Fishing

You'll find several analogies are used to convey important concepts about MLM.

One of these is fishing and it relates to prospecting.

Imagine that you are fishing from a boat with a single rod, line and bait and let's say you have to wait around an hour on average to catch a fish.

How could you catch more fish per hour? Put out more lines and bait.

The same principle applies to prospecting. An almost exact analogy is placing postcards in shop windows advertising your business opportunity.

If you put just one postcard in one shop window, you might expect 2-3 enquiries a month.

If you want more enquiries, place more postcards in more shop windows.

There are many methods where it takes just a short time to set up and then leave running with no further work on your part, and every now and again you'll get a bite!

Other fishing methods:

• Adverts
• Posting on forums
• Giving out business cards (because people tend to keep them)
• Autoresponders - can send infrequent emails to a prospect list

You only have so many hours in a day - these methods can be working for you when you can't be!

To your success.

Prospecting

Prospecting is a term for looking for prospects.

Remember your list?

All the time, you should be working through the names on your list, exposing them to the business one way or another.

But unless you're also continually adding new names to your list, you're going to run out of people to contact.

Prospecting is how we look for new names for our list.

There are hundreds of ways to prospect. Choose some from the picnic table and incorporate them into your DMO.

Use a Funnel

Think of a funnel as being a way to get leads from different sources and 'funnel' them into one of your prospecting pipelines.

So your funnel is your collection of methods that you're using for 'prospecting' - looking for prospects. (see also fishing)

The bigger your funnel (i.e. the more methods you're using), the more people you'll be feeding into your prospecting pipeline and the more results you'll get.

Placing adverts is a good example. You could place one advert leading people to your website (the start of a prospecting pipeline) but you could also give out flyers leading people to the same website, thus widening your funnel.

To your success.

Leads and prospects

You'll find people sometimes use these terms in different ways but generally, most people use the following analogy for marketing:

Lead -> Prospect -> Decision

Where a lead is a name or an email address you have that hasn't been exposed to the business yet. You have a name but you haven't approached them in any way.

A prospect is someone you've made some kind of approach to, sent an email, given them a DVD, someone who is considering the proposition - we hope.

So we need to make some kind of approach to turn a lead into a prospect.

Once they are a prospect, we turn the handle and move them along our prospecting pipeline until they make some kind of decision that we can work with, so we can take them off the radar for now.

That decision might be to

• Become a player
• Become an affiliate
• Say no, not at the moment
• Say no full stop

Any of those decisions are fine for us - we've achieved our objective in getting a decision from our prospect. Otherwise, we have to keep following them up, wasting our time and theirs. If they've said "no, not at the moment" then we can simply set a reminder to ourselves to call them some time in the future.