Network Marketing Lead Follow-Up - Some Tips

I was listening to a training CD by Art Jonak and Andy Hummel the other day in my car (always educating the mind, you know) and Art and Andy were talking about some ideas about how to follow up on network marketing leads. Andy talked about small actions leading to small results and massive actions leading to massive results. He spoke about needing massive results to really solidify your business and create residual income. If you have been putting into place the teachings of Ann Sieg's The Renegade Network Marketer, Mike Dillard's Magnetic Sponsoring, or Mike Klingler's Renegade University and Renegade Professional system, you have been busy creating your web of attraction marketing content. And if you have been doing this properly and given it some time, you will be generating significant or even massive leads. In order to get those massive leads into and through your sales funnel you need to develop a process. Here are some ideas for that process.

Phone Follow Up

How long does it take for you to initially follow up on 1,000 leads by phone? If we use 5 minutes per call as an example, that works out to 5,000 minutes or a little over 83 hours. That's the equivalent to more than 2 weeks of full time work! And 5 minutes is probably very conservative. The call length is probably closer to 10 - 20 minutes. And you probably don't often get a live person on the other end as many people don't pick up the phone anymore and rely on their answering machine or they just aren't home.

Automated Call System

One way to leverage your time in the follow up process is to use an automated call system like Call-Em-All. (I am in no way affiliated with Call-Em-All and I make no money from them if you use their service. I just did a Google search and since they were the first one to come up in the Google ads, they get the free mention. I am just using them as an example of what is available at the time of this writing.) Here is how it works. You provide Call-Em-All with a list of phone numbers of who you want to call (which you produced from your lead generation activities), you specify when you want the calls made, and you record a 30-second message in your voice on Call-Em-All's toll free number. Apparently the recording is so clear that it is indistinguishable from a live call. Then Call-Em-All calls everyone on your list at the time designated. If a live person answers, they are given the option to hear the message again at no cost to you. If an answering machine answers, the message is left. When there is no answer or a busy signal, the phone number is tried several more times after waiting a few minutes. Making the recording and setting up the call probably will take you 10 - 20 minutes at the most if you already have the phone list ready.

Rates (at the time of writing) vary by the number of calls and range from $0.15 per calls for 100 calls, $0.09 per call for 1,000 calls, to $0.06 per call for 50,000 calls. (I found other services that are even cheaper.) Only successful calls are charged to you. Let's do the math. If you value your time at $25 per hour, 83 hours of manual calls will cost you $2,075. If you pay for 1,000 automated calls at $0.09 per call and it takes you 20 minutes to set it up, it will cost you $98 (1,000 calls x $0.09/call + 20 minutes/60 minutes x $25/hour). I don't know if it is just me but I think I prefer the $98 cost over the $2,075 cost! I can spend the 83 hours saved on more productive activities (worth more than $25/hour) and I don't need to deal with the tedium of dialing, getting busy signals, dealing with rejection over the phone, etc.

The Message

Now what kind of message do you record? Depending upon the source of the leads, the message could be something like "Hello, this is Doug Mah. I understand that you signed up to receive some additional information about a home-based business opportunity. I have recorded a high level overview of my business and you can access that recording at any time at 1 800 xxx-xxxx. Go listen to the call and we will touch base. Have a great day!" You can fine tune your message to your business and what your organization teaches.

Hotline

The next thing that you will need to do is set up the hotline with a recorded introduction to your business. The introduction is there to tell the prospect enough about your business so he knows whether he wants to pursue it further. If he does want to pursue it further, he is instructed to give you a call or to email you. In this way, you only spend time with high quality pre-qualified prospects who already know what your business is about and you don't have to waste your time dealing with low quality leads full of excuses. Telephone is best but you can also send the person to a webpage instead but usually your company's main web page is not ideal for this initial introduction. If your company has an online guided presentation that would be great but make sure that there are instructions as to how to get a hold of you after the prospect has seen the presentation.

Time Leverage and Scalability

Adding these two components to your lead follow up process will allow you to leverage your time as well as save you a lot of time. You will also be able to spend more quality time in the productive activity of following up with high quality prospects from your lead generation methods that have pre-qualified themselves by calling you back. And this system is highly scalable. When it gets to the point where you can't follow up with all the high quality prospects, it is time to give some of them to your downline.

C Doug Mah is an internet network marketing coach whose goal is to teach independent business owners how to use attraction marketing and Web 2.0+ technologies to grow their businesses profitably. If this article was interesting to you please connect with Doug here to learn more about internet network marketing.