One of the things I love most about Avant, besides our amazing products and how easy it is for anyone to make money here, is that unlike my last company, we have no problem telling people the name of the company right off the bat. In fact, it is encouraged. With my last company they did not like us to say the company name until we actually got people on the phone, which was something that I did not like. I think that a company should be proud enough to put its name out there, and Avant does just that! This is our new compensation plan video that gives a brief overview of the products and goes into detail about showing the money! See how a $300,000 first year income really is possible with this company!!
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Tonight I made my first video in about 2 years, you can see it above or on YouTube. Since I have been sick this past week and had no voice I spent a lot of time catching up on YouTube videos and blogs I am subscribed to. Do you ever have those days or even several days where the same thing keeps coming up?
That is what was happening to me. The topic of lead generation, prospecting, and making money in a home business kept coming up in everything I watched and read. I think this video
really sparked me into action the most. I work with Tony Rush in Avant and he is very good at writing articles and making videos that inspire and teach. This one really struck a chord with me because this is something that drives me nuts as well.
It is very easy to do things that can wait or sometimes don’t even need to be done at all. There are so many ways to find people that are interested in what you have to offer and are out there looking. How you find them is not important. Now, is it good to learn Pay-per click advertising and SEO and all that stuff, of course. But in network marketing and MLM, what makes you money is selling products and building a team. Especially in the beginning of your business, the best thing you can do is talk to as many people as you can, ignorance on fire.
When I first got started in this business, I would buy leads to make up for what I was not generating on my own. Sometimes I would decided to just go crazy and see if I could break a previous record of mine and I would buy literally hundreds of leads. More often than not if you ask other people in your company that are successful they can recommend a lead generation company. My favorite and the one I found to be most reputable and give me the best results, is National Leads. They have many different kinds of leads and even offer a free 5 day course about lead selection and working your leads.
I also use a traffic site called TrafficSwarm. Now I use the paid version which runs about $30 a month. I will also tell you the only way it generates quality leads is if you have good AD COPY!! If you are not sure about your ads, ask other successful people in your company to look it over or just use one of their ads. You also need a good landing page. I use one provided by my company. For $30 a month, I have use of 6 different squeeze pages and their back office with auto responders. I have in the past paid a lot of money to have my own custom page made and I have to tell you, if you have access to a landing page that is proven to convert you are an idiot not to use it. Not to mention, a lot of people that are getting started in a home based business can’t afford hundreds of dollars to get their own site, and the key to making money in this business is duplication.
In one of my earlier posts on this blog, I talk about the fact that I have and I can spend a TON of money on building my business and start up and advertising, but if I do that, I will turn away a lot of people. They will look at my business and think they can’t do it without a lot of start up capital. I purposely spend a very low amount on my advertising (unless I am doing a promotion for people on my team) so that my team can copy me and get the same results so many of us are having.
Talk to other successful people in your company about their numbers. How many people did they have to put in front of your companies presentation to get the results they are having? Remember consistency is key. It is much better to spend an hour a day and get the same number of people a day on the calls, than to cram all your work into one day. I focus on putting 15 people on our business overview call 4 days a week. Make sure the people you are showing your business to are not only people that are a good fit for what you offer, but that are people that you would like to work with. Trust me on this, some people are not worth the headache no matter how much money you make from them.
I want to end this with just a quick overview of how I work my leads, which I cover in the video. For me, I have a home office, but I hate sitting in front of my computer calling people. It hinders my flow. I like to be surrounded by my dogs, or floating in the pool, or out on the boat. I have even made my calls from Starbucks, the side of a mountain and the beach. These are places that make me feel happy and make me feel abundant. I print off my leads either the night before or first thing in the morning. I use highlighters to color code and just start from the top and work my way down the list. I wait until I am done making all my calls before I update anyone’s status, and when I do I use the bulk edit feature so that people are put in the right auto responder groups fast.
Every one has their own way of working but this is the way that has worked best for me over the years. It makes my work not only enjoyable but I complete it a lot faster. I work usually 4 hours a day Monday through Thursday. I will still take calls on the other days if it is convenient for me, but I got started in Network Marketing in the first place because I wanted time freedom.
So many people get bogged down with the BEST way to generate leads and the BEST way to run their business that they never even get started. Do whatever it takes to have enough people to talk to and enough people looking at your business. Don’t worry about having the coolest website or having to be in front of your computer when you are talking to people. Usually, the simplest things are also the most profitable.
