The truth is this: Network marketing is about a lot of people using and sharing a little bit of product. For the system to work, each of us must do our part. Our homes should be filled with our products and services. To novices we teach a battle cry: "Just Get Ten!" After personally using the products or services, we insist that our new frontline distributors begin by finding ten customers among their immediate family and close circle of friends. That's all—just ten.

Everyone should be responsible for finding ten legitimate retail customers before building a sizeable network organization. It doesn't take months to do this. It can be dealt with in a matter of days, but it must be done before they are ready to begin the more dramatic and lucrative part of the business: recruiting others who will do the same.

Simple math makes it easy to understand the importance of each person creating product movement. If you sign up without ordering or sharing the products with others, you have created zero volume. Duplicate your process and sponsor a hundred people who in turn each sponsor a hundred people, and you can brag to everyone that you have 10,000 people in your organization.

The downside is that if they all duplicated your effort, 10,000 times 0 is still 0. There are two kinds of product movement that are up to each of us: personal use and customer orders. Based on your company's compensation plan, we encourage you to set specific goals and duplicate those throughout your organization. For example, we encourage our distributors to strive for $500 a month of personal sales volume—that includes the personal use of the distributors' immediate family and customer orders from the rest of their family and friends.

For those men and women who are completely business-oriented and simply can't envision conducting product demonstrations and clinics, here is what we suggest. Once you have begun using the products and/or services yourself and have found your ten customers, put all of your energy into prospecting for business builders. As you sit down with small groups of prospects to show them the business presentation, you will inevitably have people who don't sign up to become business builders.

However, they may be interested in the products or services your company offers. Without having gone out of your way, or exerted extra energy, you simply service those people as retail consumers. Others will sign up, interested only in getting the products at wholesale. Instead of joining Sam's Club or Costco and paying an annual membership fee, busy consumers are learning that, through our industry, their products and services can be delivered to them directly.

Teach your people who are resistant to product sales how easy it is to create customers out of those prospects who come to the  meetings but decide not to participate in the business. This method appeals to executives and other businesspeople who are intimidated by the fear that they will lose their identity as professionals and be looked upon by their peers as product peddlers or door-to-door salespeople. That's the honest way to address this problem, instead of creating the false expectation that no products or services need be purchased in our business.

PEOPLE today are much more sophisticated than they were two or three decades ago. We've all been bombarded with millions of slick, Madison Avenue advertising campaigns before we reach adolescence. By the time we reach maturity, we've seen our share of carnival barkers, sales professionals, and pushy, arrogant marketing reps.

A twenty-year-old today is more jaded and cynical than a sixty-year-old in 1940. The very last thing people want is a high-pressure pitch on an MLM opportunity. Most people today can smell a rat the minute it emerges, and can easily see through lies and fabrication. Our business already seems too good to be true. There's absolutely no reason to attempt to make it even better with false statements about exaggerated income, early retirement, or zero sales.

We suspect that most professionals avoid our industry because it doesn't make sense that an ordinary person with only a high school degree can become a millionaire in three years with virtually no risk and no capital. When a thinking person is exposed for the very first time to network marketing by a competent leader who simply articulates the facts honestly, one of two things will occur. Either that prospect will walk away shaking her head in total disbelief, or she'll lose sleep for a week from the excitement of our potential earnings and lifestyle. No one need ever exaggerate nor falsely explain our industry again. The facts are sufficient in and of themselves.

Think for just a moment about how preposterous these facts must seem to a prospect who knows very little, if anything, about our industry. Although we all say it in a multitude of diverse ways, here's essentially what we are presenting to people. We are asking them, first of all, to believe that network marketing is much more lucrative than most franchises, yet to begin it costs less than $100 or $200. If the owner of a great franchise like McDonald's earns more than $200,000 a year after having invested $1 million in the franchise, how on earth does an MLM distributor earn $200,000 a month on an investment of a couple hundred dollars? It doesn't compute.

The franchise owner has to acquire property and build a large structure, but the network distributor works at home. The franchise owner pays out $10,000 a week to employees. The network marketer needs no employees. For the first six years the franchise owner is nothing more than a shift-change supervisor for a bunch of pimply faced teenagers before he breaks even. In half that time, the multi-level marketer is working twentyfive-hour weeks and thoroughly enjoying her life. We could go on and on ad infinitum because the life of a successful net work marketer seems preferable to the life of anyone in traditional business.

You get the point: MLM seems too good to be true already. There is simply no need for hyperbole. We urge you to present this business opportunity honestly and professionally. False expectations can literally ruin would-be great distributors. If people are led to believe falsehoods, once they figure out the truth, they quit. We've actually seen people quit while earning over $10,000 a month because someone had filled them with the false notion that they should be earning three times that amount. It sounds ridiculous, but it's absolutely true. This is the only business in the world in which former blue-collar workers can earn more each month than some pediatric cardiologists do in a year. So why tell folks they can do that in four months? Four years would satisfy most people. Nothing works better to convince a person to join our industry than the following honest dialogue following your presentation:

"You know I think you and your wife would make remarkable partners in this home-based business and I don't want you to go out of here today with false expectations, so please remember my closing comments. This is the most lucrative and fun profession in the world, but it's also the hardest work you'll ever do. This isn't like a lottery and it's certainly no getrich-quick scheme. But if you are willing to put in long hours and long days for just a few years, you could end up earning over $100,000 a month and enjoying all the free time you've ever imagined. I say it's tough because you may have to prospect a lot of people to find just one who's willing to work. But remember, one good frontline distributor can easily earn you $50,000 a month or more!" Your prospects will appreciate your honesty, and you'll never be accused of creating false expectations.