Multilevel Marketing Training: Everything You Need to Know

You have onboarded distributors, and they are full of energy. Now, what’s important is to channel this energy properly. Multilevel Marketing training is the medium that drives motivation for the distributors in the right direction to deliver growth, revenue, or any aspect in which you want to measure success.

With our eight years of experience in MLM consulting, we found that despite having established systems in place, MLM companies often miss out on one key piece—training.

Now, even if these MLM businesses do have training courses and learning sessions in place, are they effective? If not, they offer little or no value even after making efforts. We are here to change that.

We created this article, highlighting the importance of MLM training. It also outlines the important aspects that you must include in your training program and ways to effectively implement it.

Why Multilevel Marketing Training is Important for MLM Businesses?

When distributors are recruited and left on their own, they need to figure out everything. Literally, everything!

They need to learn about the products, marketing, recruitment, and all other aspects.

Several distributors will check Google or YouTube to learn more, some will directly start approaching customers, a few will communicate with other network marketers, and the rest will be clueless.

Whatever these distributors follow, it will take more time for them to get on track, and many will lose interest in the process. Ultimately, it will negatively affect your business that relies on network marketers. However, we can develop a uniform approach for everyone through multilevel marketing training.

According to a study published in the International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, the quality of training program is considered one of the important factors for driving distributors’ satisfaction in MLM companies.

On this note, let’s discuss the essential elements of multilevel marketing training in detail.

Provide Distributors with a Smooth Start

When you or your distributors recruit other distributors, the first task is to onboard them. Though the distributor who hired them takes the responsibility of mentorship, you should also play your role.

According to research by the Society for Human Resource Management, 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience great onboarding. The same can be said for distributors.

During the onboarding and initial training program, if they are made familiar with the products, compensation plan, general rules and regulations, and skill-based information, they’ll be at ease.

Many companies, such as Amway, provide a roadmap to their distributors that contains the tasks they need to complete, information regarding tools, reading material, and much more.

By following the roadmap, the distributors will know what their next step is, the learning curve will drop, and they’ll experience a smooth start.

Develop the Ability to Sell Better

Not all distributors you hire are well-established marketers. Contradictorily, many of them will be starting their respective MLM journeys with you or will be in the initial stage of their career.

There are some insightful details from the AARP Study of Multilevel Marketing we’d like to mention here:

• 75% of members have no experience in commission-based sales before joining an MLM company.

• Four out of ten MLM members have less than a year of experience.

• Only 25% reported making a profit.

These numbers may appear scary. But isn’t it obvious that if they don’t have experience, how will they make a profit?

You can solve this by providing them with suitable skill-based training that will give them a head start in the field and help them sell better.

Another important aspect of better sales is knowing the product inside out, which is only possible through training.

Long-Term Retention

When distributors have the right direction and sales keep on improving, long-term retention is effortless.

However, exclusive training sessions for members who qualify for higher ranks are an extra perk that boosts retention.

Ensure Consistent Brand Messaging

A distributor, who is working for your company and trying to bring in sales, must know the company’s mission, vision, ethics, USPs, brand guidelines, and every element that defines your company.

Let’s say a prospect or a potential member is being approached by two distributors. Both have different approaches, where the product USPs, compensation benefits, or company values are explained differently.

The person approached will get confused about what the correct information is. As a result, even if the prospect was initially interested, there's a good chance the plan may be dropped later.

To avoid that, it’s important to conduct multilevel marketing training, explaining the complete brand guidelines and product details. It not only helps in keeping the brand messaging consistent but also improves the customer relationship.

Avoid penalties and legal issues

Training provides assurance that your distributors are well aware of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines and other regional laws and regulations.

There’s a specific focus that a network marketing business should not be considered as a Pyramid scheme. With training, the right messaging can be delivered to customers, eliminating suspicion and reputation damage.

Essential Elements of Multilevel Marketing Training

Now that you know about the importance of multi level marketing training, it’s time to create a training program for the MLM business.

We have created a complete checklist for your business so that you don’t miss out on any of the aspects.

To gain a deeper understanding of what your training program should include, read on and explore each essential aspect in detail.

Product knowledge and Training

While you are onboarding distributors, providing them with the product details is necessary. You can’t let them rely on your website and marketing material to get the product details.

Amway offers complete product training through its learning platform, Amway Education. Many other MLM companies, such as doTerra and Mary Kay, are doing the same.

The training must explain the product details, its respective buyer personas, its USPs, usage instructions, demos, and things to take care of.

