Over the last almost 10 years there has been a lot of use of the terminology Old and New School Network Marketing so what is this really all about.
In simple terms, Old School is the original strategies used to build a Network Marketing business. These strategies involved person to person or belly to belly approaches to anyone and everyone you came into contact with. They were all about getting as many people as you could to join your business.
When a new Distributor joined an Old School Network Marketing Team they were asked to make a list of everyone they knew, friends, family, work colleagues even old school friends, and often these new Distributors were instructed to come up with a list of at least 200 names. Once the list was completed the Distributor was then taught how to approach or expose each one of these people to the “business opportunity”
In the early days of the Network Marketing Industry, the approach was often made by a Distributor’s Sponsor or Upline directly to the people on the list, and the objective of that approach was to get the person along to either an open or large meeting or to the new Distributors home where the Upline or Sponsor would be there to present “the business opportunity”.
Another major part of the Old School approach strategy was to invite people to a business opportunity meeting or a meeting about e commerce. There was no qualifying of prospects and often a lot of mystery and mystique about the meetings. In many instances people who were invited this way felt tricked into attending a meeting that often turned into a pretty high pressure sell, and as a result of this tactic many people joined the Industry because they either felt obligated or pressured to join or they got caught up in the idea of making a squillion dollars simply by talking to a couple of friends. And because many of these people joined for all the wrong reasons it often meant they failed at what they were doing and pretty quickly they quit Network Marketing and then proceeded to tell anyone who would listen what a scam Network Marketing was and how they had lost their money.
Another commonly used aspect of the strategy was, what has become known as the 3 feet rule, which simply means a Distributor was taught to talk to everyone who was within 3 feet of them and get them along to a business meeting as quickly as they could. This often saw Distributors out prowling the shopping malls and weekend markets talking to anyone they could get to listen, attempting to get them to a meeting.
The huge stand out and positive strategy of Old School Network Marketing was all about forming relationships with people, and many of the genuine business focused Old School Network Marketers invested a considerable amount of their time and resources into developing powerful communication skills, and many of those people are still in the Industry today and still are Industry leaders and top income earners.