Fear of rejection, in my experience, ranks right up there with fear of public speaking. Most people admit that the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of public speaking. Rejection seems to give rise to the same levels of fear. What is this all about? Let me tell you a story…

I have a “friend” (me) who was once active in a Network Marketing company marketing a very useful service in the form of Pre-Paid Legal plans. This “friend” understood the service offered by the company. He also understood the compensation he’d get for successfully marketing the service to receptive customers. He knew enough of the book knowledge about the services and the company.

But this “friend” failed miserably in this company. Why? He was afraid of rejection. He would stick himself out there and told someone about this remarkable company and the wonderful service being offered. Sometimes, the people he talked to said “NO”.

He got a bit more depressed each time. Each rejection got to him because he took it personally. Each “NO” seemed like a personal attack and made him less and less likely to want to stick himself out there.

Eventually, he stopped working his business altogether. At first it just started as excuses like “I need to organize my desk” or “I need to rethink my approach”. Eventually it snowballed into downright apathetic laziness.

Eventually, he found his way into another gig, which was door-to-door, going from one business to the next and peddling different things. Things from discounted oil changes to cheap tickets for the local sports teams. This gig didn’t pay exceptionally well, but he eventually learned a few lessons about rejection in the process.

1. Never Take Rejection Personally

When a person tells you “NO” regarding your offering, product or service, in most cases they are not saying no to YOU. When they say “NO”, what it normally means is “Not right now”. Even when you hear “NO”, ask the person, “Is it OK if I get back in touch with you in a few weeks/months to let you know how my business is growing?”

2. How much is each NO worth?

When you are marketing a product of service, something interesting happens. You will eventually establish a baseline for what your success average is. If it takes you talking to 10 people to get 1 “YES”, you got 10% baby! Assume that that one YES pays you $100 for a commission…

Each time you get a “NO”, think to yourself “That’s another $10 in my pocket!” ($100/10 people means each no is worth $10!)

3. Be grateful for the opportunity

Businesses are built on value and opportunity. Any business that is worth anything of real value won’t attract every single person. If you went out and talked to 10 people and they all signed up at once, that indicates you just might be on the tail end of the curve for your service or product. The opportunity is weaker than it would be in the beginning. Each time you get a “NO”, silently tell the person thank you for allowing you to have the opportunity to position yourself for success!

4. Attitude is what determines your altitude!

If you start to feel youself getting discouraged when you hear a “NO”, don’t just say “thank you for your time” and go to the next door. Take a short break, take stock of yourself. What I usually did is go to a restroom and stand in front of the mirror. Then I would do my best imitation of the old “Whozza!” Budweiser commercials. That gets me laughing (at myself) each time. It helps me to not take myself so seriously. This also really helps me if I’m really needing to make sales. It keeps my mind off of the “I need money” mindset and gets me into a more playful mood.

5.  Rejection is just a state of mind!

When you get a “NO”, just remember that rejection is only rejection if YOU let it be that way in your mind.  What most call “Rejection”, I call “a matter of timing”.  Going back to tip #1, just get permission to get back in touch with the person at a later date.  Not necessarily to try and sell them on your idea again, but to treat them as a human.  Let them know how your business has grown in the time since your last contact.  Find out if there’s any way you can help them succeed in their own business.  Take them to lunch. Whatever you can do to let them know you’re more than just a suit with a blank application to fill out.

While the stuff I’ve listed here helps me through the day, I imagine that since you are reading this, you may have some other tips/tricks to help with rejection. Let me know in comments what some of yours are!

Now, my friend also had a copy of The Millionaire Course: A Visionary Plan for Creating the Life of Your Dreams by Marc Allen. I find that I am more in alignment with his vision of financial freedom, and here is why:

My idea of Financial Freedom is the ability to choose to do what you wish with your life, without the need to think about if there is enough money to do what you want. In order to break dwn what this REALLY means, you’ve got to really understand what money itself IS.

Money, in a spiritual aspect, is representative of the flow of spirit, via the Law of Circulation.

Money is basically what makes the world go round, as far as sustaining a sort of co-existence of a multitude of different manifestations of spirit.

If you had enough income piling into your bank account to meet your basic necessities, such as food, a place to live and clothes, how would like be different?

Now, you may be saying “but I DO have enough money to provide for the necessities.” And you may be correct. But, the real question I want to ask is, “HOW do you get that money?” Is the income you earn each month Linear (i.e., from working in a job or a self-employed business type setting), or is it non-linear, leveraged, and passive?

