Defcon 1 Direct Selling E-Book

Randy Gage

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The leading authority on network marketing shares everything you need to know to lead a successful direct sales team. Defcon 1 Direct Selling is the must-have playbook for anyone leading a direct sales team. It's Gage's follow up to the international bestseller, Direct Selling Success, and it's a handbook for leaders. DEFCON is the U.S. military acronym for "Defense Readiness Condition." DEFCON 1 is reserved only for imminent catastrophic events, like a nuclear war. Luckily, you don't have to fend off missile attacks in direct selling, but you will face some extremely difficult challenges and urgent crises leading your MLM team. No one knows how to lead teams better than author Randy Gage, a former high school dropout who rose to become a self-made multi-millionaire and inspire millions around the world. In this highly anticipated book, Randy teaches you how to hold your team together in the mostdifficult circumstances --the stuff no one likes to talk about, but that is vital for top-level leaders. It takes much more than a positive attitude and motivational words to be a successful field leader. True leadership requires you to deal with messy, complicated scenarios when there is not always a clear-cut solution. Many of these challenges are caused by factors completely out of your control--from economic, regulatory, and political setbacks, to having top leaders quit, to companies going out of business, and a host of other issues. It's at times like these, when it seems like your team is falling apart, that you must draw upon your resilience, persistence, and character to ride out the storm and lead your team through the chaos. This indispensable resource will enable you to: * Create a team culture of maximum readiness * Deal with toxic leaders and effectively handle conflict resolution * Use your leadership to make your team more powerful and build their self-esteem * Handle corporate incompetence, poor decisions, and PR crises * Know what to do when you or a team leader leave a company Most leadership books will tell you, wrongly, that every situation has an ideal solution. Not this one. Defcon 1 Direct Selling: Manual for Field Leaders delivers the plain, unadulterated truth that everyone leading a direct sales team needs to know.

Leseprobe

An Important Message from Randy

This is the page where you would normally find testimonials from influential people who have read an advance draft of the manuscript. I have chosen not to include any in this book. This subject matter will be controversial for many and frightening for some. Field leaders may be hesitant to publicly endorse the book, because they could face repercussions from their corporate team or even renegade factions in their own team. Likewise, some company owners and executives might be fearful that their field leaders could feel threatened by what this book reveals. The man behind the curtain usually doesn’t want you to know he’s behind the curtain.

Although some courageous leaders have offered to provide quotes, I wasn’t comfortable accepting their generous offers. This book will end the careers of some people in our business. And provide the last nail in the coffin for some companies—rightly so. But this book will also be a catalyst to ignite the careers for the next generation of empowering leaders in our business. And perhaps birth the next great companies.

This is a book for a small but impactful subsection of the profession: the leaders (both field and corporate) with the power to change the game. It’s a book that will cause significant collateral damage to the negative forces in our profession and they won’t take it lightly. They will attack with all they have left. I don’t want to put anyone else in that line of attack. I will face it alone because I believe in the profession as perhaps no one else does. And I believe in you.

Also by Randy Gage

Direct Selling Success

Making the First Circle Work

Lead Your Team!

Accept Your Abundance

37 Secrets About Prosperity

Prosperity Mind

101 Keys to Your Prosperity

The 7 Spiritual Laws of Prosperity

How to Get Smart, Healthy & Rich!

Risky Is the New Safe

Mad Genius—A Manifesto for Entrepreneurs

How to Build a Multi-Level Money Machine

DEFCON 1DIRECT SELLING

New York Times Bestselling Author

RANDY GAGE

MANUAL FOR FIELD LEADERS

Copyright © 2020 by Randy Gage. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 9781119642114 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781119642091 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119642121 (ePub)

Cover image: © Samarskaya/Getty Images

Cover design: Wiley

This book is dedicated to the worst sponsor I ever had. You don’t even know who you are, but I’ll never forget you. And know that because you were weak, I grew strong.

