How AI will affect network marketing

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Networkers, the ultimate podcast for networkers in direct sales, network marketing, MLM or any cell side of You'll learn the skills for the how-to and the mindset to make it work from the author of over 20 best-selling books and over 25 years in the business. Here's your host, Pete Strider.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

If you're curious if AI will help or harm your business, this episode is for you. Last night I overheard a conversation. I was at a social event. And when I go to events, and when most people go to events, there's always like specific people you gravitate toward, and there's always a group of people you kind of stay away from. So I was trying to stay away from a specific group because they're always about current events and watching the news. And that's great if that's what you're into. It's just not my thing. But more importantly, they kind of always go to the negative and the complaining, and it just wasn't my thing. So I tried to avoid the group. The group was behind me, so I had to excuse myself and go farther away from the group. But before I left my area, they were talking about the fear of AI. And again, it was the fear, not the positive, but the fear of AI. And yes, it is a legit fear for people in some industries. Now, I don't think it's going to do any harm for network marketing. I'll kind of explain it, but the fear is how it's going to affect the entire economy and how it's going to have a negative impact and all these other things that that goes on. And my thought is always there's good and bad in everything in the world. In fact, last week someone asked on a Zoom call I was on about AI. I said, Yeah, there's there's good and bad. You could use it in your business. Now, this is just my thoughts, but you can use AI to help brainstorm. Because we used to use Google to brainstorm, and people started using AI. So Google said, you know what? Let's put some AI into Google because we want people to stay on Google. Now, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's straight up wrong, but it's in there. So you can brainstorm with AI, just like you would brainstorm with Google, as far as who else sells to my customers and how do I reach this market. You could do some really good brainstorming with AI. But the big drawback in any AI engine or any Google is it doesn't add a real personal touch. Personal touch is very important when you want to solve problems. So before I share any more specifics and of course a couple of stories to have you remember the information, keep in mind, always add that personal touch when talking to prospects or customize information so they can help solve their problem. So many companies are using AI, especially big companies, because they want to save money. And actually, about two weeks ago, I have a service with a company, and the discount wasn't applied to my bill. This count was cut and dry, something happened, no idea. I just called in and it was a lot of AI. Press one, press two, here's the information. I was just I was stuck in an AI loophole, and finally I said, please cancel my service. And within 30 seconds, all of a sudden, a human answered the phone. So there's a quick tip. If you ever want really fast customer service from a big company, just say cancel my service. The next thing you know, your wait time is very minimal. And when I talked to the human customer service agent, they took care of my problem. Only a human could could have fixed the problem because the human has to make sure that I'm not trying to pull a fast one. They realize I was a good customer, they realize they it was the mistake was on their end. Again, not mad at the mistake. I'm just just fixed my problem so I can move on. And it only takes a human to do it. And people are just craving that human connection. There's so much AI and press one, press two with these big companies. People are craving human connection. And we have to remember that when we talk to our prospects. We don't want to give them canned presentations. We want to give them customized information that they want. Let me share you one more really quick story on AI. Last October, I got a new car and we're trying to figure out should we give this car to the daughter and maybe get another car? Should we get her a car? I said, you know, let me just figure this out. Let me do some research on getting an additional car because, hey, why not? It's only been a couple months since we got a car. Let's buy another one. And I did some research and I said, okay, this one looks great. It's something that she could use. Let me just send a quick email to the dealership with just two questions. That's all I need are just two questions answered. And when they receive this, they can email me back anytime because I did this late at night. It was almost midnight at the time. But I said, let me just send it out and be done with it, and they could deal with it. And the email that I sent, and I'm gonna X out the information because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, even though they deserve to be thrown under the bus. Uh email went simply, I'm very interested in XYZ car. Can you please email me the total price, including any addendums? Thanks, Keith. Now, if you don't know what a car addendum is or a dealership addendum is, it's simple. It's where the dealership can make an extra thousand dollars on overpriced add-ons. Now, not every dealership does it. In fact, the dealership I got my car, they did it, but they did it in an ethical way where it broke it down and they weren't overcharging. But on average, it's twelve hundred dollars for some fancy package, and all those options cost under $200. So it's a good way for them to make it a thousand dollars. Again, they have to make a profit, but just be upfront about it. And the addendum is normally for twelve hundred