I read once somewhere, and I cannot remember where, about a quote that is attributed to Garry Trudeau, the creator of the popular comic strip “Doonesbury”:

My entire goal is to create a lifestyle that does not require my presence.

How beautiful an idea is that?

Now, take this in idea into mind to see why I don’t entirely agree with Brian Tracy on some of his ideas about Financial Freedom. Before I do, however, please let me remind you that Brian Tracy IS a self-made millionaire many times over, so his ideas DO work for him.

Brian Tracy’s approach to Financial Freedom, from my understanding of what he says on the tape, involve arriving at it from the point of awareness of a traditional employee. On the CD set, he tells the story of how, by making himself an indispensible employee and developing a workaholic mentality, he ended up earning more than many people in his company combined. From the employee mindset, this is brilliant.

Marc Allen, however, embraces what he calls the “Lazy” approach to Financial Freedom. Note that by “Lazy”, we do not mean the same thing as sloth. Laziness in Allen’s model of Financial Freedom, means to take whatever creative ideas you have, find out how to turn it into an income-producing business, and building that business up to a point of profitability. By automating your business processes as much as is possible, you have now created a recurring stream of income that will flow, whether or not you wake up by 6am, or even by noon!

The problem that I see from the employment method is that you have to be at work everyday to keep the income flowing long enough to create investments and such that will eventually create the recurring income streams.

So, what different things can you do to create automatically recurring streams of income?

• eBay Set up an eBay store which features products from reputable drop-shippers. Drop-shippers are essentially companies which manufacture and ship products on behalf of other companies. Say, you had an eBay store that sold leather-bound widgets. The eBay store can be set up to auto-list the auctions. All the leather-bound widgets are set at a minimum price of $10, which is the cost to have the drop-shipper make and ship them. The auction ends at $19.95 for the widget. The buyer pays you via whatever method you choose. $10 of the $19.95 gets automatically sent, with order and shipping information to the drop-shipper. the Drop-shipper slaps on a logo that you made up, and they have on file, to the widget. The product is shipped out, you have your $9.95 left over. That was easy, right? But remember, the eBay store can be set to auto-list auctions on a recurring basis. So, say that you are running 7-10 auctions for leather-bound widgets at a time. Set it the store so that once an auction ends and finalizes, an identical new auction lists 12-24 hours later. You’ve just set up a system of making $9.95/day or so. That equates to nearly $300 of gross income for YOU, and exactly $300 for the dropshipper. That’s just from widgets, though. What if you also list the latest hot products? The only time you’d really have to invest each week (other than the initial setting up of the system) is to do some cursory product research to find what people are looking for. Neat, huh?
• You can also get into Internet Marketing. That is such a huge animal to tackle, that I am going to have a whole other post for it. For now, however, feel free to check out this FREE 33-page mini-course in Niche Marketing (PDF)
• Network Marketing This is one of my personal favorites. Network marketing is such a splendidly weird business model. I say weird, because it’s devilishly simple in the basic concept of it. In corporate America, if you try and help someone get ahead, you run the risk of them taking credit and passing you by. In Network Marketing, you actually get REWARDED for taking a new business partner by the hand and showing them the ropes of your particular business. This model works extremely well for Real Estate Brokers who make a little tiny commission off each of their agent’s sales. How would you like to be the person who recruits and sponsors 2 new people each month, and teach them to sponsor 2 people each month? How many people would be in your business team at the end of a year? A few hundred maybe? Nope. Over 8,000! 8,190 to be precise. And, since Network Marketing is built on the concept of getting paid a tiny piece of the commissions generated by each person in your organization, you’ve went from nothing to massive passive income. Of course, as with any other sort of business venture, it’s understood that many of that original 8,190 people will drop out. It’s been shown that only 5% of the population ever set and attain goals. Even 5% of 8,190 is a whopping 409 people. Would you like to get paid on the efforts of 409 people, day in and day out?

Those are only 3 methods of creating residual passive income to help fund your lifestyle. The key is to create the systems such that they do not require constant meddling on your part.

1) Talk more than you listen. Ignore the age-old and time-proven advice, as outlined in Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” that there is a reason you have two ears but only one mouth.

2) Ignore what the other person is telling you, due to the fact that you are already trying to plan out what to say when your turn comes up again. Ignore the notion that the brain is able to think much faster than it can listen and process language.

3) When you are talking, talk at a speed that is incongruent with the other party. Pay no mind to the techniques in “Unlimited Power” by Tony Robbins which outlines specifically how to establish a sense of deep rapport in conversation.

