March 2005
Interviewed by Barbie Young
Edited by Yvette Adams
Are you expecting rejection when you show your business, or do you have the doors to success wide open? Award winning trainer and author, Michael Oliver, explains how your training may need a fresh approach.
Michael Oliver illustrates his philosophies on network marketing perfectly within the first few minutes of our conversation. He has gently challenged me why I would think that pyramid selling carries a negative connotation for most people. It’s an exemplary start to the interview. By pointing this out, Michael has already demonstrated the importance of not prejudging a customer or anyone’s perceptions whether it’s about products or life in general.
“I might suggest that what you did is not much different than what most distributors are taught, which is to interpret and respond to what people say to them based on what they think is being said,” he says. “And in selling particularly, that’s a huge, huge trap for us,” he says, with ‘us’ meaning network marketers.
Oliver delves deeper into my philosophies to further illustrate his point.
“Let me ask you, when someone says something to you, do you really know what they’re thinking, what they’re meaning or what they’re saying?”
I see where he’s coming from straight away. “No, I’m only seeing it from my perspective,” I reply.
“That’s right and most distributors are taught that when they hear things like, “Is this a pyramid, is this network marketing, or I don’t have time”, to immediately assume that the other person is putting up resistance and treat it as an objection. How do they know if it’s an objection? They don’t! They assume it, respond to it as though they know what the other person is saying, and it then becomes real. It’s crazy. I have no idea why most distributor’s have one hand tied behind their back.”
Oliver suggests alternative ways to tackling resistance from customers.
“Assume you don’t know what they mean. It’s most likely the best assumption you can make! Answer their question with a question. If they say ‘Is this pyramid selling,’ ask them questions such as ‘When you say pyramid selling, can I ask you what do you mean by that?’ Or ‘What is your perception of pyramid selling?’ Or ‘Why do you ask that?’ You’ll find you’ll get a different answer from different people and level of knowledge each time that you can then further investigate or talk about.”
Recently Michael was voted #1 MLM Generic Trainer in an online poll by www.mlminsider.com.
Asked why he thinks the readers voted so strongly for him, he says it’s probably because there are a lot more people who are looking for something that resonates closer to their own inner truth.
“Statistically, 90% of network marketers will quit within the first year. I would suspect however that they actually give up within a few weeks or months. My research shows they quit because what they are told to do when it comes to approaching potential partners or customers doesn’t really resonate with them. Many also join for the wrong reasons, one of them being they were persuaded to do so, rather than having a desire to do it for themselves.”
Oliver says many sponsoring distributors are so anxious to make money or activity happening for themselves and the new distributor that they lose sight of the need to equip them with the skills to not only do the job well, but to enjoy it too.
“I’ve found that most new distributors are not looking for money up front; they are looking for knowledge and confidence - to be trained. When you walk into a new job, do you just get told to ‘do it’?. No, you go through training. If you look at IBM and or most companies, they train their people before sending them on the road. They understand that a person needs to be given the confidence to do their job effectively and well.”
“Now I guarantee, if you spend more time training the new distributor, finding out what will work for them and giving them the confidence to go out and do what is needed on his or her own, the chances are strong they will make it.”
“ But if you put the fear of God into them by telling them that they are going to meet lots of resistance, and give them rejection and objection-handling training right up front, then you’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because that’s what they will get, rejection and objections! Why? Because they’re expecting it. When that happens once or twice, their fear turns to paralysis. For the life of me, the logic behind this training tactic has always eluded me.”
He also laments the systemization of network marketing and the push to get through volume rather than focusing on quality calls.
“Many distributors encourage their down lines to plow through people as quickly as they can, not really caring about their potential partners needs. They set up systems and, as I talk about in my book, they try to duplicate and systemize the selling process. Selling is not a system. Selling is very personal and quite lateral in thinking and application. It flows in different ways. And it’s really easy if you can get away from the conventional selling mindset.”
“I accept a company must have the best systems going as far as administration is concerned - setting up, goal setting and so on. But in the field of communication, it’s not just a matter of telling people about products and the opportunity and having objection handling skills assuming everyone is going to raise objections. This approach is doomed to constant failure. That’s why it’s called the numbers game. Want proof of that? Look at the massive distributor and customer attrition rate and the need for constant recruitment.”
Oliver rather recommends what he calls using the Process of Discovery and instead of trying to make a sale, or getting someone to do something, simply focus on whether there is a sale to be made first.
“You’ll find there are more people looking for your solutions than there are not. It’s just a matter of how you approach them.”
He refers to planting a seed in the prospective clients mind.
“People are like seeds - seeds grow at different rates, they sprout at different times and some don’t sprout at all. If you let go of your agenda and let it guide you through a process of discovery and not manipulate you in trying to get a result from each person you talk with, and if you talk to them in a certain way, a way I call ‘Natural Selling’, by using the power of dialogue, it will be a very energetic, effective and fast way of selling. Much faster than the conventional way. What you will find is that those seeds will start sprouting as the days, the weeks, and months go by, and that’s one way of building your business.”
“The major difference between the conventional way of selling which most distributors teach and the Natural Selling way is that it’s not about you getting what you want, it’s about helping them get what they want. Think about what you want and you’ll get resistance. Think about what they want and approach them in the right way and you’ll get no resistance.”
“In the conventional mindset of selling, a person gets up in the morning and thinks to themselves ‘I want to increase my business today’…Then they think, ‘In order for me to do that, I have to go out and prospect as many people as possible and sign them up to my business’. But when they do, the outcome, the majority of the time, is an unhappy one.
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The majority of people they prospect say ‘No.’ They resist, they bring up objections, and reject the distributor who, after a short while, won’t do it anymore.”
