Have you ever panned for gold? To us, recruiting is a lot like panning for gold. Everything looks like mud until you look closer. While most of your pan’s contents are mud, there may be little bits of gold in there, too. Don’t Prejudge It isn’t wise to make judgments about people when you first…
When Should You Pay In Products?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay your independent representatives in product instead of money? The good news is that there are times when product is the right form of compensation. Principles First One of the guiding principles of multilevel compensation is to keep within your compensation plan as large a portion of product…
3 Behaviors We Want From Our Reps
The average life of a direct selling or referral marketing representative with your company is short, unfortunately. Before it ends, we want to see two behaviors and after, we want to see one. Why Are Average Direct Selling Lives Short? By design, most direct selling and referral marketing opportunities are priced very affordably. We want…
How Do I Attract Top Leaders To My Company?
If you have an established direct selling or referral marketing company with annual sales of $50 million or more, you are likely to attract top leaders because you have a proven track record. But what if you’re new or your annual sales are less than $50 million? To attract top leaders, your track record isn’t…
The Rules of Recognition
As a direct selling company or a referral marketing company, one of your primary goals should be to attract and retain your independent sales representatives. Distributors and consultants are not employees who report to work each day with regular contact with their supervisors. They are independent contractors who are operating their own businesses. This means…
Why FTC Decisions On Vemma and Herbalife Matter To You
If your direct selling company has a multilevel compensation plan, it is in your best interest to be aware of the recent FTC actions against Vemma (August 2015) and Herbalife (July 2016) because your company and your compensation plan may have some of the same problems. Watch this video now to learn why these FTC actions…
Compensation Plans: Focus On Activity
This is the third in a series of compensation plan articles, each of which focuses on one important element to be considered in the design or improvement of all multilevel compensation plans. The previous articles in this series are Compensation Plans: Focus On Compression and Compensation Plans: Focus On Customers. Why Are Activity Requirements So Important? Activity requirements…
Why You Should Get Into Your Learning Zone
There are two worlds in which you live – the “Performance Zone” and the “Learning Zone.” In his TED talk, Eduardo Briceño talks about these two zones and why you need to spend time in both of them. When we go into the Learning Zone, we decide to spend some time learning so that when…
For Your Success, Remain Teachable
In the world of direct selling, you will always be teaching others. Did you know that students make the best teachers? Always be open to learning more. Never stop learning. The more you know, the smarter you get. What if you could go somewhere fun where you could also learn more about how to build…
Why Stair-Step Compensation Is No Longer Needed
For many years, stair-step compensation was commonly used in multilevel compensation plans, but times have changed. Just because another compensation plan designed in 1980 has a stair-step compensation plan, doesn’t mean your plan should include it today. In this video, I define and assess the relevance today of stair-step compensation. More Videos About Compensation…
What Is The Most Dangerous Thought?
In business, the most dangerous thought is “My problems will go away by themselves.” Unfortunately, wishing problems away rarely works. Fortunately, there is a better way to make your problems go away. We Understand Thinking that the problems will go away by themselves is a topic that we discuss with many of our clients. The…
Compensation Plan Prototyping
Whenever a compensation plan will be changed, before the changed plan goes live, we need to understand what the effects will be upon the earnings of the representatives. “Prototyping” is the term that I use to describe the process to calculate the results of a new compensation plan using historical data. The historical data will…