4) When you are finished talking to the other person, make your exit as rude and callous as possible. This is a real winning strategy.

5) Let it be made patently obvious that you are “working the room”. While the other person is talking to you, let it be seen that you are glancing around for someone better to talk to.

6) Avoid eye contact if at all possible. It will only deepen any rapport you may have accidentally had.

7) Make no effort on your part to exchange contact information with the people you talk to, in case they would like to get together later on and discuss opportunities. Who needs those?

In Napoleon Hill’s book, “Think and Grow Rich”, he outlines the concept known as the “Mastermind Group”. I wrote briefly about that in the article, “The B-I Triangle: Team”. The Mastermind, in essence is the invisible Mind created when 2 or more people get together with a common purpose in mind.

I like to compare this to the model of the brain. The brain stores concepts, ideas and information by building connections between neurons of varying intensity. An interesting everyday illustration of how this is accomplished is a flock of birds.

Have you ever wondered who is actually leading the flock? What if I told you that no single bird did?

In the book “Emergence” (aff), author Steven Johnson explains that in a flock of birds, each bird reacts only to the actions of the birds in its immediate vicinity. With just a few birds, nothing spectacular can reasonably be expected to happen. If, however, you get enough birds in the flock to achieve a sort of critical mass, watch out.

Any time a single bird deviates even the slightest bit from its “norm”, the birds in the immediate vicinity will adjust accordingly. And the birds in THEIR immediate vicinity, INCLUDING the ones that caused the initial fluctuations, will respond accordingly. This “ripple” will propagate through the entire flock, nearly instantly, until a sense of equilibrium is once again reached. So, in looking at this model, no single bird is saying “ok, boys and girls, let’s turn NOW!” Each bird has but one purpose while in flight, and that is to FLY.

The general MISSION of the whole team of birds is the same. Each bird is contributing to the success of the team.

The brain is essentially the same thing; ideas/concepts are introduced to the brain in the form of sensory inputs. The brain’s neurons automatically adjust the weights and intensities of the connections to the adjoining neurons to accommodate the new information.

So, the brain stores information by looking at how ideas and concepts all relate to each other, nearly instantly. This is the basis for the neurological model of the Mastermind concept.

Let’s say we build a mastermind group of 10 different people. In order for the Mastermind to function properly, the team must have a common mission or goal. The power of the Mastermind comes to play when each person in the team has a unique skill or ability to contribute to the group. This is important because each person, having a unique skill set, will ultimately have a whole slew of experiences that are vastly different from anyone else in the group. Now, imagine that the different ideas, concepts and experiences that each person contributes to the group, all come together to form that third invisible mind, the Mastermind. This is basically like a whole new brain that exists because each person in the team is in alignment.

What I think works as a better guidance system is to make sure that your own network marketing business are built on a strong stable foundation of Triangle. This insight hit me while driving earlier.

So, as it is, I am now restructuring my thinking regarding my Network Marketing business endeavor as follows:

Mission: My Mission, as I wrote it down, reads, “To sell as many memberships to as many people as possible.”

Out of this missions sprung a separate, yet equally powerful mission, “To hold the running company record for organizational recruiting AND sales.”

This secondary mission, in a sense, is important because it supports the primary mission to sell as many memberships as possible, through the power of leveraging my efforts through others by recruiting them into my organization.

Team: This refers to my recruiting methods. I am always looking at new or novel ways to recruit team members, in a fashion that is duplicatible.

Leadership: This refers to my ability to get people motivated and focused to follow the simple daily activities that are essential to create enough forward momentum. I will be holding a weekly training for my team. Also, to help set a beneficial example for my team, I will be reading at least 10 pages or 1 chapter from a personal development book each day, which ever is more. Also, I will listen to 15 minutes or 1 track of a personal development audio program, whichever is longer.

Cash Flow Management: Of all money I make in the form of commissions or payouts, I plan to reinvest a certain amount back into the business. As an example, say I made $1,000. I’ll take a certain amount and purchase marketing materials and supplies. I’ll also use some of the money to reward people in my team for jobs well done.

Communications: This refers to the external and internal communications. This is where most network marketers beieve is the only part they need to focus, in order to succeed. For my communications component, I am making 2 company/product exposures per day. In our business, an “exposure” is simply the act of getting a 3rd party marketing tool into a prospective business partner’s slime. We use things like magazines, DVD’s, CD’s, etc., to simply tell people about our products/services. The materials do the talking for us, and never get tired.