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I LOVE the Elevate program put out by Avant. It is seriously the most amazing Personal Development home study course EVER. Of course, that is my opinion, but because this is my blog, it is all about my opinion. There are so many reasons I love it, from it’s simplicity to it’s progressive layout. But something that sets Elevate so far apart from any of the other personal development home study courses I have used, is its online aspect.
This 72 day course is accompanied by an online community and component. When you log on not only does it have a checklist with your exercises to do for the day, but it holds you accountable by have your stats. Did you miss a day of journaling? Did you miss an exercise? Also, you get to see everyone else’s progress as they go through the course. You get to see their thoughts and discoveries. You can interact with them and find out why they got better results with a certain exercise or just talk about your progress in general.
So, after saying ALL of that lets get into what I really meant to blog about today in the first place. The lesson for yesterday and today (Elevate is set up with one lesson over two days) is about living in the moment. The reason this inspired me enough to write a post on it, is because out of the all the things I do well, I have discovered that this is an area I am serious lacking in. Don’t get me wrong. I love my life and I love all of the things I have done and experienced. But the exercise for this chapter asks that you think of a time when you were really in flow and living in the moment.
I hate to admit it, but for the life of me, I could not come up with one time when I was just enjoying everything going on around me. See I am one of those people who always lives for the next moment. As soon as I accomplish a goal, instead of relishing it and enjoying it, I start working on the next goal. It actually saddens me a little bit because that also means that I have missed out on a lot of the fun of getting there.
In all of my businesses I have always had the blinders on. I know what I want at all times and I know that I will get it so I just go go go. It never occurred to me that I might just enjoy the moment and not worry about the next. Like I said, I already always know what I want and know I will get there, so it absolutely makes sense to me that I should just enjoy the ride.
So from this day forward, I am making it a point to live in the moment. Enjoy everything. Display my inner child and my child like enthusiasm. When something happens I am going to live in that moment and remember the thoughts and feelings, not just push them aside and keep going. If it is a bad moment, I am going to learn from it and move on. When I accomplish a goal I am going to take it all in and really enjoy reaching it. I invite you to do the same. I would love to hear from you as well. What are some times that you have lived in the moment? What did it feel like? Do you ever revisit that time?
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I am not even going to look at the date on my last post, I know it has been a long time! I have spent the last year-year and a half just enjoying life. I decided to hang up my working shoes for a while, knock some more things off my to do list, and just have some down time. While I enjoyed it, it left a lot of time to think and reflect. One of the things I realized….I don’t like being retired. Especially when I know there are so many more people to help with my business both through our products and our opportunity.
About a month ago I was on Facebook and saw some posts from people I had worked with in my previous company. They were so excited because one of the founder’s of the previous company I had been with since 2004, did not like the direction the company had headed and so decided to branch off on his own. July of 2011, Avant was born. It took everything good from the previous company and improved it. It has a lower entry price, gives more back to those who need it, has a better product line, just amazing.
Needless to say as soon as I saw this I went to the website and got started. So at 30, I have come out of retirement and gone back to 2-3 hour work days, 4 days a week, generating a multiple six figure income. I feel productive again and I definitely feel like Avant allows me to help even more people than before! Expect to see frequent posts again as well as updates and feel free to leave comments.
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I absolutely love Brian Tracy. I have read just about everything he has put out and will continue to do so. He has an amazing way of getting ideas across and also of keeping simple things simple and making complicated things simple. “Focal Point” and “Eat That Frog” are two books that have helped me streamline my life in every area. ” Goals” and “Million Dollar Habits” have helped me to achieve things at a much faster rate. While I am not in sales, I still read Brian Tracy’s sales books, the most recent being “The Art of Closing the Sale“. In the chapter titled “Developing A Powerful Sales Personality”, Tracy talks about feeding your mind. He has actually brought this up in almost every book, audio, newsletter, and program. “Make the decision today to read in your field for thirty to sixty minutes each day. Each morning, instead of reading the newspaper or watching television, invest thirty to sixty minutes reading something that will help you to perform better during the day. What you put into your mind in the first hour sets the tone of your mind for the rest of the day. If you feed your mind with something positive, educational, and uplifting in the first hour, you will perform better all day long. You will be more cheerful, relaxed and self-assured. You will also be more resilient and will bounce back faster from rejection and disappointment. Get up every morning two-hours before your first appointment. Spend an hour reading and then get ready for your day. All the top successful people arise early and get going immediately. Average folks rise at the last possible minute, run around in circles, and then dash off for the office with no time for thinking or preparation.” Which one are you? Do you hit the snooze button three or four times before dragging yourself out of bed? Are you running out the door with seconds to spare or maybe even late? For the next thirty days, make it a point to wake up an hour earlier. Spend the first thirty minutes of each day reading in a book either in your field or on personal development. Keep a journal and take note of all the changes that you notice. Increased energy level, higher sales, more positive attitude. After thirty days you will wonder why you didn’t start doing this sooner. You may also, like me, start reading an hour or two a day instead of just thirty minutes. Contact Me Today To Find Out How To Be A Part Of This Successful Team!
