Let me throw a few statements at you and see if they sound familiar. By the way, hide your thoughts from me because I’m going to try to read your mind and guess your answer.

Here goes…

“It’s a numbers game. The more people you contact, the more you will enroll.”

“You got to send out 50 magazines/info packs every month. You’re not serious if you’re not on a [insert number] autoship for [insert tool name].”

“You can sift through 20 people in a few hours. Ask them if they’re interested. If not, move on to the next person.”

“Just send them out; these tools have a long shelf life.”

Get the picture? Have you heard that or something similar before from your upline? Wait… don’t tell me. Let me guess. Hmmm… Yep, you have.

This is an approach that’s taught by many. I call it the “throw mud at the wall and see what sticks” approach. I’ve tried it. Guess what? Maybe it was just bad luck, but the walls I picked were made from Teflon. Nothing stuck. Several thousand dollars later and my results were a spectacular zero, zip.

Why is that?

The MLM rock stars usually tell you, “This is a million dollar tip.” Well, what I’m about to tell you is a thousands of dollars savings tip. So, listen up.

People DO NOT CARE about you and your wonderful opportunity. To them, you’re just another one that’s trying to either drag them into something or get your hand into their pockets.

Sending them tools that describe how wonderful your company and opportunity are serves just one purpose. It moves inventory and inflates the bank balances of the people who publish the tools. They love you, I promise.

At the other end of the chain, your prospects might send the tool back to you if you were smart enough to ask them to do so. Otherwise they just toss it in the trash. Your grocery money, in the trash.

I’m known as someone who networks with other network marketers, just for the sake of networking.

Ever so often I get an email from someone where I can literally picture the new distributor jumping up and down, shouting, “Look at my opportunity! Look at my opportunity!”

Poor soul, she has probably sent that email to hundreds of people. Why? Cuz her upline told her so. She may have received back a handful of no thank you’s and she has enrolled the grand total of zero new distributors or product customers for her efforts.

Even at a minimum wage, she has spent an awful amount in the time it took to send out all those emails, especially if she did not know about mail merge.

Also, what she didn’t know was that her domain was probably close to being blacklisted as an origin of spam. That would send all her future emails straight into the junk mail folder where her opportunity can rub shoulders with bigger boobs, higher sex drive, free credit cards, and all those other fantastic offers that we all cannot wait to read about every day.

Wait, I digress…

What do people care about?

They care only about their lives. They care only about their challenges, about their dreams if they have any left, and about their wants, needs, and don’t wants.

Here’s my “million dollar tip” to you. You’re wasting your time pitching your opportunity to people who don’t care. Heavy rocket science stuff. Duh.

Don’t even think about talking to someone about your company, products, or opportunity until you know what the person wants, needs, or doesn’t want.

Once you know that, you can show the person how your company, products, and opportunity can give them specifically what they want, need, or don’t want.

Then they will care, they will listen, and they will look.

"Wait," you say, "that sounds like a lot of hard work." Ever noticed the word work in network? Yes, network marketing is no different from any other business. It takes a lot of hard work to succeed.

I will devote future newsletters to several ideas and threads that I've raised here.

One last thought I want to share with you. Always remember, you are not dealing with prospects. You are not dealing with leads. You are not dealing with numbers. You are not dealing with entries on a list.

You are dealing with people. Treat them that way.

To subscribe to the Street Smart MLM Newsletter, visit (http://www.streetsmartmlm.com-MLM Newsletter | Advice | Succeed | Excel in MLM)