Defcon 1 Direct Selling

CHAPTER 2The Sacred Responsibility of Sponsoring

For decades I’ve been regaling convention audiences with my story of sponsoring my roommate into the first five companies I joined. (In fact, the story is so funny it’s been stolen by one CEO, two authors, and five other speakers. That I know of.) He joined each time because I agreed to pay for his distributor kit and activation order, for which he promised to repay me from all the money we were both going to be raking in. And in each of those attempts, he was the only person I sponsored!

That system works well to sign up your first recruit quickly but doesn’t work out so well over the long haul. After I reached the point where I couldn’t even convince my roommate to join if I paid for everything, it became apparent I would need to improve my recruiting approach.

Mentally I created a pretty simple equation in my mind. It basically went something like this:

• I was broke and I hated being broke.
• Most of the people I knew were also broke.
• The people in Leveraged Sales made money, earned bonus cars, and went on fancy trips. A lot of them appeared to be rich (and certainly were rich by my standards).
• I wanted to be rich.
• If I could sign up enough people, I would get rich.
• If the people I signed up also signed up enough people, they could get rich too.

That was my basic recruiting presentation. Eventually I got good enough at that pitch to attract and sponsor people who actually paid for their own distributor kit and activation order. ...