CONTENTS

Cover

Introduction Living the

Nightmare

Dream…

Chapter 1 It’s All on You

The Person Most Responsible for This Turn of Events was Me

But Here’s Where I Had Really Fallen Down

How Behavior Is Changed

Another Example of Poor Decision-Making and Leadership on My Part

Own the Problem

Five Frequent Mistakes

Lead Through the Bad to the Other Side

Chapter 2 The Sacred Responsibility of Sponsoring

Feeling Frustrated, I Resolved to Become a Recruiting Machine

Reexamining My Process

Leading Yourself

Build the Foundation

Care Enough About Your People to be a Truth Teller

Look Inward

Make Your Own Path

Chapter 3 How You Become a Model Leader

Who I Had Become

Self-Development

Skillsets for Success

Chapter 4 Unleashing Your Secret Weapon: Culture

Your Team Doesn’t

Have

a Culture. It

Is

a Culture.

Integrity

Ethos

Recruiting

Self-Development

Pace of Growth

Chapter 5 Building a Golden Goose (And Protecting Her)

Process versus Improvisation

Push-and-Pull Partnerships

Chapter 6 Creating Momentum and Exponential Growth

Exponential Growth Is Not a Fantasy

Chapter 7 Dangerous Field Dynamics and How to Solve Them

Crossline Navigation

A Rogue Leader Unplugs from the Team

The Leader Is a Toxic Person

The Leader Has Low Self-Esteem and Doesn’t Want to Be Recognized in the Group

Your Sponsor Lacks Integrity

Two Leaders in a “Civil War” Try to Get Their Teams Involved

A Distributor Lacks Support at Home…

A Leader Is Promoting Sketchy, Off-System Webinars or Events to the Team

You’ve Sponsored Someone Who Is a Distraction Factory

The Leader Is Easily Distracted or off System

A Team Member Is Recruiting for Another Opportunity

One or More Top Leaders Leave to Join Another Company

Chapter 8 Protecting Your Team Against Zombies, Dinosaurs, Parasites, and Terrorists

MLM Zombies

Dinosaurs

Parasites

Terrorists

This Is Not the Same Thing as Competing Against a Legitimate Competitor

Chapter 9 Why 90 Percent of Current Companies Will Be Extinct by 2025

1) They Don’t Have a Viable Product Line to Compete

2) Their Business Model Can’t Be Operated on a Smartphone

3) They Don’t Invest in Marketing Infrastructure

4) Their Comp Plan Sabotages the Results

5) They Haven’t Become Tech Companies

Chapter 10 Why Brilliant, Visionary CEOs and Founders Usually Fail

Bold Vision Does Not Equal Good Management

The Martyr Leader

Chapter 11 Dealing with Corporate Mistakes, Incompetence, or Malfeasance

The Company Employs Incompetent People in Important Positions

The Company Keeps Overpromising on Releases (New Products, Marketing Materials, or Promotions) at Major Events and Then Doesn’t Deliver on Time

The Company Promotes Crappy or Off-System Marketing Materials to the Network

The Company Is Paralyzed by Internal Politics

The Comp Plan Isn’t Working, or the Company Makes Changes That Backfire

The Executives Are Totally out of Touch with What Happens in the Field—Yet Convinced They’re Omniscient, Omnipotent Geniuses

The Company Becomes the Target of Regulatory Action or Negative Publicity

Company Execs Are Abusing Their Leadership Positions

The Company Is Making Bad Deals with Zombies and Dinosaurs

The Companies Chasing after These Zombies and Dinosaurs Believe They Are in a Race to Sign the Best Talent

Chapter 12 When the Missiles Are Airborne

When Skynet Becomes Self-Aware, the Missiles Are Airborne, and Judgment Day Is Upon You

You Have the One Thing These Companies Do Not: The Single Most Valuable Asset in Our Business

Epilogue Rebuilding After Doomsday

Recommended Resources

Bonus Content

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Introduction

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Introduction Living the Nightmare Dream…

The car was a ’71 Plymouth Satellite, a pretty sweet ride when it first rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. I managed to buy it in 1979 for $1,500, because my mom co-signed the note and I arranged to finance it over three years. But by the time I was driving it to opportunity meetings in 1980, it already qualified as a broke-mobile.

I always parked in the back reaches of the hotel parking lot or by the loading dock. I would be meeting prospects at the meetings to show them how they could “live the dream,” and I didn’t want them to realize they probably had more money than I did.