Once again, a long time has lapsed since my last post. I have been enjoying life so much that I have not made the time to write like I had planned. Luckily in life, we are able to hit the reset button and start over. As I sit here on the balcony of my hotel room in beautiful Acapulco Mexico, I am inspired to start writing again.
I spent the day deep sea fishing for Marlin and will be posting pictures and videos soon, but in the six hours I spent out on the water alone, with the exception of the crew, I had a lot of time to think and reflect. To acknowledge how amazing my life is and to take responsibility for creating it.
From the books I choose to read, to the things I choose to watch and not watch, right down to the thoughts I choose to think and the friends I choose to have. It is so empowering when you realize that the choices that you make, determine your life and that you have 100% control of those choices.
Take some time in the next few days to look at your life. You don’t have to go on a trip or spend six hours on a boat, but maybe take a bubble bath, or go to the beach or the park. Somewhere where you are happy and won’t be interrupted. What in your life right now are you dissatisfied with? What in your life do you enjoy and want more of? Make a list. Now go through that list and brainstorm what you can do to eliminate the things that are not adding to your life and a list of what you want more of. Last but definitely not least, take action immediately and every day.
Over time you will notice that you will find more and more things you enjoy. You will also find that some things that once brought you joy don’t anymore. I would do this exercise every three to six months to chart your progress. Your list of dissatisfaction should get smaller and your enjoyment list should get bigger. It will also help you add to your goal list of things you want to experience in your life, and if you don’t have one you should make one right away.
When you put things on paper, amazing changes start to happen almost immediately. Start today and take control of your life. Only you have the power to change it, and if you are not creating a life you want, you are creating a life you don’t want.
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I was talking with a new associate earlier today and something came up that I felt was blog worthy. In my business this seems to be more of an issue than in a business where you send the prospect to a website, or you send them a package of information, but really it goes for any business.
In my three step business, the second step is to send qualified people to a twenty minute business overview call where they get all the details on the company, the products, and our compensation plan. Because the business overview calls are live it gets very easy, especially for new people, to complicate things.
I know when I got started, I would find myself trying to schedule my prospecting around the calls. My thought process was that if I scheduled them too far in advance of the call, that they would start trying to get information before the call and never even make it to step two of the system.
I kept running out of time to call my prospects because I would only prospect right before the calls and I would have more prospects than time that I was allowing myself. I would listen to the other leaders talk about their schedules and I noticed that almost everyone in my company has a different prospecting schedule.
Wendy prospects from 12pm – 4pm. Rachel prospects for an hour at a time from 8 am until she has ten people on the calls. Other leaders only prospect at night, some only in the morning. But they were all making money. Then my friend Tony told me, “the best time to prospect, is when you want to prospect.”
I realized that the key to my business, the reason we make a lot of money fast, is that it is fun. I also realized that a large part of my business is sorting. In order to get to step two of our system, the overview call, you have to participate in a five to ten minute interview call with me.
Once I got to thinking about it, I realized that the sorting does not stop at the interview call. I am looking for people that are able to follow directions, learn my system, and get results. If I talk to someone in the morning and schedule them for a call in the afternoon or evening, and they decide to start gathering information on their own, they disqualify themselves. Odds are that they would not be successful here anyway.
It hit me that whether or not I prospect right before a call, or hours before a call isn’t what matters. What matters is whether or not the time I spent prospecting I was enjoying it and in the “zone”. Who was I “being” while I was prospecting? Am I wishing I was doing something else, or am I really being present to the people I am talking with?
When you are running your own business, there are so many other things to focus on other than the best time to call your prospects. Don’t worry about if you catch them at home, if they are serious they will return your call. Don’t worry about them going out and reading some crap on a website about your company. If your business is the right fit for them, they will get started no matter what they read.
Remember, the internet is a great place for information, but it is also a great place for people to post their opinions. There is a huge difference between someone’s opinion and actual information and I would much rather get details from people that are getting the results I want, then people that have “tried” things, didn’t get results, and are now complaining about it to anyone who will listen.
