I’m curious.

Do you think this blog is useful?

I’m evaluating my business and I’m wondering if this blog is helping.  Is it hurting my business by taking time and focus away?  I’ve been trying to keep this blog so generic that I’m not sure if it is helping me find new distributors.

I also wonder if it is helping YOU.

Have you learned anything from this blog?

I’d be interested to hear any opinions.

Thanks!
Ben Fitts

Popularity: 15% [?]

Earlier I spoke about business plans and wanted to go into a little more detail for you.

If you ever develop a traditional business and go to a bank or a group of investors they all want to see a business plan. Sure you have a great idea but they want you to prove it to them!

A business plan usually has an overview about your company, a list of goals, a plan of action for accomplishing those goals, a forecast of expenses, and a forecast of costs.

If you’re simply running your own network marketing business you might not want to go to that extreme. However I encourage you to create a mission statement. What is your goal? Why are you in business for yourself? Why network marketing? Why your company? Why your product?

Then sit down and work on your goals. It can be a dollar amount or a number of people. It probably is both! You probably need to get a certain number of people into your organization to make the dollar amount you want to achieve. Do you know what that dollar amount is?

Once you do, what are your actions going to be to reach the goal? What marketing stratgies are you going to use? What training or coaching are you going to participate in to help you reach that goal?

If you take the time to sit and write a business plan I’m confident you will benefit. Remember only 3% of businesses have a business plan and they make 98% of the money!

Here are some links I found on business plans for you.

Learn More about business plans at Wikipedia.

Small Business Planner from the Small Business Association (SBA)

Business Plan Software and Sample Business Plans

Good luck with your business plan!
Ben Fitts

Popularity: 15% [?]

Do you have a plan for your network marketing business?

Did you know that a Harvard Business School study, tracked 1,600 businesses over a 25 year period.  During this time they found that:

70 percent of all businesses had no written or verbal plan
27 percent had verbal goals only
3 percent had written goals

After 25 years of tracking the study showed that the 3 percent of business that had a written plan had 98% of the wealth!

So in your MLM business do you have a plan? Do you have goals?  Have you written them out?  Have you shared them with others so you can be held accountable?

What’s a business plan?

Maybe that’s a topic for later this week…

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 14% [?]

Hi guys,

I am writing this from my hotel room in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I’m sitting here waiting on my breakfast to arrive so I can scarf some food, a couple of cups of coffee and head to the convention center for our Company Convention.

It’s kinda funny. I wasn’t sure what to write today but one thing I thought of was just the experience I’ve had here in this company.  You know I never really had a downline of more than a few hundred people prior to this and now I have a downline of 4300 or so.

Some of the things you learn are trying to help manage and organize people.  If you have a spouse or someone who can help you organize stuff it can be really helpful.  It could even be a key leader in your downline who likes to lead from behind the scenes.  Not everyone wants to be in front of the room so if you can find someone who can lead from the back, that’s very cool.

My top distributor is like that. She doesn’t like to be in front of the room so she’s been exteremely great in terms of organizing things, helping find people, make sure people know where we are etc.

I’m out of my league. LOL. I wish my wife was here.  She’s so much better organized.  Last year I sent trophies for our team party to the wrong hotel and since I’m a guy I didn’t bother to check on them until an hour before the party. LOL.  So I didn’t have the trophies for the party.  I had to carry this big huge box of trophies to the convention center and try and find people there.  So the next day at the company party I’ve got this huge box full of trophies stashed under our table.  LOL. I was trying to find people and hand out trophies during the party.

At 1 AM after the company party I still had 4 or 5 trophies left.  They were big.  Each was individually boxed.  I couldn’t find the people who deserved those trophies.  So I was in the lobby.  I was going to walk down the street to a 24 Kinko’s to have the trophies shipped home.  Then I bumped into one of the people who had earned a trophy in the lobby and was able to get down to where I only had 3 trophies left.  I was barely able to squeeze them into my bag and take them on the plane.

See! If I can do this business anyone can!!!

Right?
LOL. Tomorrow maybe if I have time I’ll share with you Diane’s story (my #1 distributor) and what happened to her cell phone.

I hope you guys are having a great day.  Make it a successful one!

- Ben

Popularity: 14% [?]

Do you believe in yourself?

One of the benefits of going to events (as I mentioned last week) is that events can help inspire you.

When you’re home working your network marketing business you are competing against all the naysayers. You have the family members that think you’re in “another one of those things”.  Maybe you have the crappy job that takes all your time.  Maybe you have the upline that doesn’t help.

Most of us deal with the negative about 90% of the time and only about 10% of the time do we get the positive.  Many of our families fed us crap like “money doesn’t grow on trees”.  Everything we hear is negative.

Going to company events is one way to surround yourself with positive.  Surround yourself with people who think like you.  Surround yourself with people who believe in your company and your business.

Another thing you can do is work on your own beliefs.  Work on your self esteem.  Work on your bad habits and develop good habits.

