Network Marketing Is That Selling

I am often asked about network marketing: Is this one of those 'selling' things?

My apologies to all those network marketers who say that you do not sell a product in network marketing. They prefer to tell you that you 'share' the product. If that is true, when was the last time you were paid for 'sharing' something?

Network marketing is selling; a highly evolved form of direct selling. It is also known as multi-level marketing or MLM for short.

What is direct selling and where did it come from?

Let me start by giving credit to Dr Charles King of the University of Illinois for providing me with the research on all this:

The "Direct Selling" industry can be traced back to the original Yankee Peddler of colonial days. He drove a horse-drawn wagon out into rural America and sold products and services. He was the original channel of distribution for reaching rural areas of colonial America.

With the advent of new communications and transportation systems, general stores in small rural communities became the next channel of distribution.

Soon afterwards, the manufacturers realized they couldn't guarantee that they could reach the general stores in these communities, so they organized their own sales organizations.

By 1920, a complete sales organization system was in place and it was called "Direct Selling".

From "Direct Selling", a new wave of selling evolved which was intended to reach more consumers individually - on a direct one-to-one basis.

Eventually, Manufacturers asked the question "how can we market more directly with consumers on a one-to-one basis?"

In 1940, the concept of the consumer to consumer sales was invented to solve this. This highly improved form of direct sales became known as Network marketing (or MLM) in the 1950s and has grown into a 30 Billion dollar industry, involving 13.3 million distributors in the U.S. alone.

Worldwide network marketing produces 90 Billion dollars, in 13 countries involving 50 million distributors.

What makes it better than direct selling?

In conventional direct selling, you make one sale, one time, never look back, and move on the next sale. In fact, in many of these early jobs, you were not allowed to leave a business card because all future sales were pulled back into the manufacturer's home office and they would collect all future commissions. The salesperson was paid on a single transaction and nothing else.

Contrast that to Network Marketing, where you build a relationship with every customer from which ongoing sales can be made. If you nourish the relationship with your customer and they remain happy with your product you continue to receive residual income. You can also make commissions from the sales of those you recruit and train. They, in turn, can duplicate this with someone else, who duplicates it with someone else and so on.

It's at this point that most uneducated people rise up and say "It's a scam! You're taking advantage of others!"

Let me point out that most sales organizations today now have sales managers presiding over salespeople from whom they receive sales overrides and bonuses based on the performance of the entire team. While the modern-day sales manager is similar to a network marketing recruiter, the commissions of sales managers are very limited in comparison to what can be generated in network marketing. The residual income of conventional sales managers is limited or non-existent. Residual income is how MLM is building lifetime retirement income for its members long after they retire.

Today, MLM remains the most efficient and fastest way to get products to consumers. More and more traditional businesses are now going towards network marketing.

For example, in 1988 when AT&T lost its monopoly, two upstart companies decided to take advantage of the situation - MCI and Sprint.

They asked the question: "how can we take advantage of this opportunity through network marketing?"

Well, MCI joined forces with Amway. Overnight, they had a contract with Amway to service 2 to 3 million distributors with discounted long-distance service - and they were established in the marketplace.

Sprint watched that happen and said let's go find us a network marketing organization too. They built their own network marketing cellular phone service company called "Network 2000". Within 3 years, they had 3 million subscribers.

The success of MCI and Sprint alerted all the other major consumer product companies such as Proctor and Gamble and General Foods - to the benefits of multi-level marketing.

If you're not in network marketing, you should be. It is the business of the 21st century.

In the early years of the 21st century, a new age of network marketing was quietly born. A new frontier of MLM was announced in august of 2009. This new category of network marketing promotes Gold and Silver Collectible assets. Not investments, these collectable coins are rare museum quality coins. The premier company and pioneer of this new category are
Numis Network.

Numis Network has brought network marketing to a new industry which produces more than 100 billion dollars worldwide, every year. That's more than the entire network marketing industry combined!

It's a new world. And now, there's finally an MLM product that you can be proud to sell, that you would love to have a garage full of.