Perhaps you're one of the individuals who has been encouraged or advised to buy Melaleuca leads from home business lead companies. How has that worked out for you? In my Melaleuca review, I touched briefly on the fact that many independent consultants with the Wellness Company find it difficult to know what niche to class Melaleuca in, or how to find their core customers.

With that in mind, some reps try to sell Melaleuca products but don't know who exactly to target. After all, the company does offer a wide array of products. Building Your Melaleuca Business Opportunity

You have 2 options when it comes to building your Melaleuca business opportunity:

1. Market and promote the products
2. Recruit leaders into your business, and build a productive sales team

In certain cases, some of your customers could be so impressed with the products and the business opportunity that they eventually become Melaleuca independent consultants and market the products as well. This only helps your sales team and your overall business opportunity grow.

With the second option, you immediately get to build a strong Melaleuca sales team, and the volume of products your team can market is increased. Your potential commission checks and residual income are also increased tremendously.

However, in both cases, Melaleuca distributors sometimes seem to have trouble coming up with people who they should target as their Melaleuca leads. 3 Keys To Building Any Business Opportunity

The 3 keys to building any home business opportunity are:

1. Build a list of targeted leads for your business opportunity.
2. Build a relationship with the people on that list of targeted leads.
3. Market to your list of leads.

So just how do you come up with the most targeted and profitable Melaleuca leads so you can sell more products and market your Melaleuca business opportunity? How To Uncover Your Most Profitable Melaleuca Leads

Whether you decide to build your home business by leading with the Melaleuca products or the business opportunity, you need to uncover your most profitable Melaleuca leads, attract them and build your business around them. So how do you do this?

Here's how. Melaleuca Products
Melaleuca products solve certain problems for people. Your job is to come up with those problems that are solved. Given the wide array of products on offer, try to target:

1. Common problems that are solved by the products OR
2. A subset of products solving common problems OR
3. A single product you are familiar with that solves certain problems.

After coming up with as many problems as possible, next find people with these exact problems. If you do this exercise, and do it correctly, you won't have a problem coming up with laser-targeted Melaleuca leads.

Possible target markets could include housewives who are worried about the chemicals in household cleaners, or athletes looking to live healthier lives for example. 2. Melaleuca Business Opportunity

Your Melaleuca business opportunity solves certain problems. Again, your task is to come up with as many of those problems as possible. Once you have those problems, you need to determine who exactly is facing those problems. Once you do this exercise, you can easily target the most profitable Melaleuca leads for your business opportunity.

Examples of your target market could include people recently laid off who are looking to make extra money, or real estate professionals who have been affected by the downturn in the housing market.

Why Melaleuca Leads Will Be Attracted To You

If you do this exercise Melaleuca leads will be attracted to you, and you will potentially have an abundant source of leads. This of course depends on how you will market your Melaleuca business opportunity.

This exercise will have you attracting and generating targeted Melaleuca leads, because you are solving problems and talking to your leads and prospects in terms of their problems. They are more likely to listen to you, than if you had come in talking about your products and how great they are.

Make it your business to solve other people's problems, and you will attract Melaleuca leads like bees to honey.

2. The Number One Person in Your Business
According to the ETR survey results, one of the biggest struggles among readers is identifying the right audience for their business. Today, I want to share with you a simple little exercise that will give you clarity and insight about the number one person in your business and your best client.

By doing so, you'll be better equipped to provide the right solutions and sales messages to your clients, no matter if you sell in an offline or online business. Please don't think this is useful only to those who have an internet business. It's just as important if you are a real-estate agent, salesperson, lawyer, doctor, or personal trainer.

The exercise involves creating what is called a, "customer avatar". When I started my online fitness business, this is one of things I did right without even knowing it.
At the time, most of my lead generation was through the writing I did for Men's Health magazine in addition to the questions I answered on their website forum.

As a result, I began receiving almost the same questions on a daily basis from readers who were similar in many ways. These readers tended to be late 30's, married with kids, busy at work, but also increasingly sedentary as family and work demanded more and more of their time and compared to their carefree early 20's when they were able to hit the gym, play hoops with their friends, and still find time to take their future wife out for dinner and a movie. Those were the days, weren't they?

