Do We Need to Prequalify Our Prospects Here?
In traditional sales training, reps are being taught to pre-qualify their prospects.
You have to find the MAN in order for you to make a sale:
M - Money
A - Authority
N - Need
When talking to a prospective customer or prospect, you need to determine first if the person has the money. Or, do they have a budget for your merchandise.
Then, the next thing to probe is, if the person has the authority or in a position to buy what you're offering. You do not want to be wasting time to someone who's not in the authority to buy, do you?
Lastly, do they need the merchandise you're pushing? Do they have the requirement?
Prequalifying Your Prospects for Wealthy Affiliate
Working with the WA Affiliate Bootcamp, there are times you need to Enter your own correction... your prospects the way we Enter your own correction... them in other fields, only that we have to use a quite different criteria.
M - Can the person afford the premium membership?
A - Authorized by wife/husband to start an online business?
N - Need. Is he not yet rich and still needing extra income?
L - Laptop! Does he have a laptop or personal computer?
Y - Yes! Is he willing to say YES to our coaching?
Quite funny but true. Maybe others have their own criteria or version of this, but for the sake of simplifying things, this is what I got.
Many times, referrals just signed up for reasons unknown to us. With the starter members, it's quite difficult probing their reasons why they join us, because of their limits to some communication means here.
Unless, the free starter member happens to be your friend and you can talk with each other on Facebook about why his face popped up in your referrals list.
The Harsh Truth
Let's admit it, not all people are for Wealthy Affiliate.
Yes, anyone can join, and it's free to try. But if a person doesn't have a deep reason why he or she's joining WA, chances are they'll just become part of the statistics.
Observing the most successful bootcampers in WA, I noticed something...
[For example, Eric Cantu, of workfromyourlaptop.com]
The person clearly promotes that this business is about working with your laptop or own computer, building a business diligently like publishing blog posts regularly, so you can enjoy a freedom lifestyle in the future.
There's a group of people out there whose longing for that kind of life. They're the perfect prospects for our WA Affiliate Bootcamp!
Now, can a tough-looking guy, who's a night club bouncer, who loves to fight instead of write, who enjoy punching instead of typing, do well with blogging in WA?
I'm not trying to be prejudice here but just imagine when gets home with an alcohol hang-over...
Unless he's drugged, I bet he won't be able to attend Jay's webinar the next morning, or compose a new blog post promoting Amazon dolls.
(*just kidding*)
Okay guys, thanks for reading, and good luck!
Your friend in online biz,
I am offering a free starter position and whether they follow up on that is entirely up to them although I will send some encouraging emails to try and get them to go premium.
I am not forcing them to sign up for any length of time so I don't need to do a finance check on them.
If they can't afford the monthly premium then I leave it to them as to how they are going to find it. I have never believed in pressure selling and so let the prospect make up their own mind.
Derek
Reply
As a marketing/sales manager in my past life I saw a lot of sales people judging their prospects. It's one thing to qualify but another to judge. Jim
I think pre-qualification should be embedded in the process. First, in choosing the niche or the overall message of your site. Then, to the flow prospects or traffic to your funnel. Then to finally seeing them appear in your referrals list here.
It's the thing that I wanted to do and not yet doing. By targeting the right audience (not just people looking for extra income online but seriously interested in building a thriving business online), we can avoid some head-shaking in the future. Just like what the other fellow has revealed in this thread, his challenge is to have his starter referrals see the premium value.
Because my initial test was to see what happened when I just to sent people through the following funnel:
Keyword focused blog post > landing page > direct link to WA > ??? > premium.
Everything went well up until the ??? point!
I had over 1,000 starters.
But less than 15 went premium!
I'm now trying the email route to try and screen out the tyre kickers and get people to take action.
I get 20 -30 new email leads each day...
But I still don't know what the ??? is equal to! lol
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Promoting WA is literally the biggest challenge I've faced so far.
The most annoying thing is that WA is the genuine solution to making money online (I've done low 5-figures in other niches)..
But my referrals just aren't interested.
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Possible solutions:
1: More value in the emails.
2: Set expectation on the landing pages (hard work required etc).
3: Find a motivated target audience (entrepreneurs) - rather than trying to educate people into seeing the value of affiliate marketing/WA.
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#3 might be quite difficult.
I don't really know how to connect with this type of audience (the product reviews they search for etc).
I can see why people just crank out DFY 'get rich quick' products - it's what people want (even when they don't work) because they don't like the idea of DIY solutions it would seem.
Hope I can get this figured out.
I've been stuck on it for months and nothing seems to be working.
Just recently, I opened myself to recruiting via my personal Facebook account where I have a lot of friends, up to 4,990. The thing is that, my broadcast was with unsorted audience, and I started receiving inquiries from people, from all walks of life.
After the experience, I realized, we are a peculiar group of people who chose to work with our computers to establish online businesses so that in the near future we would be able to spend our lives on our own terms. Like, enjoying a freedom lifestyle. But the truth is, no matter how desirable it is for us, not all people see the beauty of what we saw here.
So, I think the key is, just find those who are like us. Find those of same breed, similar to ours.
My angle is helping those looking for MMO product reviews actually make money via affiliate marketing/WA.
Maybe the issue is that they have the 'get rich quick' mentality and so they just go for the starter membership and then give up when the don't make any money after a week.
