Tips On How to Succeed in Direct Selling in the Philippines
How to Succeed in Direct Selling in the Philippines?
Join the Industry
How to succeed in direct selling in the Philippines is no different from the question of how to succeed as a lawyer. The most basic answer is that you can succeed only after joining the industry. To succeed as a lawyer, for example, is to get yourself enrolled firstly in the college of law. Be a direct seller first, if you want to succeed as a direct seller.
Choose the Right Company-Partner
An independent direct seller (let's just call her "Ms. Traditional" for the sake of our discussion) started out in 2000 with a real MLM (GNLD International, a global company) for her business and as a Sapphire Director of the company. After a year she ended up as a Fashion Pro II (highest rank) of Natasha (a local and Filipino-owned corporation) up to the present or in a span of over 16 years. Ms. Traditional believed that had she pursued with her GNLD business, she could not have been as successful. Her reasons were that she was interested more in real and old-fashioned direct-selling entrepreneurship, such as having inventories, branches, and employees, and second is that she is not interested in becoming a one-man-army as a business person and as a "Vitamin Doctor" forever, GNLD being a food supplement company.
MLM/Binary is an Option
Choose What Suits Best Your Capabilities and Potential
The bottom line is that we need to choose the right company for us, the one that suits best our ability and potential. If we are good at training or giving lectures, but are not a hardcore financial risk-taker, then go into MLM/Binary direct selling business. Otherwise, go into traditional direct selling (the credit-extension type) like joining with Natasha, Tupperware Brands, MSE, Avon, Sundance, Personal Collection or Beautiful Horizon.
These issues are highly debatable indeed since there are direct sellers who want to make money without taking any business risk at all such as the cost of inventories, etc. Secondly, there are MLM Direct Sellers in the Philippines today who are also called "Top Earners" by their colleagues in the industry.
One Korean speaker, for example, a simple housewife, started earning over a million pesos monthly after doing her MLM business in six years. What was amazing was that she did know how to do PowerPoint Presentation and was even less than average as an organizer. MLM works!
How To Succeed in the MLM/Binary Type of Direct Selling?
God First Policy
Don't Do the Business Unprepared
My second point is that MLM/Binary direct selling requires speaking/training ability. There is a teaching principle that you cannot give what you do not have. If you are lazy at studying your company's marketing scheme for example, or you are too dull and inadequate to hold a business opportunity meeting by yourself, then my unsolicited advice to you is to try your luck at employment instead. Never force yourself to bark if you are not a dog, so to say. Never force your future on something beyond your capabilities and natural gifts!
Be Consistent
Thirdly, always be consistent. By being consistent, I mean, you must be a genuine and firm believer of your company and its products, to the point that you desire to retire as a networker of said company you are now affiliated with. It is one reason I don't have a very favorable opinion with most Filipino MLM/Binary networkers, especially those who will tell me they were "top earners before with this or that company, but now no more because we left the company." The trend today in the Philippines is for the so-called veteran MLM/Binary networker to transfer from one company to another, like a rolling stone which gathers no moss, to borrow from Publilius Syrus.
Attitude is King
Fourthly, bear in mind that success, in whatever endeavor, is always traceable back to your safe and productive attitude toward the things that you are doing. A networker who is negative, for example; who is living an undisciplined life, dishonest, lazy, stupid and irritating will never be able to lead his group of recruits effectively. Success is attitude, a journey, a walk, the keeping of right values and principles in life.
The Meaning of It All
Lastly, to succeed you need to find a definite meaning in what you are doing. Manny V. Pangilinan (MVP) is a Filipino legend of success. But to me, his success is without meaning. He was asked on TV who will be his successor being single, to which he replied in a fashion seemingly disconnected or out of topic: "I have trained...managers..." Well, MVP is successful, but he is without a wife and children of his own who would have served as meaning and reason for all of his successes in life. I learned this thought from the book titled, "The Greatest Salesman in the World" where Og Mandino, the author, said that the greatest salesman's success was meaningless, for he was without love. Do you want to be a successful networker, then feel your deep love for your wife and children that is now serving as reason and meaning for all your sacrifices and hard work. For we will all die, and the works of our hands per se don't have to mean at all in that cold grave that is awaiting each and every one of us in God's scheduled time.
Your First Success Assignment: Find a Good Life Partner
What if you don't have a life partner yet? Well, your first success assignment is: find out the good one or be a failure forever. Said one successful entrepreneur during an interview: "The ingredients of my success formula are a) good college education; b) good business decision; and, c) a good husband at my side.
I heard someone who said: "my secret and my first priority is hard work." This principle holds true only if you are still robust and healthy. When you are sick and dying, you will certainly "edit" it and say instead: "my secret and my first priority is God." My point is that real success, financial or otherwise, has to start with the truth that we will never succeed in life if we are sickly. That is the argument of Napoleon Hill. You are never successful if you don't have good health. Lesson number one is to work hard to be healthy, then success in your direct selling business will just come naturally.