You Need to Find These People

On Saturday morning, Matt Smith and I worked with seven fantastic Early To Rise readers to build their businesses. It was like "The Breakfast Club", but for eager, smart, ambitious entrepreneurs and and everyone wanted to be there, too. There was the "Young Gun", the "Kung Fu Girl", "Daily Deal Man", the "Legendary Copywriter", the "Big Idea Guy", the "Underground Coder", and "The Ad Man with the Plan".

We sat around solving each other's problems, everyone adding value to each other's business, making potentially lucrative business deals and affiliate connections, and even starting new businesses together.
You need to find these people in your life to mastermind with them. It's people like these that we'll be bringing together these types of people at our Early to Rise event in the spring of 2012 as well as through the Financial Independence Marketplace.

Craig Ballantyne
"Mastermind and collaborate with other smart entrepreneurs if they have futures that are even bigger than their present." and Yanik Silver, Maverick Business Rule #29

How to Find the Right People For Your Business

Imagine a beer commercial where old folks sat around in a nursing home drinking beer in their wheelchairs. Or a beer a commercial where soccer moms sat around drinking beer at child's birthday.

Obviously we'll never see these commercials because the ads wouldn't address the target market. Beer makers know who their audience is, and they advertise directly to them. In the ads we see, the beer company clearly identifies and calls out their prospect. If you're a young man interested in having a good time and meeting girls while enjoying sports events, this ads for you.

By identifying and addressing their target market, the beer company is happy to exclude a large portion of the population. They accept that not only will older folks and non-drinkers not be interested in the commercials, but the beer company also accepts that the ad will offend the non-interested party. This is a trade-off the beer company is happy to make. They are willing to exclude to attract.

This makes obvious sense in our extreme example. However, one of the most common problems in a new or stagnant business is the lack of a specific target market. All too often the business owner or sales and marketing team try to appeal to everyone. As the old saying goes, "selling to everyone means selling to no one".

Too many companies are worried that they will offend potential clients by being specific with their sales message, but as a result they are not specific enough for their target market and miss out on making the necessary connection for the sale.

Your business needs a WHO before you can sell a WHAT. Unfortunately, most business owners and salespeople try to force their product on the marketplace without properly identifying their best customers.

Once you figure out the right market, everything else falls into place. Clearly specifying your market will allow you to identify the best ways to reach your audience. When you know who your audience is, you'll then know where your audience can be found. You'll be able to advertise in the right spots, whether it's the newspaper, online, or even on the radio or TV. Your marketing will be dictated by who your audience is.

It will also help you create the all-important irresistible offer for your market. By knowing your audience's pain and suffering, you'll be able to provide the exact solution to solve this problem. You want your customer to exclaim, "This is EXACTLY what I've been looking for." Every sales message, product, and lead generation offer you create should be exactly for your target market.

However, it's not just enough to know demographics about your audience. Sure, it's important to know your best customer's age, income, gender, family status, location, and job. But you also need to know what's going on in their head. You need to understand their emotional wants and needs.

On the weekend, one of our coaching clients was struggling to pick the right target audience, and of main concern to him was figuring out how to reach his audience. Fortunately, thanks to ETR Publisher Matt Smith's extensive business experience, the group was able to identify the best way to reach the prospect.

As Matt explained, knowing how to reach your customer goes beyond just demographics and he pointed out the importance of knowing customer psychographics.

According to Wikipedia, "psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. Psychographics can also be seen as an equivalent of the concept of "culture" as used most commonly in national segmentation."

When you combine customer demographics and psychographics, you'll have a powerful profile of your best customer. There's one exercise that allows you to combine them into an important part of the business puzzle. If you're struggling to sell to the right client, one of the most important exercises you can do in your business is to create your customer avatar. Go back and review this article I wrote where I show you how to create your customer avatar.

List out all the statistics you know about your customer, but don't forget to tap into the emotional aspects as well.

