Hey guys, welcome back. We're a few podcasts in, and I thought I'd let you in on a little bit of my home life. My wife is amazing on the piano. She's been singing, songwriting, and playing for over 25 years. She knew from a very young age what she wanted to do and what her gifts were. So, she's basically the opposite of me: artistic, expressive, and pretty. I'm introverted and logical. I'm a like a rocket scientist. This whole podcast and MLM journey has been an evolution for me that got me out of my shell. I didn't used to be like this. It's amazing. You know what will happen when you are passionate about something. It really energized me and got me to talk to people, to get me out of my shell, to learn how to present. All those things were very good for setting a foundation for what I'm doing now. (01:37) But let's get back to my wife. I mean, she's amazing course. I have to say it again because she is. We just got a new piano. Well, new to me anyway. My inlaws brought the piano from Alabama, from my wife's Grandma's house. And it was actually the piano that my wife learned to play on. It's an acoustic piano and the seat lifts up. There's a compartment below the seat, like piano seats have, and there is all the lesson books that she went through when taking lessons from her mom. She learned to develop her gift into this amazing skill. My inlaws had loaded this piano up in a U haul and drove 10 hours to Texas to give us this little piece of my wife's childhood. (02:23) She had been wanting to get it to our house for a while, and it just so happened that it worked out. After we unloaded it, we rolled it in the house. It was really heavy. We found a spot in the house, kind of a central location where everybody can see and hear. Everybody wanted to play it. We first noticed though that it was a little out of tune. Over time the piano strings must've been loosened and some were a little off. It still sounded okay, but some of the keys were not exactly that note, they were supposed to be. But when my wife started playing, you could barely tell even the notes were off. The rest of the music, the beauty of the music, outweighed those off notes. (03:06) And so what does this have to do with MLM? I'm glad you asked. Well, there are a lot of MLMs out there, and I don't think any of them are perfect, but many of you have a history with them. So, I would tell you this: get good where you are. Get so good that nobody cares about the notes that are off. I'm sure my wife would sound even more amazing on a fancy grand piano. In fact, she's always wanted one. But she loves her piano, and she's glad to have it now. We can always get it tuned up. It doesn't matter though if she had never developed the skill to play it, and I would venture that if she wasn't good ,or good enough to hear the notes that were off, she wouldn't know it was out of tune. What I'm saying is this: you have to develop your skills before you can say the piano is a little out of tune. You need to get better to take advantage of other, higher end pianos. (03:55) It's the same thing with MLM. There are so many that complain about the things in a company and jump from one to another. I didn't get enough upline support. The product didn't sell as well as I thought. The comp plan isn't working. It's not fair. The customer service wasn't great. The website didn't work. . . .and on and on and on. I mean obviously if major things are wrong, you can't stick around. But find one that fits you and stick with it. If you're happy where you are, great. Let's help each other and move forward. So what skills are we talking about? I mean I'm, preaching different things than most consider MLM skills. I'm not talking about getting better inviting, recruiting, or whatever. I'm talking about marketing. You have to get good at marketing, not sales. Sales is a high five. (04:46) Marketing is a relationship, so the high five means something. When you get the marketing right, the high five becomes the secret handshake, you know, fist bump, snap, side five, back five, high five, turnaround, spin around, jump, whatever. You create a following. That's what you do with marketing. It took me a few years to realize this. I had to get it into my logical, introverted mind that it wasn't sales that I needed to get good at. I didn't need to get good at telling people about the product more. I didn't need to get good at saying the things that salesman say in order to close and get a sale. What I needed to learn was marketing ,and that's what I've been doing. I started to realize the way people sell things online are very different. If you haven't caught on, I'm talking about sales funnels. This is the whole rocket science of MLM that I want to do. (05:37) How do we use sales funnels online to build our team and sell our products? Maybe a little funnel-ology 101 is needed here. If you don't know what a sales funnel is, you bring as many people to a sales funnel as you can. In that process introduce and weed out those who are interested in what you have, and