So, the best time to call your prospects is when you feel like it. Make it fun and schedule it around your life, not around theirs. Your prospects want to learn to create the life you have. I make more money when I am calling people from the boat, the pool, the ski slopes, or even Starbucks, then I ever make working from my desk. I also make more money when I have the dogs in the background playing or my family over.
I am the CEO of my own home based business. So I work it how I want and when I want. If someone is bothered by my dogs, or the sound of brewing coffee, or the fact that I can’t call them at an exact time because I am out enjoying my life, my business is not the right opportunity for them. On the other hand, the people that do get started, are people who are attracted by the way I run my business and my lifestyle and want to create the same thing.
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If you have been in business for any length of time, you have probably heard the saying, “What you lack in skill, make up for in numbers.” I totally agree that in the beginning of a business, especially when you are still building confidence and getting used to your script, it helps to have a lot of people to talk to. The more you go through the script, and the more conversations you have, the more confident you will become and confidence is what attracts business associates.
When someone is deciding whether or not to join your business, they are really deciding whether or not you are the person that is going to lead by example and show them how to achieve their goals. They are looking for a leader. Of course if you talk to enough people, the odds are eventually someone will get started with you, but it could take thousands of people.
I am not saying that’s bad, and really if you had to go through a learning curve of talking to thousands of people to get rich, would you? The real questions would be, can you handle all that rejection and keep going, and can you afford to generate thousands of people to talk to until you make that sale.
This article is actually less about having thousands of people to talk to and more along the lines of, at least for me, what having an abundance of leads did for me mentally to speed up the learning curve so that I didn’t have to go through thousands of NO’s to get to my first yes.
When I say an abundance, I don’t mean 50-100 leads showing up in your inbox everyday. The details of your specific business will determine how many leads you need. In my business, our system consists of a 5-10 minute interview, booking qualified people on a 25 minute business overview call, and collecting a decision.
My personal goal in the beginning to grow my team, was to have 10 qualified people booked on our overview calls 4-5 days a week. So for me, I needed between 10-20 people to talk to a day day to hit that. That doesn’t mean I needed to generate that many leads a day, it just meant that I needed to have that many people to talk to, so people I had previously tried to reach or that had called me back and left a message, counted in that.
When I first got started, I kept hearing the stats that out of 100 people that you talk to, that usually 3 will make it all the way through the system and get started. So I was determined to talk to 100 people and find my 3. Of course in the beginning of my business I was only generating 10-20 leads a week not per day. (This is a whole other article but it really came down to realizing that lead generation is easy, thank you Tony Rush.)
Well, I got through the 100 and no one got started. People were interested but were not taking that final step. Hmmmm. So I went through another 100 and again, no one got started. So one day I was listening to a company training call and they were discussing the importance of not being attached to your leads. When you sit and focus on each individual lead as someone you NEED to have get started, it actually repels them.
When I went back through my journal, I could see that because I had a limited amount of leads (what I thought was a limited amount) that I was taking each one way too seriously. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I catch them at a bad time? What if they are not interested? What if, what if, what if.
It was then that I started seeking help in my lead generation and you can see my earlier article, Online Advertising With Google and Zango, to learn exactly my main forms of advertising. What I noticed was that the more leads I had to talk to, the less important it was that each one got started. I stopped being so attached to each prospect, got out of “pitch” mode, and got into qualifying mode. I went from wanting anyone to get started, to wanting the right ones to get started.
I wasn’t someone struggling to make my business work anymore, now I was sifting through people to see who I wanted to work with, not begging people to work with me. There were no what ifs because i had plenty of other people to talk to next. I record myself on the phone and I can tell you that I didn’t change the wording of my script. I already had it memorized so it wasn’t getting to know the script any better that did it. It was totally and completely in my energy that the change came. Now at the same time, don’t generate so many leads that you get overwhelmed, unless you have a team of people that are working and deserve to get some of your overflow.
It is true once you start getting results in your business, the confidence, success, and leadership does show through in your conversations, and it will take less people through your system to make sales. But in the beginning, it is important to have some kind of goal of how many people you are going to put in front of your product/opportunity everyday, and have enough people to talk to so that with every call, you are putting out positive energy and excitement, instead of worry that if one more person says no, you are sunk!
A couple of extra tips for lead generation and prospecting:
1 – Smile, your prospects will hear it in your voice.
2 – Get up and walk around while your on the phone, your energy with skyrocket.
3 – Prospect in different locations. I prospect from my boat during the summer, on vacation, at Starbucks, on the side of a mountain while snowboarding. I even got a waterproof phone so that I could prospect from my pool.