But here’s the craziest part of all that. If you had asked me then whether I would be releasing a book in 2020, distilling the secrets of my success and leadership in Direct Selling, I would have said, “Of course.”

Probably not what you thought I was going to say. And if you did hear my answer back then, you probably would have thought I was irrational, foolish, and naive. And you’d have been right.

And That’s Why I Can Actually Write This Book

And that’s why you can read it with confidence, knowing it can help you be irrational, foolish, and naive too. Irrational, foolish, and naive enough to live your dreams. Because the number of rational, wise, and skeptical people in the world who are living their dreams would probably fit in a subway car.

My story really is one of those romantic, “rags to riches” tales that we all love to hear. A kid who was expelled from high school and served time for armed robbery—who was able to transform his life to become happy, successful, and wealthy. However, too often these stories of transformation leave out the messy middle stages, the drama and trauma that have to be endured and persevered through to reach the “lived happily ever after” ending.

Not this field manual.

This is the book that some wish you would never see or know about. The people who don’t want you to read it fear that what you’re about to discover might scare you away. Might blow up the idealistic narrative they’re trying to sell you.

But I Want You to Know the Truth

The truth that, yes, you can be successful, build a large team, and live your dreams. But also the truth that it is going to take real work, dedication, and endless endurance—and that you’ll need more than just goals and a positive attitude. You’ll need an actual game plan. And most importantly, the truth that growing your business won’t always go according to your game plan. That sometimes your game plan is going to get blown out of the water, and you’re going to have to suck it up and create a new one.

I See Dead People

And by dead people, I mean clueless people in a coma of delusion. The people in charge of “the system.” The system that says go $80,000 or $100,000 in debt for a college degree that is out of date before you even graduate, then sell your soul to a series of jobs you don’t like or actually hate, trading hours for money in the hopes of financially existing with your head barely above water. And doing this for 40 or 50 years to “retire” in a position of still needing financial supplementation to get by.

I think we’ve lost the plot.…

Do we really have to work six days a week to enjoy one off? Work 50 weeks a year to vacation for two? We have an education system now that is preparing people to be worker drones in the collective. Entitlement mentality is running amok and we’ve forgotten what it means to live a life of meaning. There is nothing wrong with working a job for a salary, getting paid a fair wage for an honest effort. We all must start someplace, whether that is working a drive-thru, scrubbing bathrooms, or washing dishes in a pancake house like I did. But let’s not become immune to the opportunity of developing and progressing, becoming the highest possible version of ourselves in everything we do, including our career.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. I get that. But there are millions of people in unfulfilling jobs for whom an entrepreneurial opportunity would provide a much better alternative. And these people don’t realize that opportunity is available to them because they have bought into the “normalcy” of the current system. With this field manual, I’m going to show you exactly how you can best share this opportunity with them. Not with high- pressure sales techniques or hype, but by truly educating your candidates about the possibilities you can offer them.

It’s not your job to sponsor everyone you know. But it is your job to offer people what you have, allow them to self-select in or out, and then help those who decide to join you.

Make the commitment now that this is the culture you will create on your team. Don’t “close” people; “open” them to the possibilities.

The insights you discover in this book are meant to equip you for the dirty realities you will confront and to demonstrate to you that you’re not the first person to face such daunting circumstances. Every great leader must face down extraordinary challenges before they come out victorious on the other side.

Please allow me to share with you how this book came about.

It was January 2019 and I was doing the final edits on my most recent book, Direct Selling Success. I sent proof copies to more than 20 top income earners in various companies to get their input. It immediately became apparent that the book would be a worldwide smash, an international bestseller. To a person, these leaders wanted to know how soon it would be published, whether they could share key sections with their top leaders, and whether I would give them permission to begin training sessions based on the content.

And then Something Fascinating Occurred

For three days straight I received urgent messages from three of those leaders who had read select chapters of the book. Now they were seeking help with a burning situation that had arisen with their teams. They each were desperate to know if I had additional advice that could apply to their unique situations.

