Coaching the Coach

We often talk in the MLM business about coaching and mentoring methods for working with your team. There is an important issue related to that to consider—namely, the integrity of the information you provide as you coach your team.

As you progress and develop into a network marketing professional, your ability to coach and mentor becomes much more important. This is part of the natural evolution from recruiter to leader.

This is also the area where most network marketing amateurs fall down. That is because they don’t understand one of the fundamental prerequisites for duplication–the sponsorship line’s responsibility to lead by example, model the proper behavior, and discover what works before sending things down through the group.

Unfortunately a lot of beginners experiment with their team members’ time, money, and prospects. They might read a book or article by a consultant recommending something and immediately relay this information to their team. The problem is many of these consultants have never actually built a large team. The same thing happens when you hear about things people in other lines may be doing. Those individuals may say they have a method that is working great, but we can’t be sure of that, and their definition of “great” may be a lot different than ours.

There are really only two things we can say with integrity as we coach our own people:

1. This is what I’m doing; do this.

2. This is what I did, do that.

Anything else is speculation, theory, or testing. And, it’s not right to use your team members as guinea pigs to find out what works. We have a responsibility to go before them to see what works and only send this information down the group through our coaching.

Otherwise, if we experiment, it means our team members may lose money, waste time, and burn off prospects who might otherwise have joined if they’d been approached correctly.

Think how often you see the “flavor of the week” syndrome in network marketing. People are desperately jumping from one technique to another and another.

It seems a lot sexier to always have some exciting new thing to train your people on. But, that doesn’t really serve your team. Let’s lose the hype and concentrate on the fundamentals that have proven to work over the years–using third party tools, home meetings, hotel meetings, and modeling the behavior.

As we coach people, it’s important to make sure that we are creating the right expectations. Building a network marketing business is not a five-week or even five-month endeavor. It’s a serious business that for the average person starting part-time, is a two to four-year plan. Mark Yarnell says five years, and he’s one of the brightest minds in our business.

The best coaches are coachable, themselves. They learn from their own sponsor, model the behavior, and then coach on what they have proven through experience. This is the best scenario for true duplication. Now, go out there, draw on your time proven experience and knowledge, show what has really worked and is realistic, and become the best coach!

For information on the Author and his upcoming training event, please click the Author bio link.