Systems: This is the real meat of a network marketing business plan. Systems, as outlined before, are where the rubber meats the road, so to speak. When you develop systems for each part of your business plan and execute them properly, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process.

Systems I plan to work with here are:

• Recruiting/Sponsoring
• Sales Presentation

These things, when executed like clockwork, done over and over, compounded over time, will ensure success.

Legal: Not really much to say here, other than I intend to use the services of an attorney to either incorporate my business or even LLC it. I will do this for assett protection as my main focus.

Product: All you can really do here is to actually KNOW your product/service in and out. Learn the product presentation. I am right now working on developing a presentation that I can comfortably deliver in 15 minutes, as well as one that can be done as an Elevator Pitch.

I hope this makes sense to you. If not, Email Me or Comment and ask for clarification!

Take care of yourself and others!

Here’s are questions to ponder, though:
1. What happens if the elevator ride ends faster than 30 seconds? How can you maintain interaction and pique your intended recipient’s curiosity?

2. What happens if the elevator gets stuck? Do you give in to the temptation to go ahead and give a complete presentation, or do you keep it at 30 seconds, then switch to more casual conversation about your golf swing?

Let me know what you think…

The reason I like this article so much is that, after reading it, I was reminded of some of the things the leadership trains me on in the Network Marketing Company I am involved with.

In a nutshell, set a goal. Make that goal known to everyone. In certain cases, as necessary to ensure success, also determine a negative consequence that will have to be fulfilled if you should FAIL to meet your goal.

David’s article can be found HERE, or his blog link is also in my blogroll.

Take Care of Yourself and Others!

I personally believe (and know) that if you try to stick with something that you don’t truly enjoy, it can be an uphill battle. I remember hearing Brian Tracy say, “Ask yourself what you would do if you got a million dollars tax free, and didn’t have to work unless you wanted to. Most of the time, the answer you get is what you are here to do. That is your inherent purpose.”

When I was in high school, I used to spend the lion’s share of my time on my computer, programming. I used to love programming. I still do, I’ve just not yet gotten back into it to the level I was before. My language of choice in the early 1990′s was QBasic. Before that was TRS-80 Color Basic, TRS-80 Extended Color Basic, GW-Basic and BasicA. I guess I had a thing for the basics

I’m telling you about my programming because it was so cool then. It still is cool. I would sit for hours in my room working on my projects. I would code, run, check, code again…over and over, until my programs did what I wanted them to. Hours would pass and I would totally lose track of time. When I would glance up at the clock, I’d wonder what happened to all that time.

The programming project I was most proud of was when I made a tic-tac-toe program. 2 People could play, 1 person could play against the computer. At first, the computer would just randomly play a square. It would never be able to win, and I got bored with that.

So, being ever-curious, I began to wonder what it would take to make the computer be able to learn from the moves that led to it being defeated. So, I added in a subroutine that, when the computer was defeated, simply stored a snapshot of the game into a 9-dimensional array. It seemed to take forever for it to learn though, as it actually had to experience defeat to learn from it. So, yet again, I added another cool feature. I made it so that when I selected ’0′ for the number of players, I was replaced with a function that would randomly play a square. This sped up the computer’s “learning” process. It was way cool! It ended up looking like the part at the end of the 1984 movie “Wargames” when the computer was going through all the tic-tac-toe scenarios. I programmed it to save it’s new “knowledge base” to the disk for future reference.

Then I reloaded the program, started playing. And, alas, I was NEVER able to win the game! The only problem was that te search routine the computer used to check past experiences was not very efficient, and occasionally, the computer would take 45 MINUTES to make a move!

I’m writing about this because I am passionate about what i was doing at the time. I love programming, for the problem-solving challenges it provides. I also love the solitude of it. I can be a solitary person at times.

So I’d like to talk about the “symptoms” of being passionate about something. Whether that something is sales, reading, sports or whatever doesn’t matter. Here is a non-inclusive of the symptoms:

• Loss of time ( “Where did all that time go?” )
• Single-minded focus, no matter what obstacles come up
• A heightened sense of curiosity, always learning (I am learning a lot about PHP just by making this website!!!)
• You get very talkative when telling other people about what you’re doing (like the tic-tac-toe thing)

That’s what I can think of from the top of my head…If you think of any more, comment and tell us.
Bill

As promised in my last post, this article will focus mostly on a relatively important aspect of building an organization in a legitimate Network Marketing Business, which is the product(s) or service(s) that a company offers to the public.

