We
often discuss the qualities of a good team member. How often do you think about
the characteristics of the people you would NEVER want to work with?
It
can be difficult to do, but there are times when you may want to discourage
someone from joining your team. If you
are new in your business, you may just want a body; you don’t care about their
personality or skills. So you may ignore
this message.
Once
you have grown a team and are continuing to grow it even larger, you may find
that you run across people who simply are not a good match for your team. Or, perhaps you flat-out dislike them.
Who
will I discourage from joining my Xpress Healthcare team? There are a variety of types of people and
“job” requirements that may disqualify them.
When
someone tells me they have been with numerous network marketing companies, it
is likely they will quit very quickly after joining. I call them MLM hoppers. I’ll spend time
training them, and then without ever putting forth any effort, they will quit.
Some
prospects are attempting to work several businesses at one time. In my opinion, those who do so are generally
unable to truly focus on growing a business with any one of those
companies. I know, there are exceptions,
but as a rule, I have found this to be true.
Then,
there are the know-it-alls and braggarts who say they were with “such-and-such”
company for five years, and they had the biggest team in the company. Really?
Then why did they leave? These
people usually tell me that, because they have worked MLM’s before, they
require no training. After a few days or weeks, they quit.
The
remaining categories are different and more difficult for me to advise that my
company is not a good “fit” for them. I
prefer that my team members can work their business at least ten hours a
week. They may have good potential. However, because network marketing businesses
take a long time to build, if someone is only working a few hours a week, it
will take so long that they will become discouraged, and then they will quit.
The
last two “disqualifications” are practical ones. I have had people contact me with such heavy
accents that I couldn’t understand them, and I had to ask them to repeat
themselves frequently. (My company only
operates in the United States.) Some may
think it is unfair, even prejudicial, however, if I cannot understand them,
neither will their prospects. Why would
I encourage them to join my team if they are set up for failure?
I
have also had prospects call me who are shy, soft-spoken. I cannot hear them. Again, I may need to
frequently ask them to repeat themselves.
With some, I have asked if they are comfortable speaking louder. If they do raise their voices, fine. If not, the same reasoning applies as did for
those in the previous paragraph.
I
have only discouraged a few from signing with my team. The last one was a
terrible braggart who insisted that I was hiding something because I would not
reveal my income or team size. He was
totally obnoxious and would have been a poor representative for the
company. I told him straight out that I
didn’t think he would be a good fit for Xpress Healthcare.
He
was an extreme example, but it isn’t always that easy to “qualify” a
prospect. Most of us have signed team
members who fit one of the categories I mentioned, but we didn’t pick up on it
right away. We have then suffered the
consequences, but we have learned and grown from the experience.
If
we can identify a prospect that fits one of these categories, we can save them
and ourselves time by not inviting them to join. By qualifying prospects, we can build
stronger – not simply larger - teams.
To contact Julie Klein and learn about Xpress Healthcare, visit http://julie.joinxpress.com/opportunity-launch.html