In each of these cases, the leader and their team faced a “DEFCON 1” type of situation. The DEFCON scale (short for “Defense Readiness Condition”) measures the alert level of defense forces. DEFCON 1 is the maximum level status, used to describe preparation for imminent nuclear war. Obviously, these leaders were not facing anything close to an actual war. But they were facing exceptional, crisis scenarios that threatened the ongoing existence of their business.

In one case, a lot of their top leaders had lost confidence in the company and left en masse to join another one. In another case, the company had made major changes to the comp plan, and the results were causing a huge drop in volume and lots of resignations. In the third case, many leaders had been influenced by an outside generic trainer who had taught them systems that were actually eroding their businesses. These three leaders needed to act fast, or they would lose their teams and their livelihoods. If you develop a large team, at some point you too will face a “DEFCON 1” type of scenario for your business.

And That’s Why I’m Writing This New Book

Here’s the thing about leadership, particularly in Direct Selling. (For most of this book, I will refer to this as Leveraged Sales, which I believe is a much more appropriate label for this business model.) Most people believe leadership is about being positive all the time, sending out lots of happy, smiley emojis in their WhatsApp groups, and always giving positive motivational speeches. But the truth is, that’s not leadership—that’s propaganda. Well-meaning propaganda, surely, but propaganda nonetheless. And you’re going to have to do better than that.

That’s not to say there is no place for the “moonbeams, unicorns, and rainbows” perspective in leadership. There most certainly is. But that positive, optimistic, motivational outlook is only one element of leadership.

Because True Leadership Deals with the Messy, Complicated, and Dark Areas as Well

How do you stay true to your principles and lead the team forward when their world is falling apart because of a comp plan change, regulatory attacks, or a competitor poaching away top leaders? Or when 90 percent of the product line is on backorder, the company can’t make commissions, or there’s a sociopath in the sponsorship line above you? You’re going to need to exercise a higher level of leadership. One that reflects the yin and yang dichotomy of leading in the real world.

Here’s how I define leadership in our space:

Inspiring people to become the highest possible version of themselves—and building the environment that facilitates this process.

And to do that, you can’t just play the “only happy news” channel; you can’t just be the positive, motivational “I did it, you can do this too” channel. Your people require more from you. A lot more.

This book you are reading now is the brutal, unvarnished truth about leadership. A book like no one has ever written before. Because it is a manual for field leaders on how to handle the most challenging elements of the Leveraged Sales business. I will share with you everything I have learned over almost four decades of leading huge teams all over the world.

I’m going to reveal the entire panorama of leadership—the joyful empowering moments and the messy, discouraging ones. I’ll give you case studies and examples of my best leadership success—and lay bare my foolish, vain, and destructive mistakes as well.

A note of warning: A lot of my work is family friendly. But in my private coaching sessions and strategy sessions with my top leaders, my language is raw and uncensored (which is a nice way to say I swear a lot). Because this is meant to be a field manual for use in the most urgent and threatening emergencies and crisis situations, I’m not sugarcoating anything. So if profanity offends your sensibilities, this may not be the right book for you.

One of the Most Important Leadership Skills is the Ability to Tell the Truth

And to tell that truth with love and compassion and empathy, but truth nonetheless.

This book is a demonstration of my modeling that behavior for you. By the time your organization grows large, bad things are sometimes going to happen. Your company will make mistakes, your sponsorship line will make mistakes, other people in the profession will make mistakes, and you, yes you, will make mistakes.

There are no great leaders who don’t make mistakes. That’s only in the movies. In the real world, leadership is about recognizing, acknowledging, and owning your mistakes. And when the mistakes do happen, it’s about not trying to gloss them over, not hiding them from the team, but to concede them and explain:

How they happened, why they happened, and why they won’t happen again.

Regardless of who makes the mistakes, they will happen, and you are going to sometimes face those DEFCON 1 scenarios. It won’t matter who caused them, only how you handle those situations—drawing on your resilience, tenacity, and character to show your team you have the ability to lead them.

I wrote this book to guide you through the process of developing that resilience, tenacity, and character. And also to provide you with some background on the little-known, inside workings of our profession, the critical-thinking skills necessary to adapt to chaotic circumstances, and the wisdom to make right choices.

