A couple years back, I took a job in telemarketing for Telstra (yes, I was one of those annoying bastards who call you during dinner, and try and sell you a new phone plan with some some ADSL on the side…).

Everyday, at the end of each lunch break, the sales manager would yell “Get Back On The Phones, And Make Me Some Money!” (said half jokingly…)

I took this job for a couple of reasons…

1.) I needed to learn how to sell (selling is the highest paid profession in the world- if you can master selling, you can write your own tickets)
2.) I wanted to increase my confidence. The idea of cold calling someone who had left Telstra, and trying to bring ‘em back (when most of them despised Telstra) quite frankly scared me…
3.) The job paid purely on commission- meaning if I didn’t sell, I went hungry. That might seem like a bad thing, but on the upside, there was no limit to how much I could make a day.

At first, it was pretty tough going.  Just about every day you’d cop abuse, and some people would get mad as hell… but most people were polite enough.

On the first day, I didn’t make one sale.  But the next day I did, and soon after I was consistently making those commissions (you might be surprised how much telemarketers can make- the best ones were pulling down over $500/day- no kidding).

I learnt some valuable lessons from that job, that I think are just as important in the network marketing industry…

Most important, is that there’s really only two key areas you need to focus on in this business:

1.) Prospecting
2.) Generating Leads

Note the order I put them in- that’s no accident.

You might be scratching your head at that… after all, don’t you need to generate leads before you can prospect?

Well, not really.

Prospecting is something you can do in everyday situations. You don’t need to have leads to prospect. Because by prospecting, you are actually creating leads yourself. Prospecting is something you can do in everyday situations… like when a waitress serves your meal, and you ask her if she’s open to creating additional streams of income.

And I don’t mean you do it in an annoying or pushy way… you never want to try and force your business opportunity down someones throat…but you should always be on the lookout for people who are dissatisfied with their current circumstances, who may be open to building their own business from home.

There’s a real danger in thinking you need to be able to generate leads before you can prospect… because if you don’t know how to market properly (and most network marketers don’t) then you can use that as an excuse for not prospecting.

And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.

Let me tell you a short story…

I grew up on a farm- it was a wheat and sheep farm in Western Australia. Every year, a team of shearers would come and shear our sheep- and we’d pay them a few dollars per sheep.

To keep track of how many they’d done, they had these little ‘clickers’- each time they pushed a shorn sheep down the shoot, they’d press the clicker, and then repeat the process all day long.

By the end of the day, the best shearers had clickers that displayed over 200 sheep! (although I’m convinced they pressed the clicker a few more times than they should have…)

So what’s this got to do with prospecting?

Well, understand that in this business, we do something pretty similar. We are paid on our numbers, just like shearers. As a general rule of thumb, the more people we talk to, the more money we make (I’m not comparing prospects with sheep here- just the numbers part).

Now I know some people will argue with me… and talk about how qualified leads are worth 10 times the amount of unqualified leads… and that it’s more about marketing yourself in such a way that others approach you (attraction marketing).

And although I agree, the cold truth is that most will never master attraction marketing – it’s something that’s hard to duplicate, and takes time. And there’s a high probability that the people who are trying to learn attraction marketing will use that as an excuse NOT to prospect.

They’ll be waiting until they generate leads before they start talking to people… and in most cases, they’ll wait for a long time (if they don’t give up).

A much faster way of growing your network marketing business is to focus on prospecting while learning how to market. Because the discomfort you feel when talking to unqualified leads everyday will provide the motivation for you to get your marketing up and running that much faster…

Remember, even a blind squirrel can sometimes finds a nut. Even if you’re terrible at prospecting, or it makes you uncomfortable, your chances of getting a sale and gaining some momentum increase ten fold when you discipline yourself to talk to people everyday.  that is the exact reason why you need to do it.   Because you’re not going to succeed in this industry without it.

Here’s my promise to you.

If you put prospecting before marketing, and make a commitment to prospect a certain number of people everyday (eg. at least 5 -10), then you’ll succeed in your business.

You may start off being poor at it… but when you’re doing it everyday, you soon pick it up.

And when you do get your marketing set up and begin talking to qualified leads, you’re gonna have a HUGE advantage over the ‘network marketer’ who wanted to learn how to market before learning how to prospect.

I know of million dollar earners in this industry who don’t have the first clue when it comes marketing… but they understand the importance of prospecting, and make sure they do it everyday. And that’s why they’re million dollar earners.

As one of my mentors, Cedric Harris says, “Money only comes from one place- and that’s people.”

You want more money? Talk to more people.

You are not going to make money in the industry if all you do is sit behind your computer and pretend to work- checking emails, adding a few friends on Facebook… etc (which is exactly what I did in my first year in the business).

Focus on the prospecting first- remember, before internet marketing came along, there were people in our industry, like the great Jim Rohn, who built multi-million dollar empires from prospecting alone- no PPC, no SEO, no video marketing… the internet was not even around.

Develop the discipline of prospecting everyday, and I guarantee you’ll soon see results.