The ultimate goal of product training is to provide all the product-related information. This helps distributors present the products confidently and answer every query without a doubt.

Brand Training

Most businesses don’t offer any courses or training programs to provide distributors with detailed information about the brand. However, they at least create print material regarding the guidelines. Apart from that, it’s also a great idea to merge it with the product training course.

For example, doTerra has Launched Your doTerra Business course for its new distributors. The course contains the company’s mission and vision, basic brand guidelines, compliance rules, etc. Here, one can have an overview of each aspect.

The training must explain the product details, its respective buyer personas, its USPs, usage instructions, demos, and things to take care of. Then, there are exclusive courses to learn each aspect in detail, whether it’s about product, marketing, social media, etc.

When it comes to branding, you can follow what Herbalife has done. They have created the Herbalife Independent Distributor Style Guide, which contains the following:

• General guidelines

• Rules of authorization

• Logo lockup usage

• Font usage

• Color palettes for each product category

Compensation Plan Training

Under the compensation plan training, you have to teach your distributor how your compensation plan works, how they can build a team, and payout information such as minimum personal volume (PV) and payment frequency, bonuses, rewards, etc.

So, what do you think? What would be the best way to make your distributors familiar with the compensation plan?

The answer is a live webinar.

Many MLM companies conduct monthly or even weekly live webinars to introduce their new distributors to the compensation plan.

So, why are live webinars better than pre-recorded videos in this case?

Well, a compensation plan is the core of any MLM business. According to that, a distributor sets the goal and puts in efforts to achieve it. Therefore, learning it accurately is important. When there’s a live session, it gives an opportunity for distributors to communicate their doubts right away and get the answers.

Moreover, compensation plans keep changing, and you’ll have to recreate the video even for a minor change. So, why don’t we just conduct a live session and get it done in an interactive way?

Skill Development and Sales Training

Skill development and sales training start with your distributor’s first presentation slide and end with becoming a high-ranking network marketer.

Most of the MLM companies conduct sales training with the utmost seriousness. Whether we speak of The Real Brokerage Inc. or World Financial Group Insurance Agency, they have their dedicated training platforms, which cover comprehensive sales courses and further include skill-based training tailored to their niche.

They also keep their platforms updated by introducing new sales and marketing courses, now and then.

If you check Real Brokerage Inc’s academy, they offer unique skill development courses to improve sales:

• Course on faceless home tours

• YouTube for realtors

• SEO for Google & YouTube domination

Rather than limiting the courses and training to in-person sales, they even teach their members how to leverage digital marketing.

These courses are tailored to the real estate business, and similarly, if your niche demands exclusive learning, you can go for tailored courses too.

Compliance and Ethics Training

You can’t compromise with compliance at any cost because the cost of non-compliance is too high to bear and recover.

The compliance does not always depend on you, but also on your employees, distributors, third parties, vendors, etc.

Here, speaking of distributors specifically, making false promises, pushing prospects to buy more, etc., comes under non-compliance. Besides that, when a distributor solely focuses on building a team rather than selling a real product, it’s considered similar to a pyramid scheme, which is illegal in most countries.

So, how can you ensure that your distributors don’t make such mistakes? And even if they do, it isn’t fair to hold you accountable for all their actions.

To avoid non-compliance, you need to play your part and provide compliance training to everyone.

The training must include the following:

• Federal Trade Commission guidelines

• Rules to follow under the Money Laundering Control Act (1986)

• FinCEN Guidance if your MLM company deals in crypto payments

Besides that, there are some best practices that you should explain to your distributors in multilevel marketing training.

Recruitment Training

Recruitment is an integral part of network marketing. Even if a distributor is selling a huge number of products and earning immense commission, it isn’t passive income.

To exponentially increase revenue and build a passive income source, recruiting a downline is important.

And for creating the downline, building trust is necessary. That’s why providing recruitment training to your distributors for building and maintaining trust is absolutely essential.

The training should include guidance on the complete process from striking up a conversation to having members on board. And as your distributors become team leaders, they should be trained to oversee the recruitment done by their recruits and so on.

Technology Required to Conduct Multi-Level Marketing Training

You know what to include in your multi-level marketing training, but how would you conduct these training sessions? One way is to conduct offline training events and workshops. Your distributors can also organize presentations for their recruits. But that’s one way. It’s not always cost-effective, and not everyone can attend. Therefore, there is less return on investment.

Another option is to take the training online, which does require some additional tools and resources, which we’ll explain next.

