Why Get A Mentor?

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Why get a mentor?  Because if you don’t want to be prey to the industry, you’ll need to become king of your jungle, and if you read on you’ll see why you need a mentor to make the transition.  Let me explain; there is a significant likelihood that if you join a Network Marketing company you’re going to fail.   Of course your results may vary, but the average is 95% to 97%.  That goes for online or face-to-face marketing, it doesn’t matter.  This is a bare-boned and frank discussion of the reality of starting any business.  It’s DANGEROUS out there and if you are average you’ll be eaten alive.  Are you willing to be average, just fresh meat for an industry full of predators?  If the answer is an emphatic ‘No’, then you’ll need a mentor to become a “Leadership Lion”, a “Business Tiger”, and a “Marketing Bear”.

A mentor can help you get through two very steep learning curves.  One is marketing and sales, and the other is Business and Leadership.  A mentor knows the path, has been through this jungle before.  A mentor will help you become what you’ll need to be to succeed.

Become a Marketing Tiger.  Many people jump into a business opportunity thinking that they’ll invite a few friends to a meeting or put up a website and a sales funnel and the money will just come rollin in.  Not so…they’re already in the ‘Exit Lane’ from the industry and haven’t been involved 5 minutes.  Marketing and sales are at the heart of Network Marketing.  Don’t believe anyone who says “you don’t have to sell, you just share”, Horse Apples (Col. Potter, MASH).

Marketing is figuring out what to sell, whom to sell it to, how to find them, and what to tell them so they are attracted into communication with you so you can sell something to them.  And Sales is what you do with them once they show up at your door so they end up buying just exactly what they need and want, going away happy that they ran into you and telling their friends to go see you too.  This is a bit of a Swiss Cheese (full of holes) interpretation, but I think you get the point.  Marketing and sales are at the CORE of running a business.  Here are a couple of gold-letter definitions from the American Marketing Association for those of you who are sticklers for precision:

  • Marketing.  Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
  • Sales.  Any of a number of activities designed to promote customer purchase of a product or service. Sales can be done in person or over the phone, through e-mail or other communication media. The process generally includes stages such as assessing customer needs, presenting product features and benefits to address those needs and negotiation on price, delivery and other elements.

Folks this takes time to learn marketing and sales, are you willing to spend time?  Don’t expect money to come rolling in up-front without these skills.  To get up this learning curve fast, you’re going to need help.  You’re going to need a solid and tested training process, and you’re going to need a mentor who can guide you through.

Become a Business Bear and a Leadership Lion.  The second learning curve is the Business Owner Mindset.  This is my favorite because it doesn’t sound very hard.  When I first started in this business I thought it would be a cinch, after all I figured that I had an MBA, 20 years in Corporate world, and I was leaving my role as VP of Marketing.  WRONG; I was not prepared to instantly succeed as a business owner and it took a lot of energy to get there.  I didn’t realize how ingrained the employer-employee mentality was in my personality.  Bottom line, even if you have the marketing and sales skills, financial management skills, if you don’t have the mindset of a Business Owner, you’re going to bounce all over the profits board, and you’ll end up a casualty of the industry.

The reason is simple enough.  Employees know that if they go to work, they’ll receive money in exchange.  Business Owners know that they don’t make money unless they make it happen.  Successful business owners don’t quit because they have stalwart self-determination.  Successful business owners are driven from within, from desire and a dream and from passion.  They love what they’re doing, or at lease something core to what they’re doing.

This is the mindset that’s going to get you past the tough times.  It’s the mindset that’s going to see zero sales and just keep pushing forward.  It’s the mindset that asks “how am I going to make this happen” when you get Google-Slapped (lose your AdWords account).   It’s the mindset that gets you up in the morning with a smile on your face when you’re losing money, knowing that you’re ultimately going to make money because of what you do each and every day to improve your business.  And it’s the mindset that forces you to change your entire personality and become an ‘Alpha’ leader so you can literally attract people into your business like a magnet.

Take it from me, you’re going to need a mentor who can help you make this transition into a business owner’s mindset.  It’s a steep learning curve, and I didn’t make it to the top until I had a mentor.

Get a Mentor.  Three percent to five percent make it in the industry, that’s all.  Eighty percent of those work with a mentor.  In fact over time they have a series of mentors as the ramp up their success year-after-year.  Are you going to be a statistic of this industry, or are you going to become a Business Lion, a Leadership Lion, a Marketing Tiger, and a Business Bear?  Get a mentor.  You’ll thank me for it.

4 Comments

admin, January 27th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
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Dream Boards: What Motivates You To Success In Home Business?

Once you start a business, you’ve got to find out what motivates you.  What nourishes your inner strength and keeps you striving for success?  Your motivations are your own, you own them.  They are strictly built into your wiring.  But you may not know what your motivations are or how to use them to drive you to success.  Here are few steps to help you discover out what motivates you and to help you use your motivation to succeed in your home business.

