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A network marketing company needs balance. The four cornerstones on which a company builds its success are:
1. products 2. services 3.
communications 4. commissions
Let's look at the four cornerstones of network marketing success.
I. Products
A network company should plan to market a product its people believe in and feel proud of. Legitimate company founders want to contribute to the welfare of the society they live in by selling products that have real value.
A network marketing company may build its success on a product or product line because it doesn't have general market acceptance. Innovative products have often used the network marketing venue to enter the market. Distributors make people aware of the value of these products and educate them in correct usage. The products and the distribution method serve each other.
Distribution will have success with the METS Formula (Motivate, Educate, Train, Support)
II. Services
The question many companies ask themselves when building their network marketing success is not only "What products should we sell?" but also "How can we change people's lives for the better?"
In fact, the services that a company provides are almost as important to some distributors as the money they make. In some ways, services are the great differentiator.
Services come in two categories: personal growth and development services, and business-building services. Personal growth and development services include conventions, training and motivational seminars, and motivational tapes or CDs. Business-building services include retail consumer programs, web-based training, literature, training classes, and a consumer relations department.
III. Communications
Every success in network marketing company has had a "cause" or mission. Sometimes a mission revolves around a product, and sometimes it revolves around personal growth and development. More often than not, a company's mission is a combination of the two.
There was no success without successfully communicating a mission or purpose to its field force. But beware: some executives succumb to the temptation of embellishing the truth to make their mission sound better than it really is. They do so in order to appear more successful. The problem with using dishonesty as a way to bolster a company's mission is that if people act upon a false premise and then achieve notoriety and success, sooner or later Mike Wallace shows up at corporate headquarters, and the company's executives are looking guilty as sin, trying to explain that it was all a harmless misunderstanding.
In short: a company can prevent the possibility of misunderstanding by building a strong mission into its product line and corporate philosophy. This doesn't imply that the mission need be complex. The late Mary Kay Ash, for example, became world-renowned, both in and out of the industry, with the simple mission of enriching women's lives.
A network marketing company's communications strategy is arguably more complex than that of traditional business because the sales force is more spread out and diverse, and because effective communication is essential to daily success.
IV. Commissions.
Since the commission plan is the vehicle by which distributors receive their monetary rewards for the work they do, it needs to be reliable. For real success it needs to ensure both distributor satisfaction and company profitability. Most importantly, the distributors need to perceive the company's commission plan as giving them a fair opportunity to seize their own destinies and meet their own financial goals.
Another thing the commission plan will define is how much work a company will have to do to retain distributors and consumers, and how much work its distributors will do. In other words, in a "perfect" commission plan, the salespeople, sales leaders, and dream-builders do all the sales and marketing. In commission plans that fail to adequately compensate the leaders in one or more of these arenas, a company must counter this situation by taking on more of the load with their internal marketing and/or sales staff. In my experience, it's almost always better to let the distributors do the majority of the sales and marketing.
It's also very important that once a company sets up the basic structure of the commission plan, it not change the fundamental structure after the company has matured. Distributors build their downlines around the rules of a commission plan. Once the top distributors have spent years doing this, to have the company change the basic premise can undermine its best sales leaders.
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