dollars, get like window tint, uh some door ding protection and wheel locks. Like all that stuff does not cost remotely $1,200, let alone $200. But hey, they have to make a profit. I understand. I just want to know the total price because most of the time they don't list that on their website. So tell me, you know, taxed how to license license, addendums, everything. Simple email. Two sentences, pretty easy to understand. And to my surprise, not 10 minutes later, I get an email back. Hi Keith, it's this person's name, sales assistant from this dealership. The car that I was looking for is currently available. I'll get with a sales consultant to confirm addendums and calculate the driveout cost. They'll email you the details when we open tomorrow at 8 30 a.m. Let me know if you have a specific day or time this week that works for you to see it. Super excited. I felt heard, I didn't believe it was an AI robot, and I was looking forward to doing business. I was looking forward to being a customer of this dealership. And at 9 a.m. the next morning, I got an email. Hi Keith, thank you for contacting. Blank blank dealership. A member of our team will be in touch with you shortly. For any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us here. If you provided a cell number, when you submitted your information, you should have received a text message from me and you can reply if you prefer. We look forward to helping you with your next vehicle purchase. Signed the exact same person that sent me an email last night. I say, okay, maybe she made a mistake. Maybe she got confused with somebody else. Easy, no big deal. Two hours later, I received an email. It said, Hi Keith, hi Keith, did you receive my last message? So there's obviously some sort of glitch in their system. Has it say hi Keith twice? No idea. I blew it off, just kind of waiting to get my information that I asked for. And the plot thickens, and I'll try to be the as quick as possible so I can kind of give you better information. But the story goes like this. Two hours later, I get hello Keith, this is XYZ's name. I'm the internet sales director at this dealership. My team should be reaching out to you shortly. Please let me know if you can be of any assistance. Now I received that email four times from four different email addresses. So obviously there's some sort of really bad glitch in their system. So still kind of waiting. And then finally, the next day, again, we're over 24 hours later. Hi Keith, we received your request for information yesterday, and I wanted to follow up. Are you still interested? And do you have any new questions? If I don't have the information you're looking for, I'll ask a sales consultant to reach out as they're available. And now I definitely knew it wasn't just somebody that was incompetent. This was definitely AI. So I replied back. I received four emails from four different people, still waiting on the price of addendums and total price. Thanks, Keith. Don't worry, it gets worse. I get the email back. Hi Keith, I am so sorry. The price and information and information for the vehicle are attached in this link. Please be sure to check the blue details button to see the information. Do you have something you're thinking about trading in? And they sent me the link, so I clicked on the link, I clicked on the blue details button, and guess what? The blue details button did not give me the information I needed, which was addendums and total price. The blue button was basically like here's all the features. So this is definitely AI. Again, I'm wasting my time, but I'm honestly doing a social experiment now. So I messaged back, just need total drive out costs, including possible expensive addendums. And the email I got back an hour later, hi Keith, I understand. Where are you located? So obviously, this AI bot is completely confused. This dealership is completely wasting money on these AI bots. Now eventually I did receive a voicemail that said, Hi, this is XYZ from XYZ Dealership, please give me a call. They didn't even leave their number. Like their training is horrible. And all they had to do was answer one question, well really two questions, and I would have done business with them. But they left AI to do the work for them. Again, all they had to do was email me the info, which takes about I don't know, 30 seconds, maybe a minute tops, maybe a nice quick email, take another minute to make it sound professional, give me a call to action. Hey, if I need anything, or can we set up a time for a test drive? Easy, and they would have received a customer, a happy customer that would have promoted their dealership. So as much as AI helps, it can actually harm businesses and let's make sure it doesn't harm our business. So what can we do right now, right away, so we don't fall into the AI trap? Well, it's simple. We just have to set ourselves apart from generic information, generic presentations. We have to be listening and asking for specifics so we can get customized information to our prospects. So if they talk about wanting to earn an extra income, we need to know. Within your first six months, are you looking to earn an extra hundred dollars a month or an extra hundred thousand dollars a month, or what specifically would you like to earn? We have to ask those questions just to clarify. Because if they say $100 a month, we can say, okay, great, let's figure this out. Okay, we have this product or this service, we need this amount of customers, we have to find one person that thinks like us that wants to get customers. Like we can figure out a specific game plan versus well, we make 10% on level one and seven percent on level two, but it can go up to 15% and we confuse them with percentages. Now they just want to know what do I need to do to earn X amount of money, and that X amount of money is their specific number. They say, Well, I'm looking to make an extra hundred thousand dollars a month