William Winch asked:
Your success in Network Marketing depends heavily on how you communicate with other people. Everything you say is interpreted by your audience, and if you don’t have the right combination of what you say and how you say it, your activity can become counter-productive.
Most of the time, we as home-based business owners don’t think about how our personalities influence what we say and how we say it. Knowing your audience is crucial in order to achieve success, but knowing how they will react to your personality is something that a lot of network marketers overlook.
There are basically three types of personalities. No one type is better or worse than the other, but knowing what kind of person you are can help guide you in a better direction to increase your business. The three types of personalities are Pessimistic, Optimistic, and Realistic.
People who are pessimistic think that their garden has nothing but weeds. They focus on the negative. Everyone is out to get them, and every sales pitch is a scam. If your target audience is pessimistic, you need to develop a well-crafted script that focuses on handling objections. Pessimism is only good when it allows you to see through bad business proposals and shifty sales techniques.
If you yourself are pessimistic, this could be something that is harming your business without you even knowing it. Do you always complain and focus on the negative? Do you look for the mistakes people make instead of praising their strengths? Being a leader is crucial to success in Network Marketing. The best leaders help people without putting them down.
People who are optimistic think that their garden has no weeds. They put their blinders on and refuse to let others dampen their spirits. It’s very difficult to find optimistic prospects. Optimism usually comes after someone has tried your product and has a positive result.
Optimism can have it’s negative effects on a home-based business, even though the person is thinking positive thoughts. If you constantly live in a world where nothing can be wrong with your company or your upline, you’ll fall into costly traps that you should’ve otherwise been aware of.
Mentoring people with nothing but optimism can be counter-productive as well. People need guidance in the right direction. Telling them everything is always perfect doesn’t help them overcome obstacles.
People who are realistic know that there will always be a few weeds in their garden. They see things for what they really are, and are able to understand why things happen the way they do. Realistic prospects will know there is a price, but they will also know their is a value to what you are promoting. They trust people to an extent. They know when to back away from a bad deal or spending money on things that will probably not work or that are merely hype.
Many times being a realist is the best route to take in Network Marketing. You can step outside of the world your company tries to keep you in so you can look back in and see it for what it’s worth. You can decipher what you like and what you don’t like, and make changes accordingly.
The only time being a realist might have it’s flaws is dealing with personal development. In order to be a good leader, you must have a vision and hope for that vision. When times get rough, you need to be able to have more optimism than realism to get you to over your hurdle. The people you lead need inspiration that comes from looking beyond what’s real and imagining what’s possible, no matter what.
A strategy that every leader should strive for in Network Marketing should be to acquire a good balance between all three types of personalities. Too much of one or the others can have a counter-productive effect so extreme it could keep a business down for good. For things to change, you need to change.
Proper marketing education stresses the importance of acquiring and maintaining productive personality traits and how to best apply them to explode your home-based business. If your company isn’t teaching you this, and other techniques on how to be a leader instead of a distributor, it’s time to change your way of thinking all on your own.