According to marketing expert Yaro Starak, we need to know the "underlying emotional conditions driving the actions they take. When you have a deep emotional awareness of why they are there, you can better adjust all aspects of your marketing and in fact your entire business and to appeal to your avatar's deep rooted emotional motivations." Take a step back in your business and take the focus off of WHAT you can sell and revisit the avatar exercise to make sure you know the right WHO for your business. Craig Ballantyne "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself." Peter Drucker

CUSTOMER AVATAR

Based on these daily interactions, I began to create a profile of the typical Men's Health reader who would be interested in my fitness programs. Within a few months, I had written out an avatar so detailed I felt I could drive into any town in America and pick out the house where my client lived. Here it is:

"My best client is named Mike". He's 36 years old and lives in eastern Pennsylvania, less than three hours from New York City. Mike was active in college, playing sports almost everyday and still had time to lift weights two or three times per week. When he graduated, Mike started a sedentary desk job, and now works 9 or 10 hours per day, and spends at least an hour each day commuting by car.

Soon after starting his career, Mike settled down with his college sweetheart and got married, had two kids, and now drives a minivan. He has a nice home in the suburbs with toys all over the lawn (unless the in-laws are visiting, then he packs all the toys and crams them into the garage).

Mike likes to relax each night with a cookout and a beer on the back deck, and he tries to play softball with the guys once per week in the summer. However, family means everything to Mike, and he often has to cancel because he's coaching Little League or taking his kids to a friend's birthday party.

Mike is the kind of guy who still follows his college football team, watches his favourite NFL team every Sunday, enters March Madness brackets at the office, plays golf two or three times per year, and travels a little for work.

Because of his new life, Mike has gone a few years without a regular exercise program. But some event and perhaps a high school reunion, birthday, or simply the fact that he doesn't have the energy to keep up with his kids anymore and has motivated him to start looking online for a workout program. The trouble is Mike can only exercise at 5am or 9pm when the kids are in bed, and he has to workout at home in a cramped little 30 square foot area either in the basement or in a spare room.

As a result of his circumstances, Mike is frustrated and doesn't think he can get results. He spends fifteen minutes each night on the computer searching for fitness programs, or perhaps he picked up a copy of Men's Health while on a business trip, and one way or another he stumbles across one of my articles, forum posts, Youtube videos, or free programs I've given away on the internet. And that's when he says, "This is EXACTLY what I've been looking for.

Every sales message, product, and lead generation offer I created back then was made exactly for Mike. I didn't hype-up the message to try and attract young 20-something Vinny's who wanted to gain muscle when hitting the Jersey Shore, nor did I soften the masculine tone of the message to attract 30-something Jennifer's, the busy moms looking for a 10-minute workout they could do while their newborn had a nap.

By creating your best client avatar, you'll attract the best prospects into your business. And yes, you'll even get some people from outside of your focus who still want to do business with you. But for maximum connection with your client, creating an avatar and communicating with this ideal version of your client is preferred.

All you need to do is take fifteen to thirty minutes and write down everything you know about your best prospect. Give them a name, age, income, family life, work history, hobbies, appearance, and values.

But most importantly, identify their biggest fears and frustrations that only your product or business can solve. This will allow you to go into every sales message or meeting with the confidence that your message is perfectly suited for the right prospect.

Get to know the number one person in your business,

3. The Melaleuca Network
I have been involved in real marketing, real advertising and real business pursuits since way before the Internet. In the 80s I ran a successful Ad and Direct response agency. Being a student of David Ogilvey my understanding of marketing goes way beyond the often ill use of the term Multi Level Marketing (it should be termed multi level sales).

Real marketing (mostly deep research and analysis) is usually is accompanied by decades of experience in advertising, public relations and marketing. Often accompanied by several degrees particularly a Master degree, like from Stanford University or an equally accredited type of schooling.

However, this article is directed to those of you pursuing building a business as a distributorship. As many of you don't like to refer to it as MLM because that very acronym has many negative connotations to it from the field of market scarred with thousands of get rich quick and illegal schemes, this industry is really a direct sales market and you either need leads or customers. Personally I prefer just acquiring customers for my business. But developing quality individual leads is also an important part of the equation. And buying leads is deceptive, rarely works and at best is not healthy for your MLM business, if that is what you are doing. There is a system that will produce the success you are looking for in this industry.

Subscribing costs you nothing. It will educate you on the power and the mentoring as well as the powerful set of real state of the art automation you will have available at your finger tips. Just fill out the following form for immediate access to this system and become part of the growing social phenomena of this entrepreneurial marketing network of experts and professionals.