» Blog Archives » The Unspoken “Obvious Secret” of MLM.

This is an excerpt from a letter to a friend who had tried MLM and had not been successful. She loved the products and tried to build her business selling them:

I trust my company to provide us with excellent products that I can use and confidently recommend. But I’ve noticed that the people who build the biggest businesses in all the companies I’ve been with aren’t product experts and seldom have more than 10-20 customers.

The product experts always fail to make that stable long term passive income.

Why? Because there’s always another latest greatest product to be had from another company or infomercial or whatever and off your customers go.

The only loyal customer is one building the business i.e. why would they use Brand X when their own company pays them an incentive to use their own products?
That’s the brilliance of Network Marketing but because we’ve become so acclimated to business as usual, you know, one person selling a lot of product to make money, it’s difficult to see that many people each using and selling a small amount of product is really a better business model.

The other thing is, selling products is “time intensive” and justifying a product’s cost to mostly one time buyers is exhausting and emotionally draining.

We believe in the product and by god we’re going to make everyone else see what we see in it come hell or high water. This has been my biggest challenge in every company I’ve been in. I become enamored with a product, think it’s going to save the world, and get crushed when no one sees what I do.

But the evidence that it does work is obvious. People are making boatloads of money, not because they sell the product but because they sell the money that can be made.

Interestingly, by selling the income potential, they wind up helping more people to use the great products.

And about as obvious as a wort on the tip your nose (that no one talks about), is the fact that the upline markets to the downline. This, in my opinion, is one cause of distrust and suspicion in Network Marketing. Not that this is a bad business model just that no one is up front about it.

Then, the unasked question is; Is my upline trying to help me or is he trying to make money from me? The answer is yes, both!

At least it is on our team. How can I be sure? Because the master distributor (my upline) sends marketing messages out to his entire downline, not to just me. The results of those messages benefit everyone from the newbie who joined under me today to the first person to join the master distributor three years ago.

All marketing by my upline to me and my downline, benefits everyone in my organization with a downline of their own.

A good graphic is; A speaker at the front of a room must be loud enough that a person at the back of the room can hear what he’s saying. Everyone between the speaker and the person in the last row benefits as a result.

I think everyone has seen the illustration of the single radio wave bouncing off the satellite reaching everyone who is tuned in. Same thing here.

When things go unsaid, when there isn’t full disclosure, distrust is the result.

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