Cellphone Plan Home Business

Party plans are those get togethers at people’s homes where the product is demonstrated live. The party is a sales opportunity for the company’s products and there’s no better to way retail the products. That’s because the product(s) is sampled at the home party. This gives people hands on experience with the product before they buy it.

But not every network marketing company can benefit from party plans. Party plans or home parties are best suited for products that have a “WOW” factor. Products that have instantly recognizable benefits are good candidates for a party plan. Products that have more subtle benefits don’t do so well. Skin care products do well in home party plans and certain other products do as well.

For example, I have been to an Ecoquest home demonstration. Ecoquest makes those Fresh Air air purifiers. The demonstrators brought an onion with them. They cut a piece off the onion. They told me to hold out my hand and they smeared onion juice all over the back of my hand. Then they told me to smell the back of my hand – which obviously smelled like onion. Then they had me hold my hand in front of the Fresh Air for 45 seconds. And then they told me to smell my hand again. WOW …no more onion smell. That product had WOW factor and it was well demonstrated. I ended up buying a unit on the spot but did not join the business side.

The party plans work best for items that few people use. Other business like my Lightyear Wireless has little to show in home parties. I mean who needs to see a demo of a cell phone? I suppose some people might but the attraction in Lightyear is having just a great product that everyone uses. Party plans can be great for retailing the product. Retailing the product can bring in quick cash flow and some of those people might later want to be in the business.

If you have been on the receiving side of a network marketing person trying to get you onboard, did he/she remind you of an auto salesperson? In old school MLMs, the most successful network marketers were aggressive and treated their prospects a lot like customers coming into a car dealership. Personally I hate car buying. The culture is manipulate, manipulate, and manipulate until the person has signed the next four to six years away. Any person coming into a car dealership is considered fair game as long as they have some credit.

Unfortunately a lot of network marketers still operate in that mode. Think about how many times you hear from your car salesperson AFTER you drive off the lot. A lot of network marketers do the same thing: get someone to sign up and then move on; never checking back with the person again.

Fortunately there is a new wave of network marketers which I consider myself part of, that does not operate this way. A prospect is not shopping for a car to me. They are looking for a way to make money either on the side or full time. They are looking for a way to solve their problem (needing to earn extra money or move away from a job, etc) and I am here to help them do that.

Maybe I can help them, maybe I can’t. Smart network marketers will say no to the prospect if they don’t feel they are a good fit. The reason for this is that if the prospect signs on, he or she will be someone who will need guidance and contact well beyond the initial sign up. The prospect needs to be someone the smart network marketer can work with, not just a 1 time bonus.

Click Here to Learn more about Lightyear Wireless

I spent some time this morning cleaning up my twitter account. Mostly focusing on the list of people I was following. I noticed that a good portion of them have not “tweeted” in a long time. By long time, I used 3 months as a guide. I figure if they cannot tweet in 3 months I don’t want to bother following them.

Next up, I cleared out the ones that weren’t relevant to my interests. Like real estate agents for example; not sure why I followed them to begin with. Last out were the noisy ones with nothing but promo tweets. You know.. “download my such and such ebook” or “register for my such and such webinar”. Nobody wants to read promo tweets all the time.

This exercise taught me a few lessons about Twitter. First thing is that I need to make a renewed commitment to it. I have been guilty of not tweeting for long periods of time myself and need to refocused on connecting via Twitter. Secondly, Twitter must offer something of value to me. That is the people I follow must tweet things of interest to me. Otherwise, the service has no value. Thirdly I should provide value – even if it’s just a bit of humor to make someone smile.

There are a lot of people with Twitter accounts, but I would guess very few people are using Twitter effectively. Celebreties have it figured out; but people follow them like groupies. What about home based business people like me? Ok so I am off to tweet a few things. Follow me at the side bar.

Click Here to Learn more about Lightyear Wireless

There is quite a lot of debate about the warm market in network marketing these days. Usually the ‘warm market’ conjures up the visualization of one sided conversations with friends, family, and contacts. And it conjures up scenes of broken or damaged relationships.

There are people on both sides of this debate. On one side, you have the ‘renegade’ folks who say steer clear of the warm market and focus on attracting prospects instead. On the other side, are people who still swear by the warm market technique.

One well known network marketer still gives this advice to people: build your business around the warm market. He has also made seemingly conflicting advice statements like ‘lead a large group of people’ and ‘you can’t market to strangers’. This particular individual is a multi-millionaire (many times over) so he must know something. Right?

Yet I could not reconcile in my mind how you can use your warm market (which is a limited group of people) and build a large team. At some point you’ll have to market to strangers. And I know perfectly well this person did not make his money marketing his company to friends and family.

