3: Go To The Mall... Get Barfed On...

Woo hoo, what’s going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you’re listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Here’s the real mystery. How do real MLMers like us cheat and only bug family members and friends? We want to grow a profitable home business. How do we recruit A-players into our down lines, and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That’s the blaring question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio.   All right, hope you guys don’t mind the energy. I think life’s too short to be boring, so hey now, one of the things that I had a hard time with when I first started MLM, one of the reasons why I didn’t want to join an MLM, was because I had this belief that I needed to be fantastic at speaking, and I needed to basically be somewhat of a slick salesman. I’m assuming you’ve had that feeling before, or you’ve had that belief before.   It’s kind of this façade that I feel like Hollywood has much to blame for, where you’ve got to be the guy who comes in in the suit, and you’ve got starch in your shirt, and you sit down and you’re doing the deal, and you kind of go back and forth and you haggle a little bit. You’re wearing sunglasses, of course, because that’s the cool thing to do. You’re maybe in a really nice restaurant, and you don’t even look at the waitress as she comes up and you just say, “The usual,” you know what I mean?   You guys know the façade, right? It’s this business thing. It’s this whole thing that “Forbes” and “Business” and “Us Weekly” even, all these different pop culture things create about what it means to be successful inside of MLM, and I totally had that, and successful in business in general, and I definitely had that. I believed that I needed to be a great salesman. I believed that I needed to be a slick speaker, that there were a few lines that would mind control somebody into joining my MLM, that there were a few things that would make someone want to come to me and say, “Please, take my money, Stephen. I want to be a part of your down line. I will do anything, I’ll bend over backwards. Would you like … What food can I go get for you?” They would grovel, and they would come.   That’s often how movies and our pop culture portray someone who’s successful in business, and I will tell you that I have made more money by being vulnerable, more money by highlighting my differences rather than my strengths, and I’ve made far more money being unpolished rather than polished. If I’m just myself, and I just do me, then it attracts more people to me than if I’m trying to go out and try and be all polished and everything.   There’s a reason why my podcast cover is a picture of me with a wrecking ball. I should probably talk about that sometime, why I did that, or sorry, a ball and chain and all these weapons and swords and knives in my back and stuff like that. One of them’s down line, and one of them’s up line. I’ll tell you guys that story sometime soon about why that is, why I said it that way. I’ve made more money doing things that way, and just being myself, and being myself loudly rather than being polished, than anything else.   I decided, you know what? I really want to be a good salesman. I thought what that meant was that I needed, like I said, I had to be a good speaker. What I did is, I decided I was going to go do door-to-door sales. I saw Rob Kiyosaki was in the military. I joined the military. It sounds crazy, but one of the reasons I wanted to join the Army is because I saw all these other successful people went into the Army, and were from a military background. It was like, “Cool, I’m going to go develop my discipline in that area. What other uncomfortable thing can I go do? Cool, door-to-door sales.”   I explicitly did door-to-door sales because I knew it would suck, and I would learn sales in the process. I went, and I was a telemarketer. I was like, “How can I get told no to repeatedly, over and over again?” I want to tell you guys, I actually don’t think you need to go through all that kind of crap in order to be successful with it. Honestly, I kind of wish that I didn’t, because it was a little bit of a waste of time. The way that I do it now is completely different, but I learned a lot of cool things in doing so.   I remember, I was selling pest control. I sold pest control, I sold security systems. When I was doing telemarketing, I was selling software to other businesses, it was B2B, and just really interesting, kind of cool sales tactics. What’s funny is that I’m really not that good of a salesman, but I’m good at marketing. I never realized that there was a difference, for a long time. There’s a huge difference between marketing and sales, and what I needed to get good at was marketing, but I thought that that was the same thing as sales. I was going after the wrong thing, and I just never realized that.   I remember, I was going door to door, and the hot summer sun was beating down on me, and I was going at a ferocious pace. It was my first week out on doing door-to-door sales, selling pest control. I was like, “Good, it’s hot. Make it hard, coach.” That was my mentality, and I was running door to door, because I just wanted to be successful so badly. I literally ran, every door to door, pretty much every day.   I would run person to person, and I would just deliver the message. I really didn’t know that much about the product. I knew that it was good, and I knew that it worked, and that was pretty much it. I knew that it was safe, it was pest control, and that there was some organic aspects to the one that I was selling. What was really funny is that I kept my blinders on. I didn’t look at anybody else, and in no time, I was the number two, first-year salesman. The number one guy had been out there like six weeks prior to me, and he came out way before I did, and it was really hard for me to catch up, but for the first half of the summer, I was the number two guy. I was killing it, and I was making lots of money each day. We were selling … There was lots of bugs all over the place, we were selling lots of pest control, and life was good.   I was really, really excited. What was funny is that all of a sudden I started asking questions like, “What really is made up of our product? How do you actually apply this? What’s the name of this chemical? How do you actually put it on the house, or how do you actually …?” I started learning, I was like, “What kind of bug does that repel? How come we’ve got to do two treatments back to back? How come we’ve got to do this?”   I started learning about the product, and I started learning what I was selling. You know what’s funny? My sales plummeted, I mean hard, very, very hard. I was like, “What the heck? I know more than everybody else about the stuff. I’ve really given myself to learning and understanding what we’re selling, so I can serve better on the doors.” That’s not how it worked. I started talking too much. I started barfing all over people.   I’d come out and they’d say, “Hey, is this good for my kids?” I’d be like, “Yes, it’s okay for your kids and blah, blah, blah.” I’d just come and I’d barf all over them. I’d go, “Here’s all this stuff, and here’s why, and here’s the name of the chemical, and here’s how long it lasts. You could lick it after so long.” I started going through all this stuff, and it was like a five minute answer to their one question. Then they’d come up and they’d say, “Okay, that’s a little bit weird.”   I’d say, “Hey, come over here, and I’ll show you something on the side of the house.” I’d show them something on the side of the house, and I’d be pointing out what’s going on in the grass or something like that, and they’d ask the nex...