1) Learning Management System

If you want to create self-paced courses and put them online, an MLM learning management system is essential. If you create your website on WordPress or any other website builder, there are LMS that get integrated seamlessly, such as LearnDash.

Apart from that, you can create a course on dedicated SaaS applications such as Thinkific and Teachable. These tools have exclusive course creation features, such as a course builder, a course player, quizzes, assignments, and much more.

You can upload your courses here, give access to distributors, and they can go through them as and when they want.

2) Online Webinar Platforms

Some of the learning management platforms, such as Kajabi and Trainer Central, have built-in features to conduct live classes and online webinars. For instance, Trainer Central lets you add distributors to the video call, share your screen, invite speakers, and much more.

These tools are useful when you want to:

• Have a two-way interaction with your distributors

• Conduct a doubt session

• Take live tests or check how distributors are presenting

3) Online Resources and Help Sections

Distributors can have a lot of queries related to the compensation plan, sales, recruitment, etc., as they start their direct selling journey. It’s impossible for their sponsors to be available all the time to solve them. For that reason, an MLM company needs to have a thorough resource and help section.

These resources and help sections must cover the following:

• General queries related to the compensation plan

• Text and video-based sales and direct selling information: approach, communication, closing, techniques, dos and don’ts, etc.

• How to recruit, train, and grow the team

• Compliance-related information

• How to present your brand and what messaging should be

Now, it’s obvious that the resource section will not contain the answers to all the questions. It is here that the language learning model (LLM) comes into play. According to the queries and responses, you can train your LLM to provide better answers to a wider range of queries. Distributors can rely on a well-trained LLM to answer any of their queries.

4) Online Communities for Learning and Training

The tech we discussed so far comes with its limitations. Self-paced courses: no interaction. Live sessions: not available all the time. Online resources: Can’t cover all the practical scenarios. To ensure the implementation of 60-degree training, you need the support of an online community.

You can create your community on Facebook, which is widely accepted and used for interaction between distributors.

However, if you want a closed community with zero disturbance and complete control, you can go for tools like Circle and Mighty Networks. You can create exclusive groups inside a community.

For instance, there is a group where all distributors are present. The new distributors can post their queries, and other distributors can answer them. Everyone can even post insights, useful articles, share their achievements, and anything useful to everyone. This not only helps MLM companies to train users better, but also develops a strong bond amongst the team.

How MLM Companies Conduct Multilevel Marketing Training?

There are several ways in which MLM companies conduct multilevel marketing training, such as prerecorded courses, live webinars, print material, one-on-one mentorship sessions, etc.

We checked the top MLM companies and summarized how they train their distributors:

We can conclude from the above table that all the top MLM companies put immense effort in conducting multilevel marketing training for their distributors.

The best way to start training your distributors is to create guides for sales and branding. You can also conduct live webinars, as they are cost-saving and strengthen business-distributor relationships at the same time.

Later, as you move forward, you can also create prerecorded sessions and host in-person events.

You can also take inspiration from Herbalife and Mary Kay MLM companies to create mobile applications that offer training resources and event updates.

Tips for Making Your Network Marketing Training Effective

Now you know what should be included in the MLM training and how to conduct it. However, here we are, with some additional tips to bring an extra shine to your polished training program.

• Keep the Initial Training Free : Whether you offer live courses or recorded ones, ensure they are free, as charging for training materials which help distributors to sell your products is neither practical nor justifiable.

• Enforce Training Completion : Before they start selling or request a payout, the completion of training is necessary. You can also reward them for completing the training.

• Invite Top MLM Speakers : When webinars or in-person events are conducted by MLM experts with a proven track record, you can expect maximum participation.

• Conduct Webinars Regularly : Webinars are the best way to communicate as they help distributors convey their hurdles and get quick solutions.

• Build a Community in Addition to Multilevel Marketing Training : There are several MLM businesses that host a community on Facebook or a dedicated community-building platform that allows distributors to continuously learn in a strongly-bonded environment.

Take The Next Step

We discussed the importance of Multilevel Marketing Training and explored what must be included.

You can start with a basic onboarding program that gives important information regarding compliance, products, and sales.

Then, if distributors want to explore more about the products, they can go for product-related courses or guides. Similarly, you can create content and guidelines for compliance, sales, and branding, allowing members to explore every aspect in detail.

Now, what would be the impact?

Your distributors will be no random marketers, trying their luck. They’ll be equipped with thorough knowledge, exactly know what to say in every situation, and be confident to recruit and handle a huge downline.

Therefore, training is the key factor that will build smart people who can take your MLM business forward along with their own growth.

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