How to Build a Network Marketing Team (the Smart Way)

Recruiting a successful team for your MLM business can feel like a never-ending grind. And the reason is that most teams are tracking the wrong metrics.

Building an effective network marketing team is essential to the success of a multi-level marketing business (MLM) – but many sellers, even at the corporate level, have no idea how to do this effectively.

Leaders in MLM pay close attention to sales levels, but they’re flying blind when it comes to the activities that led to those sales.

For example, I spoke with the president of field operations of a billion-dollar company. He explained that he didn’t care about the amount of activity field reps engaged in. He only cared about sales.

How could he not connect activity in the field with the number of recruits or the number of sales? In the absence of the data, he simply could not see it.

To build an effective team, you need to know which activities lead to successful sales and recruitments, then use duplication to spread those strategies within your network. And to do that – you need data!

Read on to find out key sales metrics to track in your MLM and how they can help build your network marketing team.

Fundamental Sales Metrics MLM Teams Need to Track

Every large corporation in the world has a sales department. The goal of this department is to make sales, increase profitability, and build relationships with prospects. This is all accomplished by using data to analyze, plan, and implement strategies to increase revenue.

In contrast, network marketing relies on individual reps working in silos to build and train sales teams.

The basic activity metrics that every successful organization lives by in a traditional business model are not available in MLMs. 

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Without this data, most companies focus on other less useful metrics. They track sales, which only tells you how you’ve done – not how to do more. Companies don’t realize that measuring field activity is the single most important factor in network marketing success. 

It doesn’t matter if you have a small team or no team. These are the basic activity metrics that will help you improve sales and understand what you need to do to reach your goals:

• The number of prospects that you speak to every day
• Where prospects came from and how they’re followed up on
• What percentage become customers

With the above data in hand, it’s easy to determine how much you can spend on customer acquisition. This data will also make it easy for you to improve the quality of the content you create because you can see what’s working and what’s not.

Running a direct sales business is time-consuming, and, at times, it can be challenging to know where to put your time and effort. Tracking sales activity metrics gives you the answer.

Why MLM Organizations Aren’t Tracking Sales Activity

In MLM, no one knows what metrics they should be tracking. And if you don’t know what to track, how can you develop and implement the right strategies to build a high-performing sales team?

You can ask any billion-dollar network marketing company:

• How many new prospects were communicated with in the previous month, week, or day?
• How many of those prospects engaged with the information you sent them?
• How many prospects converted to a sale or recruitment?

In all likelihood, they won’t be able to give you an answer because they don’t know what individual reps are doing on a day-to-day basis.

Why? It’s the wild west when it comes to a predictable, outbound, and quantifiable sales strategy in the MLM space. There’s no set standard for collecting data or training field teams to be effective.

I bet you’re wondering how that’s possible in this technological day and age.

The reason is that field teams and individual sellers are predominantly responsible for all the marketing and sales efforts. This means:

• The tools and resources they use are the ones they choose.
• They might select the technology or platform. 
• They might even create the content. 

The individual sales rep has to figure out which tools and resources are best and how to use them at the micro level. 

That requires a lot of time investment in tools and strategies that might not work.

A Data-First Approach to Grow Your Network Marketing Team

Now you should see that the key to building a large, successful team in MLM as a field leader or enterprise is to quantify what’s actually happening in the field.

If you’re a rep trying to grow your own team, you most likely won’t have the data from your head office, so it’s up to you to find out what’s working – and what isn’t.

You need to measure and track your income-producing activities:

• Number of times that a unique prospect actually receives information
• Number of times that a prospect engages and reviews that information
• The percentage of prospects that convert – buying the product or service or joining your team

This is what matters!

Then, when you have all that data, you can refine your strategies, content, and processes based on what works and what doesn’t. And every new rep that joins your team can immediately start replicating your success.

The RapidFunnel App is designed to help you track, improve, and duplicate the sales activities that work. Features include tracking “Hot Prospects” with real-time notifications about what content and what percentage of your content they watched. The Activity Log will keep track of every interaction with prospects for you.

With these features and more, you’ll have all the data you need to grow a thriving network marketing team. 

Schedule a demo today to find out more!