In evaluating a Network Marketing company, or for that matter ANY company that you are considering joining, investigate the products and services. When (synonym for investigating) the products and services, make sure the company HAS products and services. If you are looking at a company, and can’t easily discern what of value the company offers,you may be well advised to run. There have been a LOT of companies that, instead of offering a product or service of value, seem to be merely “laundering money amongst friends.”

Any good Network Marketing company should have an abundance of training materials to help you learn the product’s features and benefits. To go along with this, the person who sponsors you into the business will work with you and train you in how to do an effective product presentation to outline these features and benefits.

Some of you are saying, “Why would I need to learn about the features, I was already given the presentation when I signed up!” Well, the simple reason why we need more training is honestly that most of us won’t even REMEMBER all the features and benefits from that initial presentation. That’s why some of the companies have a regular meeting. Training is offered, but just as importantly, a product presentation is given to bring prospective customers to. This makes use of a memory enhancing technique called Spaced Repetition, which basically says that the more we are exposed to a concept or idea, the more likely we will be to remember it effectively. This is good because new people in the company can begin to show the product and profit-building opportunity to prospective customers without being Masters of the Trade. That is the beauty of a well-thought-out Network Marketing plan. We’ll get into this more in the future article “The Power of Building Systems”.

When you are looking to get into a Network Marketing plan, make sure and doubly sure that there will be adequate support as you build your business. If you are talking to a potential sponsor in a particular company, let them know that you expect to be well-trained in the most effective ways to approach prospects about the product and the business opportunity. If you gut tells you that something is not right about what this person is saying, you may want to consider either finding a better sponsor within the company. If that doesn’t work, perhaps find another company. The bottom line is, a product presentation can be memorized and rememorized, but you will not effectively remember it until you actually start DOING some presentations. A really good sponsor will go along with you on your first few presentations, and just watch you.

Have you ever seen a good movie, eaten at a good restaurant, or read about a killer sale at the store? Odds are, you told someone about it. That is basically what we do in Network Marketing. We share a product or service that we find of value. That leads to another important aspect of the business: Passion. When you are passionate about something, it can lead you to do amazing things.

I will write more about Passion in a future article called “Passion: The Fuel that Leads to Greatness”.

Take care of yourself and others!

There is a general amount of confusion in the public as to whether or not Network Marketing is the same as a Pyramid. The widely accepted definition of a Pyramid is an organization where all the people at the TOP of the pyramid make all of the money while the ones at the BOTTOM of the Pyramid do all the work. I submit that many of the world’s companies that user a corporate structure are Pyramids in structure.

So, to find a better definition of a Pyramid, we’ll ask the Folks at GreekShares. According to our friends there, a Pyramid is defined as follows:
In pyramids, commissions are based on the number of distributors recruited.
Most of the product sales are made to these distributors – not to consumers in
general. (1)

The notable difference between a Network Marketing/Multilevel Marketing company and a Pyramid is the fact that legitimate NM/MLM companies will not pay you a commission for recruiting someone. The only commissions that are paid are based on actual sales made. If you are looking at joining a company that claims to be a NM/MLM company, and promises to pay you exorbitant sums of money for recruiting someone, think very hard about joining that particular company. Check out all you can about the company. At the end of this article, I will put a few links you can use to research companies.

One resource for checking up on a company and products is the Better Business Bureau (BBB). The BBB tracks reports of customer complaints and how long it takes the company to resolve the complaints. This will not, however, tell you specifically about the company itself, only how the company handles complaints from customers. It may also just be a result of the complaining customer being in a bad mood that day.

In all honesty, Network Marketing isn’t for everyone. There are some people who will see just one negative article or report about a company, and shut down all future thought of joining that company. This is like some people who absolutely will not see a movie because a friend or relative told them “this movie SUCKS!”. What sucks for one person might be gold for another. Research all you can, then trust your own judgment.

Part of the promise of building an organization in a legitimate NM/MLM company is that you CAN recruit people into your sales team, depending on a particular company’s compensation plan. I will get very in depth into recruiting and compensation plans in future articles for this series.

In the next article, entitled “Network Marketing: Selling your Products and Services”, I’ll get into the nuts and bolts of the most important thing you can do for yourself if you are building a network marketing organization: Learning Your Presentation.

Take Care of Yourself and Others!

Business Research Resources:
New York Stock Exchange
American Stock Exchange
Hoover’s
Better Business Bureau

Reading References
(1) Pyramids and Multilevel Marketing Plans