Studies have shown that people need to hear from you 5-9 times on average before making a purchasing decision. 

But, how many of us actually connect with people that many times before we get frustrated, give up, or lose track?

Email is a great way to warm people up to the idea of your offer, but you can’t hammer them over the head with it. Let’s imagine that you’re selling paperclips, and somebody signs up on your website to get your e-book or request more information. Chances are that you’re going to put them on a follow-up autoresponder. That’s great — Step 1 is complete, and you’re on the way to making sure that this lead doesn’t slip through the cracks.

There are two common mistakes, however:

1) You set up your autoresponder to tell them about your amazing 2 for 1 paperclip offer, and you tell them about it in every single email, sent every two days over a two week period. This strategy will undoubdtedly fail. If all you do is tell them about your offer and nothing else, they’ll stop reading your emails after two or three, and you’ll never connect with them enough times to get to the purchase decision.

2) They receive and read all your emails, but then you don’t do anything else. Let’s imagine they’ve received all your emails and like what they’ve read. You’ve included information about how paperclips can change lives, some anecdotes about funny things to do with paperclips, and peppered the emails with a few mentions of your amazing 2 for 1 offer. Now what? The next step to getting to a purchase decision is probably a phone call. In your last email, try some wording like this: “I can’t wait to connect with you on the phone to find out more about what your paperclip needs are. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow. If tomorrow isn’t good for you, just email me back and let me know when you’d like to connect.” Doing this gives them the opportunity to reach out to you, and also lets them know you’ll be calling. It’s a win-win.

We know that the fortune is in the follow-up, but that follow-up needs to be varied. Email is great, but it’s a one-way street most of the time. You can use any autoresponder tool to set up your emails to go out, but make sure you monitor where people are, and mix in other activities like sending cards, calling them, or posting on their Facebook wall. You can use the Relationship Builder in Oprius to automate those tasks, and make sure that none of those customers slip through the cracks. If you can automate a few of those 5-9 contacts, you’ll have more time to focus on the two most important ones of discovering your prospects needs and closing the sale.

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During the month of December, we know it can be a busy time for certain businesses if the products or services that you’re selling aren’t holiday-focused, but for some people it can be an overwhelming time for your business. You’ve got life, work, and family to balance, and it can be tricky to keep your business’ momentum going.

For the last three years at Oprius, I’ve talked to people time and time again who have just found that they lost their momentum over the Holidays, and it took them a little while to pick things back up again.

I’m going to throw this question out to you guys — what do you do to stay focused and balance everything that’s happening in your personal life and with your home based business over the holidays?

Please comment below and let’s share ideas

If you look at most people in the world who are successful, they have one thing in common:  They have all failed. Lots.

The major thing that sets the winners apart is that they persevere through those times. Don’t believe what you may have heard about success in MLM — it does not come quickly. Getting rich quick is only possible through the lottery. For the rest of us, you need to work hard and persevere. The only way to do this is to Love What You Do. I think that Steve Jobs summed it up best in this short clip.

Everything he says here is directly applicable to Network Marketing.

1. You need to love what you’re doing. Otherwise, you aren’t going to be able to endure the tough times and all the people putting you down.
2. Get good at scouting talent. When you talk with a prospect, you’ll need to identify quickly, without knowing them well, if they will be a good fit for your team, or if you’d be best to just land them as a customer and make them as happy as possible in that role. If you’re going to need to spend more time on training them because you know that they aren’t leadership or entrepreneur material, then maybe you shouldn’t pursue them for your team. The faster you can do this, the quicker you can move on to the next lead.

We’re happy to announce that we have just added a new in-application notification system. Sounds like a long name, but it’s really quite simple. Right now, there are two types of notifications: Alerts (red), and Announcements (yellow).

Alerts are used to let you know about system wide issues such as maintenance and known issues that are currently being addressed.

Announcements are used to let you know about things such as features, contests, or other things that we need to communicate with you but doesn’t quite warrant a newsletter.

For each type, you can close it using the X on the right and it will hide that particular notification. We hope that this will be yet another way to help us communicate even more effectively with our users. We’d love to hear your feedback, so let us know what you think!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, because I was on holiday in Europe. I was travelling with somebody who really didn’t like flying. Leading up to each flight, they continually talked about how frightened they were. They were constantly thinking about all the things that could go wrong with the flight. Unfortunately, almost none of those things were in their control. What is the point of worrying about something that we can’t control?

The same goes for cold calls and sales in MLM. People are often so frightened about all the things that could go wrong, but the fact is that most of the time, you aren’t in control of the outcome. I once had a coach who said, “Why focus on the outcome, instead of the task at hand? The outcome will be determined only by the successful completion of the task.” Landing a sale, getting hung-up on, or getting rejected on your call are all outcomes to which we don’t have complete control, because we can’t control how somebody will react to us on the phone.

There are so many things in life worth worrying about, but there is absolutely no point in worrying about the things that we can’t control. Focus on the tasks that you can control, and you’ll find you spend a lot less time stressing about the outcome to which you are not in complete control.

Here are my 4 tips to help avoid stressing about your cold-calls or sales…

1. Eliminate negative self-talk that focuses anything you can’t control.

2. Think about all the positive actions you can take towards your desired outcome, and visualize the positive outcome that you want.

3. If you find yourself getting nervous about your sales or calls, think only about the task at hand (calling somebody and having a conversation), not the outcome of the call. 

4. If the outcome of your call isn’t what you wanted, don’t dwell on it. 

After all, the past is history, the present is transitory, and all that matters is the future – so learn what you can from the outcome and move on to the next task.