MLM and You

The New Professional makes clear the evolution of multilevel and direct marketing. Like many folks, I had a pretty dim view of the overly aggressive sales tactics and misleading meeting agendas that I ran into with many of the earlier direct marketing efforts. Now I see that things have changed for the better – much better! Inventory is not in your home, it’s not in someone else’s garage, it is at the distributor and easily obtained through the internet. Supply chain management is superb in these new companies.

For example, King and Robinson provide statistics to show why direct marketing is a robust and very efficient model for introducing some products into the market place. And, they show why the type of person involved in network marketing today is truly a professional: “Of key interest, the research found ’successful (direct and network marketing) sales people have a communication style or social style that encourages the building of relationships with their customers . . . The most successful sales leaders have a combination of relationship and task orientation’ (in their communication styles).”

Network Marketing and multilevel marketing are synonymous terms. They are defined by a business model which pays commissions on multiple levels of the sales organization. Network Marketing/Selling differs from Direct Selling in that Network Marketing:

1. Focuses on relationships rather than on closing the sale or booking an order
2. Focuses on information sharing
3. Independent business owner (IBO)
4. Commissions on multiple levels of sales (not just retail of the IBO)

The role of the network marketing channel is to accelerate the movement of products using the most efficient distribution technique: word-of-mouth communication.

This is an excellent book to bring you up to date on the network marketing phenominon and to understand the new business models (yes, there are many).

If you are one of the many that are trying to keep up with the ever changing face of the business world, you need to read this book. In the last five years, I have personally experienced more changes and more growth in my own business life that in all the other 25 years put together. The bottom line is that things are rapidly changing – and we have two choices – embrace the changes and learn to use them to our advantage – or resist the changes and get left behind. While multi-level marketing is not new and not all multi-level companies are created equal, the industry is certainly emerging as one that offers some of the best opportunities for people to get started as independent business owners with a relatively small investment, especially for those who might never have had any other way to achieve financial independence. For some time now, I have had first hand knowledge of the money that can be earned by the small business owner, many of whom were not college educated and were not your straight A, honor roll student. There are countless thousands that have invested heavily in higher educations to obtain skills to get “good paying jobs” that will never come near the income levels working as an employee that can be achieved as an independent business owner. If you have looked down your noise in times past at “multi-level marketing”, take another look!! After all, it wasn’t but a few years back that most of us had never even heard of the internet, much less used it in every day life!!