Imagine you start a company and begin manufacturing something. You build a website, you hire an accountant and you start fine tuning your marketing and you decide to bring in a few salespeople.
They have an affiliate link with a unique ID number to the web shop that lets them refer customers to the company in a simple way. They place orders through their referral link and that way the company has an easy way of keeping full track of which commissions are to be paid out.
So far so good. What happens next? You, who came up with this brilliant idea, you're the one who has to train the salespeople in how to market and how to sell. You can bring in consultants who help you develop your ideas in your company, because you're bound to need help with many other things as new issues come up that you need to solve as the business grows, such as IT, logistics and customer support.
When it comes to sales, you need to be the one who trains the salespeople if you're the one who knows it best. Then, to get more speed in sales, you need to bring in more salespeople, and if you bring in many at once it becomes a challenge to train them. It has to fit their calendar, because they may well not be doing this full time from the start. All people are different, so they learn in different ways, and you're supposed to focus on running the business, not just training salespeople.
If you bring in 10 salespeople it'll probably go fine, but if you bring in 20 or 30 you may need help. You can always hire a sales manager, but that person, does that person want a base salary? With what money? You'd have to sell more to bring in more revenue to afford to hire. Some salespeople feel after a while that it wasn't for them and choose to quit, move on and do something else. How are you going to handle that loss in productive hours? Customer follow up...
Instead of building a wide sales organisation, why not build a deep one? A wide sales organisation means that you, or a sales manager you bring in, train the salespeople in how this is to be presented, your brilliant product. You train salespeople to become competitors to each other, which of course means they have nothing to gain from working together. You can still build a good company culture with afterworks, kickoffs and whatever else, but what happens if you do it differently?
What happens if you let the best salespeople bring in new salespeople? That when someone has reached 10, 20 or 30 customers, they start taking new salespeople under their wing.
A salesperson who earns nothing from helping another one wonders why they should work for free, why they should share all their ideas about how to get this product out on the market in the best way. "Why should we train competitors?"
Quite rightly, so instead of this salesperson training competitors, this salesperson becomes a mentor to a new salesperson. Instead of sales manager I'd rather call it teacher. Sponsor is the term we have in our profession, which means this person has an interest in the new people doing well, because she gets a small percentage of the total sales, a compensation paid out directly from the parent company, which doesn't affect the new salesperson's margins.
Of course it isn't as much as the salesperson gets. The salesperson has a good commission. Suggestively a ladder from 10 to 30 percent on sales. On the recurring orders it becomes a recurring income when customers tend to keep buying.
There's more for the salespeople who choose to take on new direct sellers. If they have a matching bonus of 5%, 10% or 15% on the total turnover from customers, then there's an incentive. They have something there that's very attractive, because they see the power of a leveraged income.
Suddenly they have the possibility not only to get paid on their own customer acquisition, they get paid less of course, but they get paid for helping others learn to get customers. Which means they have a reason to sit in customer meetings with their new people and show how the presentation should be done before their partners can fly on their own. It's even so that they sit in a few meetings together, and after a few meetings they can let the new salesperson hold the presentation while they sit in and listen. Then they can give each other feedback afterwards.
That way the founders of the company get more time over for the core business and have thereby outsourced the sales department to an external organisation. The experienced salesperson can keep training new salespeople who want to start because it's an exciting product, a serious company and a good atmosphere in the organisation. This culture is attractive because we work a lot with personal development and leadership and grow as human beings when we surpass ourselves.
The experienced direct seller can not only take one person under her wing but can continuously bring new people into your part of the organisation and make sure to train them, teach them to set goals, talk mindset and then sit with them at their first meetings. You let them handle the presentation after a few meetings and watch them grow into the role of presenter. Organisations grow.
Whether she has 25, 50 or 100 customers, she can have 10 partners who have 25, 50 or 100 customers, and suddenly she gets paid on 1000, 2000 or 3000 customers over time because she has put her soul into training new partners.
There's always a structural limit to how money is paid out, so it's never the salesperson who was recruited first who automatically earns the most, but rather the one who's most productive, who's passionate about coaching and who trains the most partners.
The salesperson closest to the customer always gets paid best, but if she has a matching bonus of say 10% on a turnover that's 100 times bigger than what she can achieve herself, it becomes very attractive for her to learn the basics and then turn around and help the next person.
She won't be able to build an organisation and teach anyone if she doesn't know the basics herself, but once she gets good at it, and it's a school in communication, then she can easily teach someone else.
What you know is easy, what you don't know feels difficult, but imagine there are always people who find what you find difficult easy. Then there's always help and support to be had. There are always those who have walked the path before you and know how to get customers, who have brought in 10 customers and brought in 100 customers, and those who've done it don't need to ask for help. They can easily teach how you get your first 10...
In the USA they call it Community commerce. You reach out to your community, the people close to you. Word of mouth, because people don't trust media and authorities the way they once did. They trust people they know. When someone knows you know this, they trust you instead of someone they don't know or know of. Those are the basics of our profession. Those are the basics of our business model.
It's brilliant, and everyone who says otherwise is wrong, either out of pure ignorance or because they have another agenda, they want to lead you somewhere else, they want to sell you something.
I want you to understand if you want to understand. I want to sell you the idea of learning this. I'm passionate about sharing information and educating the market so people can make a grown up decision about whether this is right for them or not.
There are two kinds of people out there. There are those who freeze up, get scared and back away. They sit down on the sofa and get it into their heads to wait this crisis out. Then there are those who move forward, straighten up and say to themselves: "I have to act now, I have to do something to change my own situation."
We can help so many people out there with this business model. We can teach people how they actually build something that lets them become self supporting over time.
Anyone can go into a serious organisation and build something with the right guidance. It's entirely up to each person what level of ambition they have. That's nobody else's business. We're going into a time that's both frightening and exciting. It's a crisis that will mean incredible changes, terrible challenges for some and gigantic opportunities for those who choose to act.
