Well, after spending 2? weeks with my toddler grandchildren several years ago, an insight bolted into my consciousness: if you make it fun and interesting --- concentrating on what THEY want, then you pretty much get compliance. I realized, as I thought about what it took to get cooperative action from our little darling 1 and 2-year-old grandchildren that the same logic certainly applied to MLM.

Some elements of our business are very challenging to people, and we have a hard time getting our new recruits into action. One of those elements is prospecting. But, what if you had a reward program to "pay" your recruits weekly if they got the job done? I can tell you from experience that once I established a monopoly type paper "pay" system in my weekly Boot Camp call, participants would do practically anything to make sure they got "paid."

When I started "paying" everyone to prospect 3-5 people a week and "paying" people to sponsor, they accomplished these activities a lot more successfully. In addition, when I started "paying" my distributors for exercising, instead of just nagging them to get more fit, I got incredibly better results.

One of my participants broke her toe, but she only missed one week's money, soon finding a way to take up stationary bicycle riding to comply with the activities, so she could once again win all her weekly money, plus the weekly bonus for completing all 12 assignments successfully.

A major key here is that it is about what THEY want. Much of the training in our industry is a cookie cutter process designed to create exact duplication with everyone. Therein lies a problem. Many people cannot SEE themselves doing certain things, like saying exactly what is in the script, or wearing a button. If, however, you could design a way to personalize your trainings, making them more interactive and perhaps even involving role-playing, then chances are you would retain a lot more people.

I have found that I can accomplish this in a group process over the phone. I structure my Boot Camp calls to allow for a significant amount of interaction every week. People are both acknowledged and rewarded. It's not about me, it's about them.

My first real conscious implementation of this "fun" and "interesting" behavior modification actually occurred many years ago, when I was a teacher in that small town high school in Escalon, California. I taught English and Home Economics. In my Home Ec classes, due to the nature of the activities, I had to assign monitor duties (I thought) each week. Some students were required to unplug and turn off the irons, some folded dishtowels, some cleaned off tables and put away pattern books, etc. I assigned such jobs alphabetically and wrote the "workers" names on a monitor list that I taped to my desktop. The kids complained incessantly that surely it wasn't their turn again, etc. and ---quite frankly --- after 3 years of struggle, I decided that life was short, and I was tired of all the whining.

I came up with a revolutionary new "system." I would accept only volunteers. No one would ever "have to" do a chore again. When I first announced the new program in each of my six classes, a snicker broke out when I said I was only accepting volunteers. After waiting an appropriate length of silence for the snickering to subside, I then continued on to say that my "frequent" volunteers would be rewarded at the end of the semester with a 4X6 colored glossy photo of my celebrity pet parakeet "Little Michael," which she would personally autograph, and a choice feather collection would be taped on the back of each collector's item photo.

A stampede ensued in each class as students darted up to write their names in every week's slots. My biggest "new" problem was that I didn't have enough jobs for all the eager beavers. I thought to myself, "Let me see if I understand this. For 3 years, I have been struggling to get any cooperation in monitor duties. Now, I offer a 50 cent photo of a parakeet, and I get an enthusiastic effort all semester long --- and I even have substitute monitors lined up in case of absences!"

I continued to use the parakeet photo system for the remaining 11 years that I taught at Escalon High School, and my only problem with it ever was that I couldn't create as many monitor jobs as I had volunteers, so I had to give credit to my long list of substitutes just to maintain fairness. Fun and interesting . . . that's the key. I hope you will take some time to consider applications of these insights for your MLM organization. Remember what Einstein aptly observed:

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them."

Copyright (c) 2006 Dr. Eileen Silva