Training - The Key to Network Marketing Success?

When I first began my network marketing career, I didn’t get a lot of training – in fact, truth to tell, I didn’t get any at all. And equally true, I didn’t think I needed any...

You see, my upline lived in another State, and I only came across the opportunity because I happened to be travelling there on business. In one evening I looked at the product, checked out the company and the business model, could see that it was an amazing business proposition, and signed up.

A couple of days later I found myself back home in Canberra. I had a lot of enthusiasm, but nothing except a few emails and a manual downloaded from a web site to guide me in starting up my new business.

I was convinced I didn’t need any help. After all, I’d been a successful business owner for quite a few years. How could I not succeed with such a marvellous opportunity available?

Now, over a year down the track, I know better. From the outset my presentations were not too bad, and my own enthusiasm quickly found me a small but enthusiastic downline. It looked like everything was coming together pretty well.

The Problem Emerges

And then, after about 6 months, it all stopped.

Once my team of distributors grew a few levels the enthusiasm seemed to drop off. Indeed, while some signed up, most of them just didn’t do anything at all with their opportunity, which I knew to be so good.

Sales dropped right away, my immediate downline team started to lose interest, and the whole business looked like it was going to collapse.

The Enlightenment

Fortunately I then had a chance to make a fairly lengthy trip back to my upline’s location, and after a week or two it hit me what our problem had been: we simply hadn’t understood the importance of TRAINING!

And it worked both ways:

1. I attended a great training course over there, and realised just how important this was for me. I learned so much, when I thought I already knew it all!

2. Equally significantly, i realised the importance of training for my downline distributors. It dawned on me that if they didn’t get the sort of training I’d just had, they didn’t have a hope of being successful either.

So this time I came back to Canberra convinced of the need to train my team properly!

But perhaps my most important realisation was that, as our downline grew, not everyone would be able to provide training of the quality I now knew to be necessary.

The Solution

Our solution to this was to take the responsibility for training out of the hands of individual distributors. We now have a regular weekly training meeting, to which EVERY new distributor is invited, no matter who in our team has introduced them. Now, no matter how big our team gets, everyone will get the right training to allow them to operate as successfully as possible.

Now I’m a convert. It’s been said that Network Marketing is not so much a marketing business as a training business. I entirely concur. If we get the training right, we’ll have a good chance of getting our business right.....