You need to have a comprehensive strategy in place before you begin finding leads. It’s essential to educate and qualify your leads so that they can be quickly sorted into the FIVE main groups of prospects, instead of all being lumped together into a single, featureless batch.

Most would-be sponsors try to squeeze 98% of their prospects into the 2% category that’s actually capable of achieving the artificially-limited approach promoted by most sponsoring presentations and tools.

It’s a fundamentally insane approach.

What are the five basic groups of prospects?

Not all prospects are created equal, naturally. But people can change over time, through education, learning new skills, overcoming lifelong conditioning and mixing with different types of groups. Here are the main five groups we need to identify in network marketing prospects so we can work with them most effectively:

Group 1: Employees, Consumers and Imitators with no business or network marketing experience and no money. (Often unemployed, disabled, injured or ill.)These people need help, not the responsibilities of running a business they’re not prepared for or capable of doing successfully.

There’s an old saying that applies here: “If they have a need, find them a job. If they have a dream/vision, give them an opportunity.”

Group 2: Employees, Consumers and Imitators with no business or network marketing experience.

These people are conditioned to think and act like employees, consumers and imitators (doing what everyone else does — safety in numbers) whenever they’re confronted by the need to make a buying or business decision.

Group 3: Employees, Consumers and Imitators with business or network marketing experience.

These people tend to struggle with business processes and decision making. They’re more likely to recruit wholesale buyers. They rarely want to be sellers, because they see sellers as pushy, sleazy and manipulative.

Group 4: Entrepreneurs, Marketers and Innovators with no network marketing experience.

These people are often the best prospects because they haven’t yet had the chance to learn the bad habits that run rampant in conventional network marketing. If you know the right things to do, and the right reasons for doing them, they can become your Super Stars! (But if you perpetuate the usual bad habits, you risk ruining their potential.)

Group 5: Entrepreneurs, Marketers and Innovators with network marketing experience.

If they’ve had the right kind of experience in network marketing, this is your ultimate target prospect group. But it’s rare to find them untainted by the bad habits so widely practised in network marketing.

Groups 1, 2 and 3 represent around 90% of the population, with a three-way split…

• Group 1 — 80% of the 90%.
• Group 2 — 15% of the 90%.
• Group 3 –   5% of the 90%.

Groups 4 and 5 represent around 10% of the population, with a two-way split…

• Group 4 — 90% of the 10%.
• Group 5 — 10% of the 10%.

Most sponsoring approaches and tools try to turn Groups 1, 2, 3 and 4 into Group 5.

Then we wonder why our failure rate is so high!

Can you see why a five-way sorting process could be so powerful in allowing each group to focus on its particular strengths and experience?

If group members were then sent autoresponder messages and Special Reports, etc, specifically targeting the needs of those groups, think how much more relevant our presentation process would be — and how much faster they’d be likely to join you!

If you were a doctor or a banker, and you found information directly relevant to your specific interests and experience, wouldn’t you be likely to share it with your peers? And, since they’re the people you mix with professionally, you know plenty of them. Can you see the potential for even more viral prospecting using this kind of approach?

This is just one aspect of the sponsoring process addressed in my ebook, “Viral Networking”.

Author Profile  JOHN COUNSEL is a network marketing professional with more than 25 years of experience. Consults to managements of direct selling companies. Writes regular columns and feature articles for various business media, online and offline. Author of several best-selling business books. Presents seminars and workshops, webinars and other training programs. Creator of Fourth Generation Thinking, Selling, Business Systems. Read more from this author

Tags: consumers, employees, entrepreneurs, imitators, innovators, marketers, segmenting, target audience

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 4:34 am and is filed under Bad Practices, Best Practices, Sponsoring Methods, Sponsoring Systems, Sponsoring Tools, Upline Teams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.