Network marketing has been in operation in the United States of America for almost 50 years and has spread to many countries all over the world. The biggest network marketing company, sharing the history with the USA is none other than Amway Corporation. Even though I’m not a distributor of Amway, I cannot denied the fact that they are the biggest and the oldest direct selling company in the world.
Network marketing is very different from traditional sales. Traditional sales focus on reaching the required sales volume of a product which could be attained by giving incentives or promotions. However, network marketing is a “people business”, focusing on the growth of an organization of distributors but not the products.
Network marketing originates from a single person and spreads to three or five persons and eventually it could grow to tens, hundreds, thousands or even million of individuals. Every individual comes from different educational background and working experience. They are exposed to different social levels and circles. Hence, ‘Duplication‘ is a very important factor in uniting these individual in an organization. In other words, you must know the ‘know-how‘ to duplicate.
Imagine you have a good proven system that is both simple and effective; and this system could provide those who believe in it, to follow and use it to operate in a simple and effective way in achieving his/her goals! Will you love this system?
To most people, the ‘duplication’ theory means creating a downline that is an exact copy of the upline. This is a wrong concept. The main hurdle is the fact that a person is subjective by nature and this will indirectly hinder the proper duplication in the development and running the operation of the ‘people business’. The person is greatly affected by his/her experiences and the methods of executing the business, and as such, it has been interestingly observed that this person or distributor will tend to deviate from the duplication process. The methodology of the system becomes distorted by the time it is spread down to several levels of the system.
A good example of the above is a game that is often played in a team building exercise on communication and listening skill. It’s about passing of instruction or information from the first person (the one who give the information) to the other person (the receiver); and this person will in turn passes the same information to another person (another receiver). By the time this information reaches the last person (it could be 10 to even 30 people), the information is totally distorted.
We can see that the level of distortion involved in the duplication process is such that when it reaches the deeper recesses of the entire system, the supposedly ‘duplicate’ is no longer an exact copy of the originator. This is the most difficult part of the whole duplication process; how to ensure that the exact copies of the original system right down to the last detail, is passed over to the last person in the system intact.
Take McDonalds or 7-eleven for example. How did they earn money? They succeed by creating duplicates or exact copies of their restaurants or shops.
Selling products, encouraging your downlines and producing selling volumes are not the problems, relying on your hard work and persistency are key to success in this business. However, to create and develop a system consisting of hundreds and millions of successful individuals and to function effectively, is not easy. The difficultly you are going to face is the management required of such a large organization.
Therefore, the system has to undergo some form of evolution. In order to do so, you have to accumulate practical experience and continuously correcting for mistakes throughout its formation years before it could be established as a viable system.
If you can’t do that then you have to look for a ready effective proven system, and duplicate the process in order for you to succeed in network marketing industry.
Talk to you soon,
Jai