John Milton Fogg has developed a training program called Belief Busters. If you find you suffer from emotions like doubt, then I highly encourage you to check out Belief Busters.

The reality is WE are our business.  People join us because they believe in us. Changing our belief systems helps us sponsor more people and sponsor better people.

Do you agree or disagree?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 12% [?]

I just wrote this to letter to the people on my team.  I wanted to encourage them to do whatever they can do to get to our company convention.  I thought you guys might benefit from this information as well. (the idea of 10 extra people for example.)

—

Hi Team,

I want to encourage you to do whatever you can possibly do to attend convention in Salt Lake next week.

I have a feeling there are going to be some really exciting announcements from SOC.

Sure you can wait and get the announcements later, but the energy you will receive from being there and being around THOUSANDS of other SOC people who share the same passions as you… That’s HUGE!

Jordan Adler says that someone once told him for every person in his downline who attends convention it’s like having 10 extra people in your downline next year.

Why?

Because the people who come to events like this get super excited and motivated.  They are unstoppable.

I know the economy is down and gas prices and inflation are up.  But if you can come, even for a day, I encourage you to come.  Heck just come hang out with us in the hotel… Whatever you can do I want to encourage you to come.

I am looking forward to meeting all of you!

- See you soon,
Ben Fitts

Popularity: 20% [?]

What is the most important thing to do in your business?

Do you know what one single activity is most important?  Does your team know?

You see for most of us our #1 activity is something like, get the prospect to a business presentation.  It might be a hotel meeting, a prerecorded conference call or sizzle line, a web site presentation, or maybe even a home party.  Whatever that #1 thing is in your business it is the thing that most directly leads to sign ups.

In my business, it’s a free demo/online presentation.

In the business I was in before this it was a web video presentation.

In my first company it was a hotel meeting.

Whatever that #1 thing is you need to train your people to do that thing and ONLY that thing.

I was talking to a lady the other day that was asking me what to tell her prospects.  She was trying to figure out what to tell her downline to say.  I asked her a few questions about her business and realized that they have hotel meetings.  I told her that all her downline needs to say is:

Come to a business presentation.

That’s it!  All they need to do is invite the prospect to a business presentation.  There is no need to answer any more questions or learn a complicated phone script.  Just invite the prospect to the business presentation.  If the prospect has questions let them know that they can get all their questions answered at the presentation.  There are two ways you can approach this:

#1 I am just getting started but if you come to the business presentation on <insert day and time> I will make sure you get all your questions answered by my mentor.

#2 I am very busy and I have a bunch of calls to return today.  However if you come to the business presentation on <insert day and time> I will make sure I spend some one on one time with you and answer any questions you have.

Or just go with #3: If you come to the business presentation on <insert day and time> and I will make sure we answer all of your questions.

You see prospects will ask lots of questions and delay the decision making.  If we try and learn elaborate scripts and such it makes things more complicated.  It gives the prospect lots of opportunities to say no.  It also makes it more complicated for your downline.

If all your downline has to do is invite someone to a busiuness presentation it becomes much easier.  The prospect they are talking to can picture themselves simply inviting people to presentations.  It is a duplicable business.  Learning complicated phone scripts is not.

What do you do in your business?  What’s your #1 best technique for getting a prospect to sign up?  Do you have a hotel meeting, a dvd, a web site presentatio, or something else?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 12% [?]

Hi All,

I was listening to a audio training by Big Al the other day. He said something pretty interesting. He said that everything we do in our MLM enterprise should be a training.

Think about it.

Imagine if every time you called a prospect you did 3 ways where your team members could listen in.

Imagine if every time you put together a new internet marketing campaign you did a live training where your team could watch how you did it.

Wouldn’t that be powerful?

One tool I’ve found that makes this work is GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar. (See why I call this the best new mlm training tool here.) GoToMeeting allows up to 15 people to watch you work on the computer. You can use it for business presentations or trainings for your team. So if you’re building a blog and want your team members to know how easy it is to setup their own blog, why not do it as a training event? You can set it up so that your team members can watch you and ask questions while you setup the new blog!

It’s the same concept as the 3way call. Make everything you do into a training activity.

I’m going to setup one night a week where my team members can watch me build web sites, do online marketing, respond to prospects, etc. It’s an activity I already do to grow my business but I’ll be able to show my team members how they can do it too.

Think about your business. How can you turn all your prospecting into a training? How can you turn your marketing into a training?

Can you invite someone on your team to go with you to distribute flyers/sizzle cards?

Can you invite someone on your team to listen in as you call prospects?

What ways can you get your team involved and create more training events?

- Ben Fitts

(Get more training from Big Al at FortuneNow. Not an affiliate link.)

Popularity: 14% [?]

Hi guys,

I just added a new plugin to the blog which will help all of you who leave comments.  You can now “quote” and “reply” to previous commenters!  That way it makes it a little bit easier to follow discussions on the blog!

We’ll also be able to keep track of who our top commenters are.

Play around with the new features and let me know if you run into any problems.

Thanks!
Ben

Popularity: 12% [?]