The Missing Ingredient in Networking Marketing, Part 2

by Al Hanzal

Training Your Sales Force

Let’s breakdown this missing ingredient--the ability to teach your network partners who you want to serve with your business and how you want those networking partners to connect you with their referrals. We start by moving beyond the traditional model of selling.

To bring home this point, let’s pretend that you have been made sales manager for your company. They hired five new sales people. As sales manager, you must train these five people into a powerful sales force. Where do you start?

If you use the traditional model of sales training, you start by teaching your sales force about your company, its history. Then you will teach the features and the benefits of your products. You have a laundry list of features that make your product superior to others products on the market. Your pricing is one of your product features.

As part of the sales training, you will high light the various objections your sales force will receive about the product. As part of their training you will equip them with a response to every objection. You will teach them how to make cold calls and play the numbers games of making X number of calls to get X number of appointments to get X number of sales.

You will quickly find this traditional sales model does not produce the sales you want. In today’s crowded market place where customers have so many buying options, product selling produces fewer and fewer results. The traditional selling model focuses on the company, the company’s product, and the features, in particular the price of the product.

More successful businesses have shifted to a customer focus model. Customer focus selling starts with the customer, their problems, their issues, their desires. The role of the sales person is to become a resource finding company solutions to a customer’s issues. The focus shifts from selling the company’s products to focusing on the customer and finding solutions to their issues. And giving them a great buying experience in the process.

How do you apply this to improving your network marketing? You can use the customer focus selling model to teach your network partners the ability to teach your network partners who you want to serve with your business and how you want those networking partners to connect you with their referrals. There are five ingredients to mastering this skill.