Defcon 1 Direct Selling

Defcon 1 Direct Selling

by Randy Gage
Released May 2020
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781119642114

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Book description

The leading authority on network marketing shares everything you need to know to lead a successful direct sales team.

Defcon 1 Direct Selling is the must-have playbook for anyone leading a direct sales team.   It’s Gage’s follow up to the international bestseller, Direct Selling Success, and it’s a handbook for leaders.

DEFCON is the U.S. military acronym for “Defense Readiness Condition.” DEFCON 1 is reserved only for imminent catastrophic events, like a nuclear war. Luckily, you don’t have to fend off missile attacks in direct selling, but you will face some extremely difficult challenges and urgent crises leading your MLM team. No one knows how to lead teams better than author Randy Gage, a former high school dropout who rose to become a self-made multi-millionaire and inspire millions around the world. In this highly anticipated book, Randy teaches you how to hold your team together in the mostdifficult circumstances —the stuff no one likes to talk about, but that is vital for top-level leaders.

It takes much more than a positive attitude and motivational words to be a successful field leader. True leadership requires you to deal with messy, complicated scenarios when there is not always a clear-cut solution. Many of these challenges are caused by factors completely out of your control—from economic, regulatory, and political setbacks, to having top leaders quit, to companies going out of business, and a host of other issues. It’s at times like these, when it seems like your team is falling apart, that you must draw upon your resilience, persistence, and character to ride out the storm and lead your team through the chaos. This indispensable resource will enable you to:

  • Create a team culture of maximum readiness
  • Deal with toxic leaders and effectively handle conflict resolution
  • Use your leadership to make your team more powerful and build their self-esteem
  • Handle corporate incompetence, poor decisions, and PR crises
  • Know what to do when you or a team leader leave a company

Most leadership books will tell you, wrongly, that every situation has an ideal solution. Not this one. Defcon 1 Direct Selling: Manual for Field Leaders delivers the plain, unadulterated truth that everyone leading a direct sales team needs to know.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Introduction Living the Nightmare Dream…
  3. Chapter 1 It’s All on You
    1. The Person Most Responsible for This Turn of Events was Me
    2. But Here’s Where I Had Really Fallen Down
    3. How Behavior Is Changed
    4. Another Example of Poor Decision-Making and Leadership on My Part
    5. Own the Problem
    6. Five Frequent Mistakes
    7. Lead Through the Bad to the Other Side
  4. Chapter 2 The Sacred Responsibility of Sponsoring
    1. Feeling Frustrated, I Resolved to Become a Recruiting Machine
    2. Reexamining My Process
    3. Leading Yourself
    4. Build the Foundation
    5. Care Enough About Your People to be a Truth Teller
    6. Look Inward
    7. Make Your Own Path
  5. Chapter 3 How You Become a Model Leader
    1. Who I Had Become
    2. Self-Development
    3. Skillsets for Success
  6. Chapter 4 Unleashing Your Secret Weapon: Culture
    1. Your Team Doesn’t Have a Culture. It Is a Culture.
    2. Integrity
    3. Ethos
    4. Recruiting
    5. Self-Development
    6. Pace of Growth
  7. Chapter 5 Building a Golden Goose (And Protecting Her)
    1. Process versus Improvisation
    2. Push-and-Pull Partnerships
  8. Chapter 6 Creating Momentum and Exponential Growth
    1. Exponential Growth Is Not a Fantasy
  9. Chapter 7 Dangerous Field Dynamics and How to Solve Them
    1. Crossline Navigation
    2. A Rogue Leader Unplugs from the Team
    3. The Leader Is a Toxic Person
    4. The Leader Has Low Self-Esteem and Doesn’t Want to Be Recognized in the Group
    5. Your Sponsor Lacks Integrity
    6. Two Leaders in a “Civil War” Try to Get Their Teams Involved
    7. A Distributor Lacks Support at Home…
    8. A Leader Is Promoting Sketchy, Off-System Webinars or Events to the Team
    9. You’ve Sponsored Someone Who Is a Distraction Factory
    10. The Leader Is Easily Distracted or off System
    11. A Team Member Is Recruiting for Another Opportunity
    12. One or More Top Leaders Leave to Join Another Company
  10. Chapter 8 Protecting Your Team Against Zombies, Dinosaurs, Parasites, and Terrorists
    1. MLM Zombies
    2. Dinosaurs
    3. Parasites
    4. Terrorists
    5. This Is Not the Same Thing as Competing Against a Legitimate Competitor
  11. Chapter 9 Why 90 Percent of Current Companies Will Be Extinct by 2025
    1. 1) They Don’t Have a Viable Product Line to Compete
    2. 2) Their Business Model Can’t Be Operated on a Smartphone
    3. 3) They Don’t Invest in Marketing Infrastructure
    4. 4) Their Comp Plan Sabotages the Results
    5. 5) They Haven’t Become Tech Companies
  12. Chapter 10 Why Brilliant, Visionary CEOs and Founders Usually Fail
    1. Bold Vision Does Not Equal Good Management
    2. The Martyr Leader
  13. Chapter 11 Dealing with Corporate Mistakes, Incompetence, or Malfeasance
    1. The Company Employs Incompetent People in Important Positions
    2. The Company Keeps Overpromising on Releases (New Products, Marketing Materials, or Promotions) at Major Events and Then Doesn’t Deliver on Time
    3. The Company Promotes Crappy or Off-System Marketing Materials to the Network
    4. The Company Is Paralyzed by Internal Politics
    5. The Comp Plan Isn’t Working, or the Company Makes Changes That Backfire
    6. The Executives Are Totally out of Touch with What Happens in the Field—Yet Convinced They’re Omniscient, Omnipotent Geniuses
    7. The Company Becomes the Target of Regulatory Action or Negative Publicity
    8. Company Execs Are Abusing Their Leadership Positions
    9. The Company Is Making Bad Deals with Zombies and Dinosaurs
    10. The Companies Chasing after These Zombies and Dinosaurs Believe They Are in a Race to Sign the Best Talent
  14. Chapter 12 When the Missiles Are Airborne
    1. When Skynet Becomes Self-Aware, the Missiles Are Airborne, and Judgment Day Is Upon You
    2. You Have the One Thing These Companies Do Not: The Single Most Valuable Asset in Our Business
  15. Epilogue Rebuilding After Doomsday
  16. Recommended Resources
  17. Bonus Content
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. About the Author
  20. Index
  21. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Defcon 1 Direct Selling
  • Author(s): Randy Gage
  • Release date: May 2020
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781119642114