“Natural Selling approaches this in an entirely different way. Instead of focusing on your personal agenda, focus on your purpose instead which is about helping others. Knowing how to do this will achieve your personal agenda far faster than any conventional method of selling. Don’t lose sight of your personal agenda though. Let it float around – guiding you not manipulating you.”
“And Instead of saying ‘In order for me to increase my business I must go out and prospect as many people as possible and sign them up into my business,’ say ‘In order for me to increase my business I must go out and talk with as many people as possible today and discover if they have any problems that I might be able to help them solve. Feel the difference in energy!”
Oliver also believes the moment you detach from the process of pushing too hard for a sale, positive things happen.
“You could talk to 10 people in the conventional way and most will have no interest in joining you. If you approached the same 10 people using the process of discovery, in broad terms about 8 will listen to you, 5 will be interested and 2 or 3 will join you. We’ve seen it happen over and over again. The key here is make sure you’re not attached to outcomes such as making a sale or getting someone to do something. If you are going to be attached to anything, just be attached to the Process of Discovery - finding out if a person has a problem, and if so what it is (this is where the dialogue comes in) and what their degree of desire to change their present circumstances is. That’s all. The rest will take care of itself. If those three things aren’t in place then you don’t have a sale, or to be more precise, you can’t help them, because either they don’t have a problem or if they do they are not prepared to help themselves.”
Oliver tested the strength of his Natural Selling process by working as a distributor with a group of distributors for a time.
“When I worked with distributors as a distributor, first of all we went through the whole downline, and identified the people who were serious about making a change and building their business. It took five weeks, but it was something that had to be done. We found that most of the names on the list were just names. There was zero activity by most of the supposed downline.”
“At the end of the process, we had a handful of people who were really committed to the business. In terms of numbers, the group was about 4% of the nominal downline. In the following three weeks that 4% did more business than the whole downline had done in the previous two years.”
He says the approach worked, “Because we put a different focus on everything. We only worked with those who wanted to make a difference helping others make a difference. They had to fit the criteria that they were willing to learn, had a desire to change their present circumstances and were committed to taking action, every day. Those who by their actions were not prepared to do this we gently let go as we were spending more time on them and their problems, problems they weren’t going to do anything about anyway. The motivation of the remainder went sky high.”
“Because the Natural Selling process is based on a different mindset and a different process, a process of discovery using questioning, listening and clarifying skills, the phenomena of objections and rejection are eliminated. The process creates a totally different atmosphere. It allows people you are talking with to talk about themselves, their desires and dissatisfactions. Freely, without feeling any intimidation. After all, who has the history of their lives and what they want? They do! Who knows what they have done about getting what they want, and whether it’s worked for them or not, and how they feel about being stuck in their present circumstances, if in fact they are stuck? They do. They have all the answers… all of them. They know what they want, though they probably don’t know how to get it. And yet they are very rarely asked, except sometimes in a superficial way.”
“If you listen with the intent to understand, and not to reply, most people will tell you what they have never told their best friend. Why? Because even their best friend never really listens to them. What people buy is not your products, your opportunity or your company. What they are buying is your ability to understand them. Learn how to do that and you’ll have people who will stay with you both as customers and partners for the rest of your life.”
In line with this, Oliver’s selling process encompasses a range of other holistic methods to do with selling, which he learnt early on that people were crying out for.
“During my early training years a lot of people used to come up to me and start talking in terms of how they resonated with the Natural Selling training. And so I knew in the first couple of years that something was happening energetically. When I was living in La Jolla in California, which is where Deepak (Chopra) lives and had his Chopra Centre, I was reading his interpretation of the laws of success and discovered it answered all the reasons as to why Natural Selling worked.”
So is Chopra Oliver’s main source of inspiration?
“He was initially a major, major influence. That’s why I decided to take the certification courses to be certified to teach the material. It allowed me to understand and teach this more deeply as it related to Natural Selling. As to my major inspiration, Socrates to my mind is the greatest being and spirit that ever lived. He was an amazing person born 2500 years ago. Natural Selling is based on the Socratic Dialogue. There are other great people in this world who have demonstrated a real understanding of leadership, like Gandhi for example who ejected a whole empire without raising one word in anger or a weapon.”
Oliver says he has several books on the boil right now, with one of them nearing completion which he says is going to be a “biggie”. He is looking forward to returning to Australia in the near future.
“I love Australia; I love it very much, and will return soon.”
Michael Oliver is the author of the best selling book “How to Sell Network Marketing Without Fear, Anxiety or Losing Your Friends”. His training programmes include the 2 CD set “12 Ways to Start Effective Conversations Without Fear” and the 8 CD set “The Best of Michael Oliver’s 6 Day Fast Track TeleClasses.” All of these are available at www.NaturalSelling.com
If you’d like to try Natural Selling for yourself, Michael has a free Ecourse “7 Steps to Natural Selling”. To start receiving these 7 daily lessons, go to www.NaturalSelling.com/ecourse.html.
MICHAEL OLIVER’S TOP TIPS
- Instead of focusing on your personal agenda to get someone to do something or buy something, try something new. Don’t take a business card or get your information out. Discover instead whether a person has problems that you can help them solve. Allow them to talk about those problems in-depth and listen.
- Focus on listening to what it is they’re saying, because people see things, feel things and have experience about different things.
- Work out if there is any desire to change. If they don’t, then there’s no point in trying to persuade them to do anything, in fact you are better off detaching yourself and letting go, allowing them to process the information you have given them.
Contact information:
www.naturalselling.com
Phone: 775.886.0777 |
