I’ve received several requests for me to describe how to handle the objection of, “I wouldn’t want to make money off my friends.” Have you encountered this objection and not known how to get past it? Let’s first look at when this objection can come up.

This objection can come up during prospecting, as in, a person reviews the network marketing industry and comes up with the idea (or someone else gives them the idea) that they HAVE to contact their friends and family in order to do the business. They don’t want to view themselves as a pest or a nag.

The other way this comes up is once a person is in the business they are told to make a list of their contacts and they recoil, thinking they will be hard-selling or pushing their friends, family and business acquaintances into buying something they (the friend or family member) don’t want.

Let me give you a couple of important tips on this right now. I’ll explain fully how to handle this objection on this month’s recorded training call.

First, if you follow the Inviting Formula and the Ten Communication Qualities (especially #4 – Use the right amount of assertiveness) as per Professional Inviter, you can NEVER be a pest nor could you ever push someone to do what they don’t want to do!

The right amount of assertiveness with the prospect has to do with that you’re never forcing them. You may lead them gently, but you’re absolutely never forcing them. It’s sort like if you’ve ever worked with a horse, you can’t force those guys. You can lead them gently and they’ll normally follow you, but you can’t force them. They’re quite a bit bigger than you.

So in the same way with the prospect, you’ve got to lead gently, but you can’t push anybody. And this particular communication quality is what gives you charisma. It’s what gives you charm and it doesn’t matter, in other words, if we veered off the business conversation for a moment here , if you have this communication quality then you have charisma. You have charm. You have the ability to communicate with another person and have that person adopt your ideas because you can communicate in such a way.

Second, the Brilliant Compensation DVD usually handles this objection. I have heard from one person that their prospect had this objection after watching the video. Upon further investigation, what occurred is that after watching the video, the prospect was telling a friend of her husband’s about how excited she was and the “friend” told her that she would lose her friends if she did network marketing.

She did not remember the section in Brilliant Compensation where working with friends and family was discussed as she “didn’t have any issue with it” so she “didn’t pay attention to that part.” In the end, she sat her husband’s friend down and had him watch the video and he was the first person she sponsored. :)

Third, people who claim they “don’t want to make money off their friends,” honestly do not understand the business! Those of you that are in the business know that when you sponsor a friend or family member or even a cold market person, your work is now cut out for you. There is a whole lot that you have to do before you earn anything at all and with most compensation plans you’ll work for a couple of months before you actually get any return on your investment of time into another person.

And so, I just want to communicate that to you so that you can think about it from that perspective – if somebody says that, then you already know that that person doesn’t really know what’s going on. They will work their guts out with a friend or family member and will earn every penny.

And lastly, if a person doesn’t want to make money off their friends… why do they think it would be “okay” to make money off of a stranger? Are they usually unethical in their business practices and don’t want their friends and family to know?

I had a great person who wrote in on this particular issue. They said that they found they had compartmentalized their life into different categories and wouldn’t allow one to merge with the other one so business and friends, business friends and regular friends were in separate categories. They really had to look at how they were conducting their business to make sure how they were doing it wasn’t the issue.

Because if a person is working in a very cut throat environment in their business life, then, yes, they would not want their friends to be around their business activities because they wouldn’t be proud of them, and so that’s the other issue that you need to determine with your prospect.

The reason that I give you these concepts is so that when somebody gives you this objection, you immediately have a checklist to go over. The very first thing that you do when you get this objection is you have to ask questions. Whatever they say as an answer is a clue and you have to follow it.

For someone to give you this objection they would’ve had to have something occur or had someone tell them something. You need to find out what happened, otherwise you could be walking right into an ambush, but most important is that something is concerning your prospect about the industry. Make no mistake about it, this is an “M.L.M objection”, so this to you should indicate they have doubts about the industry. That’s the reason that you want to answer it by asking questions.  

With respect and admiration,

Tim Sales

For more in-depth information on this topic study the Professional Inviter lecture series by Tim Sales.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under How To Handle Prospect Objections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.