those that are just kind of kicking the tires through a series of steps or different webpages, or different actions. You find out those that actually want to buy and it's all automated. Maybe we shouldn't call it a sales funnel. It's more of a filter because people get filtered out. But that's what people mean when they say sales funnel.There's traditional sales funnels on real things, and it's just a sales term. But online it becomes all automated. (06:25) And here's the thing though. You can build all the funnels you want, but if you don't master the marketing, they will fail. I've done that too. That's what I started a few years ago. I really got good at some of the builders of the websites, or funnel builders. I'm an aerospace engineer, so technically I favor that. I favor being good at something technical. I became a master at the pieces, at least for me anyway, and I could build some crazy, awesome funnels that had different steps and went different ways with quizzes and email trains and all these things, but it was only a sales pitch. There wasn't really any marketing in it. It was information. It was sales. It was technobabble. It was like the Internet version of technobabble. (07:12) When you tell people about things, and you get too detailed, that's technobabble. When you start talking about the specifics before you've established a belief. I didn't know really what I didn't know. We have this saying at work and it's for computer codes, garbage in, garbage out. If you don't give the computer good inputs, you aren't going to get a reasonable answer. In fact, they could be very wrong. I'm trying to do something here that is very different from traditional MLM. Not many are teaching this and teaching it the right way. It takes a mental shift really, and it also takes building a foundation. All this falls flat. If you don't learn how to market. I can't stress this enough because I've tried to shortcut this in the past and failed miserably. I couldn't get anything sold or products moved or people to join my team. (08:02) If a rocket has no pilot, no ground controller or guidance system, it's not going to get you where you want, and it will probably crash in a spectacular fireball. Have you ever had a firework go crazy? When I was little, we used to have these crazy 4th of July neighborhood firework displays. We lived on a cul-de-sac, or a turnaround, and everybody would put the fireworks at the center and set them off . We would all sit on the grass around the street giving, of course, space so that we wouldn't be in the blast zone, so to speak. We would line up our lawn chairs and our wagons. The kids would be running around with sparklers and the parents generally thought it was safe. I'm pretty much sure it was illegal, what we were doing, cause we were in city limits. But everybody would get stuff from Tennessee and places like that where fireworks were legal, and bring them to our small town Ohio. (08:53) And generally the cops just told us to clean up everything. But one time we lit this cube. It was a cube that had, I don't know, 16 to 20 different little tube sticking out. It was called Venus rockets, and we lit the box and ran. As it started it would fire off one at a time pretty quickly, one after another. It had about 20 rockets in it that would go up, but only a couple feet. And then it would go crazy. There was no guidance, there was really not anything to direct them where they go. Well, what happened is they turned sideways and started going into our crowd of neighborhood people. People were diving behind lawn chairs and the kids thought it was funny, but if they'd got hit they would have probably not thought it was so funny. (09:35) We were all laughing at everything, and luckily nobody was hurt and no fires or no houses caught fire. But it really, made me think. You have to have some type of guidance for rockets. We didn't get Venus rockets anymore. We stuck with the ones that shoot straight up and didn't have little rockets that shot everywhere. Building a better MLM vehicle takes more than just lighting a fuse and hoping it works. Like our Venus rockets, automation and everything I'm trying to do saves time for sure, but it doesn't work without a plan. I've put a plan together and I, and want to step through it in the future. I call it a blueprint to build the better vehicle, or, to build the rocket. But only the rockets, it's all the guidance systems and how to fuel it. (10:21) All that stuff has to go into the blueprint, and that's what I'm going to talk about over the next couple podcasts. I'm going to walk through it, and we'll see where it goes from there. But if you decide you want to follow and want to continue on, go over to www.rocketsciencemlm.com so you can see my blueprint. It's all free and I'll put you on a mailing list. They'll be other things that come out and I can tell you and notify you when podcasts come out. So it'll be fun. We can figure this out together. So head on over. I hope you guys have a great week and see you next time.