You’ll quickly notice I’m not starting the book with how you manage all the crisis, DEFCON 1 scenarios you are likely to face. Because the best way to handle an emergency is by preventing it from happening to begin with.

So the first chapters are about the principles you can follow, the culture you can create, and the behavior you can model that actually reduce the number of emergency situations requiring your leadership intervention. But of course, you’re still going to encounter some negative situations that are unpreventable. And the second part of this book will prepare you for resolving them in the best ways possible.

If you’re up for that, let’s get after it.

Randy Gage

—Miami Beach, Florida

February 2020

CHAPTER 1It’s All on You

On the lovely island of Maui, with tall palm trees swaying in the breeze, I lounged poolside, working on my tan while my teammates engaged in a fierce water polo match. (And yes, literally drinking out of a coconut.) It was an incentive trip for top leaders to celebrate and reward us for another stellar year of performance. I was serenely reading a book when Jeremiah, one of the company VPs, interrupted my bliss with the news.

He relayed that he had just received a call telling him that my then-sponsor was about to jump to another company. At that very moment my sponsor—whom the company had flown to the island first class and lavished with swag, perks, excursions, and an oceanfront suite—was in that very oceanfront suite, dialing for dollars to take people to his next deal. And planning to tell me the following day.

I gazed at Jeremiah thoughtfully for a very long time. Then, sighing heavily, I said, “You know, some days I hate this goddamned job.”

I had every right to feel appalled, disappointed, and betrayed. It would have been easy for me to slip into martyr mode and seek commiseration for the injustice inflicted upon me. But here’s the reality…

The Person Most Responsible for This Turn of Events was Me

Because I had failed in my job as a leader to protect my people and create a safe environment for them. I had initially embraced this man and sponsored under him because I chose to believe that he had become the new person he assured me he was, not the person reflected by the track record he had of moving from company to company over the years.

But Here’s Where I Had Really Fallen Down

I had edified my sponsor, shared the platform with him, and facilitated his face being seen as a leader of our organization and company. By doing this, I had placed my team in a position of vulnerability. I had created a system and a culture that presented this person as a credible component of our support structure and a powerful resource for building their business.

Now team members would wake up the next day to discover that someone they had perceived as an asset had essentially become a threat. (Please don’t read this as my suggesting my sponsor was an evil, diabolical villain, looking to attack and hurt others; he wasn’t. He had simply made a decision he believed offered the best choice for his future success and security. One that now conflicted with the status to which I had played a part in elevating him.)

The whole sad scenario was no one’s fault but my own. Years earlier I had made an expedient choice without thinking about the long-term potential consequences, and now the bill was coming due.

How Behavior Is Changed

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises is acknowledged as one of the leaders in praxeology, the study of human action. (And what could possibly be more relevant to leadership in our profession than the study of why humans act as they do?) Herr von Mises developed the concept that getting humans to make a change in behavior requires three steps:

They are dissatisfied with their current state.

They have a vision of a better state.

They can see a path to get there.

As a leader in Leveraged Sales, you must understand these three steps with every fiber of your being. The key step is your ability to show you know the right path to get people where they want to go.

Here’s the Hardest Part…

Applying the lesson to yourself. Meaning, instead of waiting for someone else to lead, you choose yourself to lead. Recognizing that you don’t like your current state, visualizing what your ideal state would be, and then mapping out a path to get there. Which is another way of stating that leading others always begins with leading yourself.

Another Example of Poor Decision-Making and Leadership on My Part

Since I’m in confession mode, let me share another story. A year or two before that Hawaiian holiday, one of my top leaders left to try his luck with another company. The reason he left is that he felt like he was a failure. He couldn’t figure out what he was doing wrong and thought maybe a change of scenery or sponsor would help him discover what he was missing.

Here’s the Thing

He had a large, growing team and was earning more than $50,000 a month. Yet he felt he wasn’t measuring up. Why? Because I was earning about $120,000 a month and that’s the standard he was using to measure his own success.

Once again, it would have been easy for me to slip into victim mode and lament as to why he would leave me. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I lost him because I wasn’t a strong enough leader. It’s apparent that I had created a culture where someone earning 50K a month didn’t feel recognized, valued, or successful.