Motivating Your Downline with Leadership Lessons from the Bomb Squad
By Tim Sales
One of our most frequent questions is, "How do I keep my downline motivated?"
My question back to you is, "Can you really motivate anyone?"
You can help them by providing them with the advice and tools to succeed, but motivation is a personal thing. People don't motivate others; people motivate themselves.
As Andrew Carnegie once said, "You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb a little."
So, how do you motivate your downline when it's up to them to do the motivating? You get them effective at what they do with great training.
Leadership Lessons from the Bomb Squad - SOPs
When I was a member of the U.S. Navy underwater bomb squad, I learned some valuable lessons about motivation and training. You see, the bomb squad only allows one person to work on the bomb at a time. However, every tech is trained to write down their steps before they are performed in case the bomb explodes.
This leaves valuable info for the next bomb tech. We took a piece of plexiglass and a grease pencil down to the bomb to document our steps. Before we got started on defusing the bomb, we would:
- Write what we were going to do.
- Do the item.
- Check it off as done.
Then, we'd move to step two. Write it down, do it, then check it off. We continued to do that until the bomb was defused or blew up. Our team members knew if we upset the bomb what not to do from the last step.
The Most Important Leadership Lesson
The most important leadership lesson I can share with you applies to the bomb squad as well as network marketing - it's your job to develop, teach and coach your team on the standard operating procedures (SOPs), not to do it for them.
Bomb squad techs are motivated by writing down the steps and checking each one off before they move to the next step because if they skip a step, they can lose it all.
Network marketers are very similar - if they don't follow the SOPs, they can lose their prospect, lose their drive for success and you can lose a valuable team member.
So, how do you ensure this attitude of motivation in your downline? Get your training down to a science. It's all about the SOPs. If they can do these nine things well, you will have a cheerful, excited and MOTIVATED team.
The Nine SOPs for M.L.M Success
Here's what I recommend you train your downline on. These are the only activities that make money in network marketing, so learn and teach them well.
- How to establish goals
- How and what to know to be effective (most of which is on this list)
- How to promote
- What to say to people when making prospecting calls
- How to set appointments
- How to present the business or products
- How to sell the business or products
- How to sponsor people (the correct procedures and sequence)
- How to train new distributors
