that you do, add tracking codes to URL's if you're marketing online, give press ads a marketing code (it doesn't matter what it is, a 3 digit code will do). For example, you run Advert 1 and Advert 2. Advert 1 pulls in 50 responses and 5 people join your team, and you're pretty excited by all the people who rang you. This gives a 1:10 conversion rate (or 10%). Not bad. Say this ad cost you 80 pounds, it means that each new distributor cost you 16 pounds to recruit. (NB Getting your response rate from a press ad is actually quite difficult as you need to know how many people saw your ad.) Advert 2 pulls in 10 responses, less that Ad 1 (and you're not so excited!). but 8 people join you. That's a conversion rate of 80%. If this ad cost 80 pounds too then it cost you 10 pounds a person to recruit them. Much better! So: Secret #4 It's not all about the response rates. This is what most mlm'ers I know get excited about. No, the conversion rate is the one that you're after. The higher the percentage the better. After all, it's better to speak to 20 qualified warm prospects who are eager to look at your mlm opportunity (and, trust me, there's lots out there) than be in a room of 100 unqualified people at a family event. You'll only ever know this by testing your marketing. You can test press ads against Google PPC ads. Ads you pay for against marketing you do for free. Test everything against everything. Log your costs, responses, conversions and cost per recruit. And you will soon see which of your marketing efforts work for you. The more qualified the target market, the higher your conversion rate should be. Secret #5 Testing should be an ongoing process, but here's the deal. With each test, you'll know what works and what doesn't. So drop the marketing that doesn't work (or test in a different way) and only do the marketing that does. This is what the Direct Marketing professionals do. This seems a very simple thing to suggest, but most people do not do it. I don't know why, maybe they're scared of letting some of their marketing go. It's OK to do that. Let it go, save your time and money, and put more time and money into what's working for you and watch your business grow. Secret #6 Direct Marketing works at its best - and pulls in the qualified and warm prospects that you want - when you know what your USP is. This stands for Unique Selling Proposition, and it's just marketing speak for something that's unique, special or different about you. MLM is a busy world and if you want to rise above the crowd, then you need to have that something special that attracts people to you. What is it about you that is unique? Maybe it's your straight forward approach. Or your ability to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome. Or maybe you have a skill or talent that you can establish yourself as in the MLM world. For instance, you're an accountant and could position yourself as a tax specialist for people in MLM. You love and own horses, and your product works with horses, so you specialise in that area. Focus in on your area of expertise, or your unique character, and concentrate your marketing around that. Tie that in to where your target market is (and only concentrate on the target market relevant to you) and you will end up attracting warm prospects direct to you. And, more importantly, those who want to work with you. Secret #7 You may not believe this if you have been struggling to get good, qualified prospects to talk to, but there are thousands of people out there who are qualified, warm prospects and are waiting to speak to you. If you utilise proper direct marketing methods, you will be able to find them AND attract them to you. And wouldn't that be better than having to lift up a phone (that suddenly weighs ten tons), to call your friends, family, or someone from the Yellow Pages?

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