In digging a little into this person’s background, I realized several things. First he has been at it since at least the 1980’s starting with old school Amway. (Did everyone get their start at Amway?). Second, he is a well known motivational speaker. I would imagine his wealth comes mostly from his speaking engagements. When you can draw thousands of people into an auditorium, that’s big bucks! That’s bigger bucks that warm marketing bucks.

Another thing I realized about his is how he defines warm market. He says to work on continually expanding your warm market. And he also believes that you should establish a relationship before trying to recruit anyone. That reconciles the “don’t sell to strangers” statement. But I’m still not 100% comfortable with warm market techniques over attraction marketing techniques.

What about you? Yeah, I know I didn’t mention his name. Who do you think I’m talking about?

When some people think of starting a home based business, they tend to get overwhelmed just thinking about it. They are plagued with questions like “how do I get started?” and “how will I grow the business”, and “how will I make any money?”. The best thing you can do if you are feeling overwhelmed is to step back and take things one piece at a time.

So if you are feeling overwhelmed, first take a look at what’s overwhelming you. For example, some of my team have a hard time understanding the compensation plan. My advice for them is to put down what they are doing and spend some time focusing on the plan to learn more about it. And of course, I make myself available to them as well.

Whatever is overwhelming you, take a step back and then focus solely on that for a bit. Usually a better understanding will emerge through focused work. Sometimes it helps to just put that thing aside that is overwhelming you – and do something else for a bit. Something simpler but still productive. With a home based business, there is always something to work on whether it be catching up on filing or building links to your website. But don’t get overwhelmed!

Over at the “Pink Truth” there is a great story written by someone who tried and failed at working her network marketing business (Mary Kay Cosmetics). It’s linked below and I recommend you read it because it’s a post mortem lesson on how not to do network marketing. In Mary Kay, the normal marketing channel is the home party. This is actually fairly common in network marketing companies where product presentation is important. The home party marketing strategy dates all the way back to the early Tupperware parties.

Why am I talking about Mary Kay? To point out the vast different in product line between some network marketing and Lightyear Wireless. Why would we do home party for a cell phone? You see, the product presentation isn’t that important because everyone knows what cells phones are and what they can do. Furthermore, the cell phone is something you get once every two years or so. So a Lightyear home party showing off cells phone wouldn’t make that much sense.

The reality of home parties is they have limitations anyway. For one, they are extremely time consuming. In the second place, they have territory limitations. The person who wrote that lamenting story points this out when she says:

I would never be able to make my money back by just selling, because she was recruiting the whole town.

If you live a smaller city or small town, you will eventually run out of people to invite to home parties. And the problem becomes more acute if there are other reps in your neighborhood. These problems can exist even in larger city (territory conflicts). The home party is really just an extension of working the warm market – a market that has inherent limitations. Is there are better way? Yeah. Work the larger market served by companies like MyWirelessRep.

Overcoming Your Rational Thinking the Mary Kay Way

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One way to sell cell phone plans via MyWirelessRep is to simply talk to your friends and contacts. Nearly everyone has a cell phone right? And that means everyone is on a cell phone plan. Strike up a conversation about their cell phone. Let’s take hypothetical Joe. “Hey Joe..how do you like your ___ phone?”. Then somewhere in the conversation ask how long of a contract Joe had to sign or talk about your own contact and that might prompt him to talk about his. Then make a note of it. Mental note short term, but for the long time, write it down in a contact list of some kind. Then when the time comes, you can say “hey Joe… your cell phone contract is about to expire; have you thought about what you’re going to do to replace it?”

That does 2 things. First it shows Joe that you cared enough to remember his cell phone contract expiration. He’ll be impressed with that. That can also provide a great lead in for you to present the MyWirelessRep story to Joe whether or not Joe might be interested in starting a business. By this time you should know if Joe is entrepreneur material or not. If so, discuss the opportunity, if not simply discuss the benefits of the plan. If you aren’t sure, discuss the plan and drop a few tidbits about the opportunity to Joe and see if he shows any interest.

This type of follow-up is more likely to be a win win because you’ve alreadly established a trust relationship with Joe.

One issue with many network marketing companies is that the product they sell is too narrow. Take a Juice MLM for example. Without even arguing the merits of the juice, how many people are going to be interesting in buying it? Perhaps quite a few health conscious people so I’m not saying there’s no market.

But what about cell phones? I can’t think of a larger market than the wireless cell phone market. That is one of the things that makes MyWirelessRep such a value proposition for me, my customers, and my downline. Who do you know that doesn’t have a cell phone? Most families give their children cell phone starting at about age 8 or so. I even saw a homeless guy on the corner with a panhandling sign talking on a cell phone. That of course made me wonder about his genuine need, but you get the picture. Huge market! And plans are always terminating and people are always needing new phones and plans.