How To Succeed in the Traditional Type of Direct Selling?
I wrote somewhere in this blog the following topics which are also related to traditional direct selling.Direct Selling Strategies
The Best Things About Direct Selling Business
Doing the Basics of Direct Selling Business
How to Start Your Own Direct Selling Business
4 Things You Need to Know About Direct Selling
The MLM/Binary's Sad Song
The Difference with the Global MLM Companies
The Need to Take Risk in the Traditional Type of Direct Selling
If you have an employee mentality, you cannot succeed in traditional direct selling. Have you noticed that most corporate managers don't like to run a business of their own? Yes, they are masters in managing their employer's money. They are the intellectuals and the professionals in our midst who are without guts to get into the financial gamble inherent in all forms of business. Many of them are now direct selling players under the MLM type since the latter doesn't require complex entrepreneurial determination, culture, spirit and skill.
The Need to be Unreasonable Sometimes
Most successful direct sellers in the traditional type are women who are gifted with risk-taking abilities that are, in the eyes of their husbands, suicidal in nature. For example, their typical pattern of attitude is to purchase products on sale in bulk without any precaution or "Plan B" at all, just in case, the products won't move as originally envisioned. Their common trait is to issue sixty-day post-dated and unfunded checks to the company, without a tiny drop of apprehension in their brains that the checks would somehow bounce. Call it positive-mindedness. But for me, it is a pure business gamble that has given them the feel of a champion. And yes, they are. They are winners, while other wives are not as gutsy and successful.
The Need to be Frugal at All Times
Make Your Direct Selling a Family Business
Unlike the MLM/Binary type, traditional direct selling requires the help and love of every member of your family. Hence, the business can be handed down from one generation to the next. That is the beauty of it all, so much so if you have a computer system that is designed to run the business for decades.
Personally, I am a pro-traditional type, since the Filipino-organized MLM/Binary companies are like bubbles; very immature; scam-infested, and have a very brief lifespan. Some commented that there are Filipino-owned binary-companies that have already been into their 7th year or even more of existence. Fine. But there is also information, unverified, though, that some of these companies are changing policies and payment plan over time to subtly kick out and/or somehow reduce the earnings of their so-called top earners.
Since the late 1980s I experienced joining with many Filipino-owned MLM companies. And the pattern was the same: the owners would either change the compensation plan or decide to close the business. I have a bias against most of our local MLM establishments except AIM Global, Classique Herbs, and few other survivors. Based on my thorough research, Atomy of South Korea is just the best MLM so far. The good news is that most networkers reject Atomy--judging it to be anti-quick income!
Read More: The Advantages of the Atomy Compensation Plan
By and large, we all know that Filipino binary-networkers tend to follow, as part of their networking routine, the build-and-forget-the-network-and-the-company strategy. As such, MLM/Binary companies and networkers received the public image of being fly-by-night appropriately. Legal cases abound in plenty on the "now-you-see, now-you-don't" binary-companies, consequently giving the Philippine direct selling (MLM/binary) industry a deep black eye. Today's Filipino networkers are best likened to butterflies hopping for nectar from one flower to another--transferring from one company to another, two to three companies sometimes in a year. Disgusting indeed a practice, for even their so-called champions wrote books on how to succeed with MLM/Binary business, telling them how they quit after amassing millions in the industry. Sad that most Filipino networkers and owners of binary companies do not love the industry as an honest source of livelihood that will last for generations.
Scam-infested, the Filipino MLM/Binary type of direct selling is not as yet mature as to make an honest promise to our children and grandchildren about the truly sustainable and long-lasting residual income that binary companies promised to their loyal surrogates.
Successful MLM corporations like Amway, GNLD, etc. (US-based MLM/Binary), are a different case and story. As mentioned earlier, Atomy of South Korea is worthy of everyone's curiosity. My problem with international MLM companies, however, is their very demanding (points-based!) compensation plan. It is not easy to grow and maintain an MLM-network business in the Philippines with these global MLM corporations--unless you are a rich person already or a professional, a medical doctor for example as in the case of most successful GNLD networkers in the country.
Almost all so-called MLM Top Earners I heard of were not rich people. Most of them, however, failed to sustain their income due to the build and destroy nature of most MLM companies in the Philippines. The option is to work with companies coming from South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, or the U.S. MLM is good, but most of the Filipino-developed groups were, based on our experience, "fake" MLMs.
As mentioned elsewhere, the real MLM business platform is better than the traditional credit-based direct selling model. To start with the traditional direct sales first is also a key experience helpful in the building up of a large MLM network.
If you have something to say about this blog, please drop your comment below.
Updated: February 4, 2017
Thank you! I'm new to direct sales and I'm trying really hard to come up with new ideas to get clients. I'm going to start leaving my business card places.
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