in six months and go, okay, great. Do you have an existing network that we can talk to? Is this realistic or is this unrealistic? Or let's figure it out. For some people, it could be realistic. They may have a network of a million people on Instagram. I have no idea. We have to customize our conversation. Same with products. If you have a weight management product, ask them how much weight do you want to lose in six months? Are you looking to lose five pounds? Are you looking to lose fifty pounds? If it's five pounds, it's great. Okay, it's under a pound a month. If it's 50 pounds, okay, that's uh about two pounds a week. We should probably talk to a physician before you get started and figure this out. Or let me show you exactly what my friend XYZ had done to to do the exact same thing. Let me share you a story of some examples of what they did, what they use, which products were their favorites, etc. Even for skincare, we don't know if they're looking to get rid of the circles around their eyes, the turkey neck. We could ask them well what problem areas do you want to target? Let's figure it out. So we don't have to go through all 17 products that they don't care about. They only care about this one specific product, maybe to start off with. Again, we have to ask clarifying questions. We want customized information because people want the human touch to solve their problem. And yes, it works for any service company as well. Like how many policies or customers do you need to get to that magical number? They don't need a full-blown percentage breakdown of the entire comp plan. They just want to know I want to earn X amount of money. What do I have to do? Okay, let's figure it out. Now you may not know right away, but you can take your time and figure it out. That way they know exactly what they have to do. So many times I see where people go from product and service directly to the opportunity. We need to ask them, are they looking to earn some extra money or they just want to buy the product? They could be in a hurry and they just want to buy the product or use the service right now. And guess what? They have so many people they want to talk to, they just want to see some results, and they say, okay, well, once I see results, yeah, absolutely. I definitely want to promote what works for me. Oh, yeah, I have a couple hundred thousand people that I can talk to via social media platforms, but I just want to try it right now. Or, yes, I want to do it, I want to promote it. What can I do right now? Can I add it to my my stories? Can I do a really quick reel? Can I do a uh an interview talking to you? I want to promote this business right away. I want to promote this product, I want to promote the service right away. We we need to know. We just have to ask them. And it can be as simple as how many contacts you have on your phone, how many contacts do you have on your social media, how many of out of all those people, there's gonna be a certain percentage of people that not only need the product, but also want the product. If the timing's right, we might as well offer it to them. Would it be okay if I could show you how to make an extra $1,000 this week just by giving them an option to change your life, just by giving them an option to lose weight, just by giving them an option to earn some extra money, just by giving them an option to save some money on our service, just by giving them an option to also get rid of their wrinkles, whatever it is. Just those small clarifying questions to customize your conversation will make a huge difference, and you'll never have to worry about AI, or at least never have to worry about AI in network marketing. People are so worried about AI, but guess what? They're gonna be worried about something else next year. They'll always find an excuse not to build. Well, I don't want to build because AI may take over. Trust me, there's always going to be a distraction. Just like uh was it last week or a couple weeks ago, I had Tony Mealy on, and I remember talking to him about investing. And it's really interesting that I kind of got into the rabbit hole of investing, and I saw a YouTube video about investing, and they said there's always going to be a distraction to investing. Just look at the last 10 years in 2015. There was the global stock sell-off in 2016. People worried about Brexit in 2017. There were some major hurricanes. One of them affected me. In 2018, there was the trade war in 2019. Uh the repo market was blowing up. In 2020, oh yeah, by the way, there was a global pandemic in 2021 because of the pandemic, there were supply chain issues in 2022, there were interest rate hikes. In 2023, there were bank failures. In 2024, people are still worried about AI bubbles. In 2025, there were tariffs. There's always going to be something. And some of these are legit, but the thing that he said is if you could just get rid of the noise and you would have invested 10 years ago and just left it in there, you would have made 200% on your money if you invested in like an index fund. In other words, you would have tripled your money just by ignoring the noise. Same with AI. It's gonna help us. For some people, if they use it wrong, it's gonna harm them. But if you ignore the noise and just build your business, you'll have an income where other people are still waiting for the right time to do something. So just start asking some clarifying questions so people feel heard. And more importantly, you give them the right information so they can solve their problem, whether it's product, service, and or opportunity. As always, I hope you receive value in this episode. If you know somebody that could use this information, please share it with them. But more importantly, looking forward to sharing another episode with another successful networker next week.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

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