4 – Have fun with it and make it a game, and this actually goes with lead generation as well. When I am out having fun, I make more money and get more leads than when I sit at home and watch the clicks in my Adwords campaign. If you have placed your ads or called all your leads and nothing is happening, get out, do something fun, something you enjoy. Suddenly people will start calling you back to get started.
5 – This last tip I learned from my adviser. A quick way to stop being attached to your leads IMMEDIATELY, is the next 10 people you call, try right off the bat to disqualify them. No matter what they say, probe and try to disqualify them. The ones that are aces will rise to the occasion and prove to you that they deserve a chance to be a part of your team, the rest will weren’t right anyway, but when you get on the phone, determined that the person you are calling is NOT getting started, there is no attachment.
This is what has worked for me in my business and what has worked for others on my team to create an incredible group of wonderful, qualified people in a very short amount of time. It is all in your energy and positive energy will always get you positive results.
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I talk to people every day that want to make more money but they are serious about it until they are called to action.
I spoke with a man earlier this week who had been to my website, http://www.SuccessByPC.com, had requested a call back, and in our interview, had told me that he wanted to make at least $200,000 in the next 12 months becuase $100,000 isn’t enough to live on and he wants to spend more time with his son.
He qualified to move on to the second step of my system which is getting all the information, and after the call sent me an email saying, “I don’t think its worth signing up for because you don’t get paid unless they spend 1,500 dollars. Nobody has that kind of money these days.”
My reply was, “You are absolutely right!”
In the past, this one sentence response would not be how I would handle this email. I would have written back telling him how well we are doing, how many sales we have made in the last 7 days, how well the company is doing etc, but I have learned that if you respond to them in that way all you are doing is selling them. I love my business because I don’t do any selling, telling, or explaining so I am not going to start now. Plus in reality, the best people you can have join your business, are the ones that after receiving the information, sell themselves.
So of course, I received an email back asking me why I lied to him. There it is! He opened the door for me to set him straight, without selling him, without being defensive about my company. He has now given me the opportunity to enlighten him. So I did!
I told him that if his belief is that no one has extra money to spend, he should definitely NOT start my business because he is only going to attract people that don’t have money. I let him know that I did not lie to him, my husband and I personally, our team, and our company, are not only making the $1500 sales, but we are also making a ton of $7995 and $12,995 sales. Here he is focusing on $1500 being tough, and we are focusing on $23,000 being no problem. Do you see why we are having such incredible results?
Needless to say, he has not written back. Sometimes the light bulb goes off, sometimes it doesn’t. But the next time someone hears your presentation and comes back at you with, “I don’t have the money” or “No one has that kind of money” or “the economy is bad”, or really any reason to not get started other than ”It is not for me”, I challenge you to write or say, “You are absolutely right!” and then be quiet and see what they come back with.
I have had a lot of success since I learned to let my business sell itself!
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Have you ever had one of those days, when it seems like everyone you run into and everyone that calls you wants to complain?
Luckily I have the LLI community and a small group of friends that “get it”. Those that don’t I choose not to talk to. Hopefully at some time they will have some good news but until then they will continue to get my voicemail and I will continue to not return their emails.
Why? Because neither one of us will benefit from me listening to their whining. If they would actually listen to my response, they might benefit, but time has shown again and again that regardless of what I say, they will remain in “victim mode”.
Which brings me to my topic. Our book in our book club the last couple of weeks has been T. Harv Eker’s “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”. The first wealth file is “Rich people believe “I create my life”. Poor people believe “life happens to me”.”
So as I was deleting voicemails and emails of my “victim” friends and family, I decided to bring this up in the hopes that maybe some of them might read it and take a hint. The first hint being, GO BUY THIS BOOK AND READ IT!!!!
The lesson in this first wealth file, talks about the 3 clues to recognize being a victim. Blame, justification, and complaint. When you are doing any of these things you are NOT taking control of your life and situation. I think he puts it best in saying, “when you are complaining, you become a living, breathing CRAP MAGNET.”
He issues a challenge which I think is great and I have used for quite some time now. He says to challenge yourself to not complain at all for seven days, not out loud, not in your head. The full seven days is important because the first few days you may have some “residual crap” left over.
He goes on to recommend that every time you do catch yourself being a victim by blaming, justifying, or complaining about something, take your index finger and slide it across your throat to remind yourself that you are “slitting your financial throat.”
This simple activity can transform you from victim to victor and can dramatically change your life. I challenge all of you to do it. Especially if you want me to call you back!
Make it a great day, you have the control.
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Teri Elmendorf McLean
Home Office: 702-764-0709
http://www.SuccessByPC.com
