Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman

4.1. Choosing Your Farm

You are going to be spending a lot of time on your farm, so choose it carefully. You want it to be an area where you enjoy living and working and that you know very well.

When I was starting out in my business, I chose my hometown—the place where I grew up and had gone to high school. I think it would be impossible for me to have been so successful in an area that I didn't know as well. When my customers mention a particular street or what such-and-such house might sell for, I'm the expert. I know every street and almost every house on my farm, even though my farm now includes a market area of more than 100,000 households.

If you were a dentist, would you live in one town and locate your office 25 miles away? That would be silly. You want to live near your customers. You want to be able to see them in the grocery store, park, or video store. If you're selling insurance, you need to live near your customers, for both their convenience and yours. The same goes for network marketers of all kinds. So pick your market carefully, because you're going to be spending a lot of time there.

4.1.1. Leverage the Built-In Customer Base

Another advantage of picking a farm/market that I had lived in was this: I already knew a lot of people there. That gave me a head start on my personal marketing. I'll talk more about marketing in other chapters, but basically my goal has always been to let every person in my territory know my name, my face, and what I do. What better ...