Don’t believe for one second that working in network marketing is a one man on an island venture and you can handle it all without a good MLM downline manager. You can’t go it alone.
MLM ventures, whatever company you’re with, will succeed or fail based on how well the manager is involved with the downline. Choosing a good manager is the biggest and most important step to take when signing on with any endeavor in MLM.
Bad managers are those who want you to sign on because you’re one of the body count and whatever you sell will reflect in commission payments to them. Once they’ve ‘got you on the hook’ so to speak, you’ll hang there, swinging in the wind until you eventually fall off and decide MLM was a bad idea.
Managers like that taint the industry. If you’re talking about joining an MLM but the manager is always too busy to really talk or spend time helping to train you, that’s a bad sign.
If he or she is impatient or can’t answer legitimate questions, don’t sign on. “How much can I expect to earn?” is not a legitimate question and a good manager won’t be able to answer it because the ‘how much you earn’ will be based on your efforts.
A good manager doesn’t see you as just a number, but as a person worth investing his time, his energy and his expertise in. The manager you sign with should not (under any circumstances) be a complete newbie with the MLM company you’re joining, because the inexperienced can’t usually lead the inexperienced.
They can learn along with you, but they won’t know enough yet about how to succeed with that company than you will. So look for someone who knows what he’s doing and has been doing it successfully for years.
A good manager is not the invisible man. You know the kind – you stop by or call, but he’s never there. Your emails or phone calls are never answered. That doesn’t mean a good manager should be at your beck and call – he has to have a life too – but it does mean that when you need him, if he’s not reachable at that moment, he should get back to you with an answer to your question or a solution to your problem in a timely manner.
A good MLM downline manager always has a plan. He has a well thought out, well written out step by step method that takes his downline from start to success. If you find a manager and he always has notes written ‘somewhere’ but can’t find them and he’s constantly telling you he doesn’t know the answers to your questions, but will ‘get back to you,’ it means he’s probably not going to be very reliable. He’s always ‘going to’ get around to helping you, or teaching you, but he never does.
Finally, what are others saying about him? People do talk. Find out what they’re saying about the manager and decide from that point whether or not you want to be a part of his team.
