How to be a Great Upline Leader in Direct Sales

Creating a successful direct sales business with great team members doesn't happen by accident. Great teams are created through great downlines, and great downlines require great upline leaders. It's not simply about "recruiting members." It's about excellent management, unmatched support, inspiration, and constant motivation; it's about making leaders out of novices. And that's precisely what we are about to discuss in this article!

So read carefully, take notes, and start exercising everything we are about to go through. Take it as your first guide to becoming a great leader. The rest of our content will just help you with the nitty-gritty along the journey.

Always Set Goals

Anything without proper goals is a directionless endeavor that ends nowhere but failure. This is a general rule for everything you do, whether it's on a personal or professional level, multi-level marketing is no exception. When you make a downline, you are a leader; you are the one your team looks up to and learns from!

That being said, you must figure out what you want to achieve in a particular duration, let's say, a year. Once the goals are set, evaluate how you will achieve them? What are the effective strategies you can adapt to facilitate your goals? Plus, are your goals realistic and achievable in the specified time?

Once you are sure about everything mentioned above, team up with your downlines and put it forth. Ask them about their opinion, and ask them to put forth ideas that can improve or make the existing plans even better.

Also, encourage them to set their goals for the particular year and help them make a plan that can facilitate their individual goals and the group's collective goal. Remember, many brains are better than a single brain! Collaborative efforts and cooperation are the cornerstones of a successful MLM campaign.

Communicate Your Vision

Vision is the end of the run, while goals are just the teeny-tiny milestones you achieve at different stages of it. In this case, vision is a long-term plan according to which you strategize your short-term plans, set goals, and strive to achieve them.

As an outline leader, it's your responsibility to define your vision and give direction to your team. Tell them the whole purpose of their recruitment and the importance of each of their roles in achieving it. Tell them what you require from them.

Your vision will define you and your team's overall work ethic. The bigger the vision, the more will be the effort required to catch up with it in the specified duration. However, for your team to work as hard as you, your vision must involve the collective benefit of each member!

A good business vision has everything for everyone. That's how you keep your team motivated.

Make Onboarding as Efficient and Effective as Possible

You don't just recruit a member and leave her to be on her own; that's simply not how leadership works. Apart from making the experience highly pleasant, you must make it highly effective to reap the benefits of having a downline right off the start.

You can achieve this in multiple ways. One way is to give your downlines a perfect sales and recruitment formula that they can duplicate. It will not only give them the initial idea about the nitty-gritty of the business but also provide them with the initial push to make it in the industry.

Take this or not, outstanding leadership is not about keeping yourself at the top. Instead, it's about creating a bunch of leaders who can take charge independently. This becomes even more crucial in a business model like MLM, where your earnings directly depend on how good your downlines are at their work. Duplication is the key.

Be the Mentor Your Team Members Need

What do you want for your children? To do better than you in life, right? Well, the story with an MLM group is just the same. A great leader is always eager to see his downline members doing better in their business endeavors.

But of course, they cannot do it alone. They'll need someone to guide them, help them, and push them to do better. And that someone should be none other than you! A part of excellent leadership includes mentoring your team members on every little step they take towards advancing in the business and leading by example.

Where it will earn you the respect of your recruits, it will also help grow your business through highly competitive downline members.

Think about it! Would you prefer average team members with average sales or someone who knows the ins and outs of effective direct selling techniques and can make some serious sales? That too, in a business where the sales by your recruits earn you a huge chunk of your income!

Keep Your Team Members Engaged

Engagement is necessary to keep your team focused on your collective goals and visions. A good way to do this is to communicate with your team from time to time and exchange thoughts. Tell them what you want and listen to what they have to say.

Moreover, make them a part of your journey. For example, if you are working on self-improvement, like many great leaders, tell your team members about all the amazing things that are helping you. For example, you could share a good book you just read and found fascinating.

Also, have productive fun with them, like taking them to company events and everything. Inspire them to do better. If you want to take that a step further, throw fun parties with them if you will.

The whole goal of engagement is to promote a close connection between all the members of your group. This is extremely necessary if you want to keep them motivated to work for the group's collective goals.

Recognize Your Downline's Achievements

Well, accept it or not, we all are hungry for recognition. The best thing you can do for your team as a leader is to congratulate and reward each member, even on the most minor achievements. It will brighten her face and motivate her to work even harder. It's a win-win for both you and your team.

Conclusion

Being an upline leader is great. But is it easy? Probably not! There’s a lot that needs to be taken care of, a lot that you must manage, both on a personal and professional level.

As said, it’s all about leading by example and giving your team everything they need to stay focused and motivated. Only then, is it possible to reap all the benefits of upline leadership.

In this article, we went through 6 of the basic aspects of being a great upline leader. Although there’s much more you need to learn, we'll get to that in our upcoming articles. For now, just stick to what we just discussed, and there’s nothing to stop you from growing your business and being a great leader.