The 7 Deadly Sins of Network Marketing

Here's a red hot article by the Master Randy Gage

It’s ironic that many of the things people try to make their group grow faster, actually serve to slow them down. That’s because they have lost track of a simple truism of the business.
Namely that whether something works, or not isn’t the issue. The real issue is -- does it duplicate?


Every decision you make about the business needs to be evaluated through this filter, or you will have serious issues with duplication. You’ll share the experience of many in the business who recruit a lot of people personally, but find that those people don’t carry forward the process.


After working with thousands of networkers around the world, I have noticed some patterns that repeat themselves. These are behaviors that slow down or even stop your network from growing.


I’ve categorized them into the "7 Deadly Sins of Network Marketing." Any one of these will kill your duplication and turn you into a grinder. Having several or all of them, will doom you to a career of frustration, low bonus checks, and burnout. Take a look, and see how you stack up:


Deadly Sin Number 1: Superhero Syndrome

The main symptom of this disease is that everything is on you.
You do all the major presentations, you’re still doing home meetings or 2-on-1’s for people who are five levels down from you, or those that have been in for six months. (Or six years.) You’re known by all as the spiritual leader of the group and people pay homage at your feet.

The symptoms of this are feeling all warm and fuzzy because you are so needed, and pride that you’re the best sponsor in the world because you take such good care of all your people. This usually lasts a year or two until you begin to attend Dr. Wayne Dyer workshops and wonder why you have so many co-dependant people around you.

Deadly Sin Number 2: The "Play Store" Precedent

This one is easy to spot. The afflicted people have lots of shelves set up in their home office, stocked with protein powders, or vitamins, or skin care. They proudly give tours of their "store" and the more inventory they stock, the more serious they think they are.
Back in the day, this was necessary. But there was a time when they thought beehive hairdos were stylish too. With the Internet, overnight delivery, priority mail service, toll free order lines, customer direct programs, and other technology, this simply isn’t necessary,
What these people don’t realize is that what they are doing is not duplicable by most of the population. And because of this, they end up being the area warehouse for most of their team, thereby increasing the amount of inventory they need, becoming even less duplicable. This ultimately leads to Deadly Sin Number 1.

Deadly Sin Number 3: The Product Peddler Prototype

This is one you see from the "play store" victims a lot. Their lead strategy with prospects is to sell the product first, then try and sneak the business in the back door.
The symptoms of this are people who drive white vans, put magnetic signs on their cars, or sport big buttons on their lapels with corny slogans like, "Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How."

They are also afflicted with the desire to drive around town and spike yard signs all along the roadway. You may also find them at the mall attempting to hand out fiber cookies, or offering sips from their bottle of jungle juice to everyone that walks by.

If their company offers skin care products, they prospect beauticians, nail technicians, and estheticians. If their company provides nutritional products, they’re prospecting chiropractors, athletes, & health clubs, and setting up booths retailing product at health fairs.

Of course they usually have good product volume, but they can’t figure out why their people don’t duplicate better. They have very wide first and seconds levels, and then things drop off a cliff after that.

Deadly Sin Number 4: The "Steady as She Goes" Scenario

This malady is usually fatal. It all begins when someone shows you their scientifically and mathematically proven duplication plan. It goes something like this:
"You sponsor just one person each month, and you teach your people to do the exact same thing. So January, you sponsor one and you’re done. Then in February, you sponsor one more. But your person from January also sponsors one more. So now you have four in your group. Then in March, you sponsor just one more.

But your four people also sponsor one each. So now you have ten in your group. In April, you and everyone else does their one and you have 21. May your group grows to 40 something, June is 80 something, and by the end of the year, you have 57,982 people in your group!"
It sounds good, looks good, and looks good on paper. It just doesn’t work in the real world. It’s an urban myth.

This has been promoted by dozens of MLM trainers and repeated by thousands of other people to train their groups over the years.
The problem is, none of them have actually done it themselves.
In fact, it’s never been done by anyone on earth in the entire history of Network Marketing.

Deadly Sin Number 5: The Happy Hostess Hallucination

This is one of the side effects of Superhero Syndrome. The infected woman is so proud of her home, she decides to hold all of the home meetings for the entire group there. They fancy themselves as social mavens, and are most proud of their gracious hosting skills. They validate this by saying they have adequate parking, or their distributors all live in trailers, or everyone just likes coming to their house.

They bake cakes, set out the fine china, and use napkin rings.
In advanced stages of the disease, every guest gets a complete meal. Everyone gets a tour of the home and a monologue on who all the strange people in the photos are. They are "the hostess with the mostess." Meaning the hostess with the mostess number of distributors who have never made a presentation of their own.

In male subjects this is the Happy Host Hallucination. Instead of baking cakes and showing off the kitchen, they demonstrate the surround sound home theatre and show off their new grill out back. In advanced stages of the disease, every guest gets a tour of their workbench and tools in the garage. (This is cross-referenced in the medical textbooks as Straight Man’s
Disease.)

Deadly Sin Number 6: The Research Scientist Syndrome

The symptoms for this one are easy to spot. The infected person spends so much time and effort researching everything that they never get around to actually doing the business.
They start by learning everything they can about the products.
They want to know every ingredient, where it came from, and if any tofu burgers were harmed in the manufacturing process.

Then they start studying the industry. They read every single book, listen to every CD album, and watch every video ever done by Tom "Big Al" Schreiter, Tim Sales, John Fogg, a few others, and me.
By the time they finish, they are one of the world’s preeminent experts on their product line and the network marketing industry. The only problem is they are broke.

Deadly Sin Number 7: Master Closer Malady

The people with Master Closer Malady are easy to spot. They do lots of 1-on-1 presentations and they sign up almost everyone they talk to. They know all the closing techniques, and they have a pre-programmed data dump for every possible objection.
("You want to talk it over with your wife: Who wears the pants in your family?")
They study the four personality types and change their presentation for each one. They take lessons in NLP and "mirror and model" their prospect’s speech pattern, body position and breathing pattern.

They analyze each prospects language for clues in how they receive information. If the prospect says, "I see what you’re saying…" they assume they are visual and use charts and graphs.
If they say, "I hear that," they assume they are auditory and give them CDs to listen to. If the prospect says, "I feel…" they decide they are kinesthetic and start to fondle them.

All this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the business is. Most people think it is a sales business. But that isn’t true. It’s really a teaching and training business.
The people who do the business instinctively well are schoolteachers, professors, professional trainers, yoga instructors, kung fu sifu’s, coaches, and others who are involved with teaching or training in their work.

The people who approach the business with sales techniques are losing sight of the simple formula for creating wealth in Network Marketing:
Create a few simple actions – which can be duplicated by a large group of people – over a consistent period of time.
That simple, but very profound formula is how you create an exponentially growing network. And that means involving a large cross section of society in your group.
Only about 10 percent of the population are sales types. The other 90 percent hate sales, are afraid to sell, and have a deathly fear of rejection. So if we want our actions to be duplicated by a large group of people, it stands to reason we should do something that works for the 90 percent doesn’t it?

This holds true for the previous six items as well. Everything you do in the business must conform to the formula: a few simple actions, which can be duplicated by a large group of people, over a consistent period of time.

You’ll notice that each of the 7 Deadly Sins is something that can only be duplicated by small group of people. Stay away from them, and you have a great shot at creating something special.
And isn’t that why we do what we do?
-RG