Generating leads in your network marketing business is crucial to your long term success in the industry or any industry for that matter.

Over the years you probably have done some pretty crazy things to generate leads.  Most likely you have done everything from cold calling people in the phone book, leaving business cards in the self help books in the local bookstore, engaging in conversations with anyone with a heartbeat, attending every community social gathering, etc…etc…

While some of those methods might have worked, I am sure it was always short term and you found yourself having to consistently do the work to keep the leads coming in.  Over the course of time, it gets cumbersome and something has got to give.

It wasn’t until I learned how to leverage systems that allowed me to multiply my efforts, that I saw a huge change in my productivity as well as growth in business.

One of the things I realized is that I wasted a lot of time talking to people that I had no business talking to about business.  I realized that if I was going to move ahead in business, I would have to have a system in place to pre-qualify my prospects before I ever talked to them.  This is called sifting and sorting.

I also found out that all of the top earners in the network marketing/internet marketing industry used a funded proposal funnel system to monetize their efforts.  This means that when someone drops into your sales funnel, you have numerous opportunity’s to offer something of value to them before they leave. This is done through your auto-responders as well as phone conversations and connecting with people.

Some people think that just because they have a online lead generation system in place, they no longer have to pick up the phone and connect with people.  WRONG! You will always have to talk to people, always. It’s the glue that holds things together.

If your trying to convince people that “your business is the best” or “your product rocks everything else out there”, your in for a rude awakening.  It’s not one size fits all.  People are looking for solutions to their problems and if you only have one solution, your going to be a very frustrated marketer.

Think of yourself as a doctor and you have patients coming to you with an ailment that needs a prescription of some sort.  If it your duty to diagnose your patients and then have the best solution to fix their specific problem.  You can only find these things out by connecting with people on their level.  Forget about what you want and start thinking about what other people need.

While lead generation systems increase productivity, understand that they are only another tool. You still have to work.  Whether your using Pay Per Click, Blogging, Banner advertising, Article Writing, Video Marketing or Press Releases, you still have to be able to connect with your audience in a way that your providing value and not merely pushing a product or service.  You have to understand that your not dealing with machines, your dealing with peoples lives.

Increasing your own value to society is one of the secrets of the industry. You have to connect before you pull.  This is where the attraction marketing comes into play.  If you have two magnets and you put the polar opposites near each other, you are going to repel them from each other.  Flip one of them around and they will draw themselves together and at that point you can pull.