Step 1:  Discover Your Motivation.  Some people say that they are motivated by money.  I don’t think so.  I think that money is only a stepping stone to achieving something that motivates them.  For instance, prestige.  Wealthy people have prestige and it’s something that can motivate a person to achieve.  Also helping others.  Some people really motivated to help others and money is something they can use to help others get what they need.  Of course there are the necessities of life.  We all need money to pay for food, shelter, clothing, transportation and education.  Money can help us achieve that as well.  Then there are motivators like self-satisfaction through achievement, self-satisfaction through depending on yourself for your own needs.

Step 2:  Make A Dream Board.  Once you have identified your motivation, it’s time to put it to work for you.  I like the idea of a Dream Board.  If you’re unfamiliar with a dream board, it’s a great tool to help you remain focused on your motivation to success in your business.  In a dream board you visually portray your dreams, or your motivators.  A  dream board is nothing more than a piece of poster board from the office supply that you use as a sort of display to remind you of why you are working to succeed.  You can display one motivating dream, or 10 if you have that many.   If your motivation is to get a new house, then what you need to do is find pictures of houses like you want and post them on your dream board.  Maybe you can draw the floorplan of the house you want.  Glue on magazine pictures of the kitchen you want it to have, the back yard, or that great 3-car garage.  If your motivation is a car, get pictures of the kind of car you want.  Get pictures of the interior and the engine.  Try to get pictures that are specifically the color you want.

Some people like to add goal tracking to their dream boards.  If you’re saving for a down payment on a dream house, maybe you should build a checklist to track how much profit your business has made that you will apply to that down payment.  For instance, if your goal is to make a $50,000 down payment, track your progress by checking off $5,000 increments:  $5,000, $10,000, $15,000…$50,000.

Step 3:  Use Your Dream Board For Motivation.  Place your dream board where you will see it regularly.  Maybe you can post it in the kitchen, or in your home office or in the family room.   Remember to keep adding to your Dream Board as you find new pictures or drawings you like.  When things are tough in your business or you need some motivation just to do the work, you can stop and look at your dream board for a refresher course on why you’re doing it.  Maybe this will help you overcome your reluctance to miss a ballgame on TV in order to work on the weekend.  Maybe when you’re tired and just want to relax, your dream board will remind you of why you’re pushing yourself.  Then you can get back to work.

To be a successful Online Marketer or Entrepreneur, you’ve just got to figure out what motivates you and you’ve got to keep reminding yourself why you’re working so hard to succeed with your business.  dream boards are a great way to keep yourself motivated and successful.

2 Comments

admin, January 17th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
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Passion: The Key Mindset Ingredient to Success for Online Marketers and Entrepreneurs

When I set out to write this article I intended to write about the importance of never quitting, because the top 3 percent, the truly successful Online Marketers and Entrepreneurs NEVER QUIT.  But as I thought about it I realized that never quitting is a side-effect of a mindset which is much more fundamental to success.  To be successful you can never quit, but what can support you and empower you to continue in the face of severe distraction or even failure?  That’s when I remembered Jean Schlipmann and I realized that I needed to write about passion.

You see, Jean is one of the most profoundly successful and committed persons I’ve ever met.  Jean is an entrepreneur, but cut from a different cloth.  She’s not an online marketer, rather she is the founder and executive director who drives the James A. Schlipmann Melanoma Cancer Foundation, named after her late husband Jim who lost his battle with melanoma.  Jean is truly a leader who has drawn the entire melanoma community together and has brought national attention and focused research dollars to curing this devastating disease. I met Jean in Texas two years ago and could sense how committed and driven she was.  That commitment came from losing a young spouse to a horrible disease and vowing with all her life energy that she would stop this disease in her lifetime.

I asked Jean what she thought it really takes to be successful.  She said, “It takes passion.  You’ve got to find your passion and let it drive everything you do.  If you don’t have passion, you’ll never get through the tough times running an organization.”  And I could sense her passion pulsing through the conversation.  It was energy, a dynamic and positive force I could literally feel.  Do I even need to tell you how critical, how essential, and how absolutely necessary it is for you to find your passion and use it in your business?  Can you imagine how powerful it will be in driving you and your business to success?

Quite simply, passion and commitment are at the top of the list of what it takes to be a successful Online Marketer and Entrepreneur.  It’s what truly separates the “wanna bees” from the top 3 percent of leaders in this industry!  With this kind of passion, can you see why successful top 3 percent leaders never quit?  It’s outside their realms of imagination!  Only persistence, carry-through, and success are on their minds.

What’s your mindset?  Are you ready to be passionate about what you do?  Are you ready to join the top 3 percent of the Online Marketers and Entrepreneurs in this industry?  Reach deep inside, what motivates you to work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day?  What is it you can commit yourself to that is worth that much energy?  What is it that you’ll do or bust a seam trying until it works?  That’s where your passion lies my friend.  I wish you the very best of success.  Go find your passion!

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admin, January 16th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized