How to Tell Real Network Marketing Training From Hype

There is a lot of network marketing training out there. Some of it is excellent. A lot of it is a motivational speech with an order button underneath.

The problem is they look identical from the outside. Both have a confident person on stage. Both have testimonials. Both make you feel like you could go do this.

Forty years in sales has given me a decent nose for the difference. Here is what I look for.

Tell #1: Does it survive Tuesday?

This is the one I would keep if I could only keep one.

Real training works when you are not excited. Hype only works while the feeling lasts.

Everybody performs after a big event. The test is what you do eleven days later on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing has gone right and you do not feel like doing this at all. If what you were given only functions at high emotion, you were not trained. You were charged up. Charge wears off, and then you have to go back and pay for more of it, which is generally the business model.

Tell #2: Can you write it down?

After a real training session you can put the thing on paper. First you do this, and here is why, and here is what it sounds like when it goes wrong.

After hype you have a page of quotes.

Try it. Sit down after any training and write down what you are supposed to actually do differently tomorrow. If you cannot fill five lines, nothing was taught.

Tell #3: Has the trainer done the thing, or only taught it?

There is a whole tier of people who have never built an organization and have built a very good living teaching people to build organizations.

You can usually spot it in the examples. Somebody who has done it tells you about a specific conversation with a specific person that went sideways in a specific way. Somebody who has not gives you principles, because principles do not require having been there.

I learned sales knocking doors in the deregulated energy sector. Not in a classroom. That is not a credential I am bragging about, it is just the reason my examples have people in them.

Tell #4: What happens after the no?

Weak training is almost entirely about the approach. What to say, how to open, how to get the appointment. Then the prospect says no and the training goes quiet, and you are left with "go find more people."

Most of this business happens after the first no. Any training that does not deal with that has skipped the part you needed.

Tell #5: Where does the recruiting arrow point?

Watch what the training wants you to do at the end.

If it consistently ends with you recruiting people into the training itself, you are the product. That is not automatically dishonest, but you should see it clearly. Training that gets paid whether or not your business grows and training that only makes sense if your business grows behave very differently over a year.

Tell #6: Can you ask a question and get an answer?

A recorded course is not a bad thing. But if there is no room anywhere in it where you can describe your actual situation and get an actual response, it is content, not training.

Your situation has details. Your market, your company, your comp plan, the specific person you have been trying to reach for three weeks. Generic answers cannot reach any of that.

Four questions worth asking before you pay

• What will I be able to do after this that I cannot do now? A real answer is a skill. A vague answer is a feeling.
• Who is this not for? Anybody honest can answer this instantly. "It works for everyone" means they have not thought about it or will not say.
• What does the follow-up look like? One event with no follow-up is a speech.
• Can I talk to somebody who took it six months ago? Six months is the number. Anybody is enthusiastic in week one.

The uncomfortable bit

Your company's training is usually not enough, and that is not a criticism of your company.

Company training exists to teach you the product, the compensation plan and the compliance rules. It has to. That is a real job and they generally do it well. But it is built around their product, and the skill of having a conversation with a human being who does not want to be sold anything is not product knowledge. It is a separate thing, and almost nobody hands it to you.

That gap is why outside trainers exist at all. It is also why so many of them get away with selling a feeling instead, because people know they are missing something and cannot name what it is.

Now you can name it. Skill that survives Tuesday, from somebody who has done it, with a way to ask a question when you get stuck.

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— Robert Blakely, The Blakester