The Social Selling Leadership Podcast

Recruiting in a Trust Recession: Your Next Dream Team Member Is Silently Watching

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Episode Summary

If recruiting in your network marketing business feels slower or harder lately, nothing has gone wrong. This is a normal part of growth—and it’s happening across the entire social selling industry as we enter what many are calling a trust recession.

In this episode, Rachael Bodie breaks down why traditional recruiting tactics aren’t working like they used to and what today’s leaders must do instead. You’ll learn how to position yourself as the dream mentor your ideal recruits are looking for, build trust through your content, and shift from operating as self-employed to building a true business owner model with systems, duplication, and scalable team growth.

What You’ll Learn

Understand the Trust Recession Impacting Recruiting Right Now
If recruiting has felt harder, you’re not imagining it. With the rise of AI content, online opportunities, and skepticism around income claims, trust is lower than ever. Rachael explains how this shift is impacting network marketing recruiting systems and what leaders must do differently to continue scaling their teams.

Shift From Self-Employed Operator to True Business Owner
Many network marketers unintentionally operate like self-employed salespeople—where income depends entirely on their personal effort. You’ll learn how recruiting, mentoring, and duplication systems move you into the business owner quadrant. 

Become the Dream Mentor Your Ideal Recruit Is Looking For
Most leaders focus on finding their “dream team,” but rarely ask who that dream team member wants to follow. You’ll learn Rachael’s Dream Mentor Shift, which helps you align your leadership presence, messaging, and content with the mentor your ideal recruits are searching for.

Use Content to Build Trust Before You Ever Invite
Cold outreach and random DM invites don’t work the way they used to. When trust isn’t established first, invitations feel transactional. You’ll learn how social selling strategies and leadership-based marketing reduce friction, nurture relationships, and make recruiting conversations feel natural.

Send the Leadership Signals That Attract High-Quality Builders
Dream team members look for specific signals before joining a team: leadership, systems, community, and vision. You’ll learn how to showcase these through your content so serious builders can see that you offer the structure, mentorship, and culture required to build a 7-figure downline with duplication and depth.

Resources Mentioned

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Social Selling Leadership Podcast, the show for six-figure network marketers ready to scale with alignment and simple systems. I'm your host, Rachel Bodie, network marketing expert and industry veteran. Each week you'll learn the strategies and systems top leaders use to enroll high-quality recruits, create duplication in their downline, and lead with confidence. Let's dive in. Well, hey friends. Welcome back to the show. So honestly, I just start to feel normal again. We went to the Lady Gaga concert last week, and it was incredible. We get four tickets, the closest I'd ever been in a concert. So that was really cool. But she didn't even go on till 9 30. So we got home super late. And uh, if you know me, I'm an early to bed, early to rise kind of girl. So just trying to get back into the normal schedule after that concert was a little rough. It definitely takes me longer than it used to, but I'm really trying to make an effort to go out and create more experiences. I tend to be a little bit more of a homebody and a little bit more introverted. So I want to be intentional about making memory. So that's why we decided to go. And you know, to be honest, I wasn't really a Lady Gaga fan until a few years ago. I watched her documentary and just seeing behind the scenes, seeing her creative process, seeing her passion, uh, seeing how how unapologetic she is and just owning her truth, owning who she is. It's really inspiring. You know, my word this year is seen and going to that concert and seeing her kind of embody what that means. It was it was really cool. And I think it connects too with what we're talking about today. We're gonna be talking about recruiting in a trust recession. Uh, because being more of who you are as a network marketer, as a social seller is going to be a huge competitive advantage because not only does it help you to stand out, but it helps to build trust. So let's talk about it. You know, if you are someone here today where you feel like recruiting is more of a struggle, you aren't imagining it, right? We are in what is being called a trust recession. So maybe you've heard that term, maybe you haven't. So what does that mean? It means that people are more skeptical than ever. And this has to do with the increase in AI, right? It's hard to even know what's real sometimes, you know, and the market's also being flooded with different ways to sell online. So that is translating to more skepticism about income claims, about online opportunities, and of course about the business opportunity within network marketing. It's interesting too because I was following an account. I thought this was a real person. I had no idea. And then I found out the entire account was AI generated. Her videos were so good. She was she was dancing, it's like an older lady, and her outfits were just epic. Uh, she was just really like showing up, owning who she is, and I found out she wasn't real, and it felt it felt a little bit like a bait and switch. And so this is what I mean by trust recession. So if you are feeling like recruiting is slower or it's harder to call in the right people, it's because trust has changed. And that's exactly what I want to talk about today. You know, I've been in conversations with so many uh leaders recently, and they want to, you know, not just recruit quantity, but they want to recruit quality, you know, people who are ambitious, who are ready to take action, who are more entrepreneurial, you know, people who are ready to do the work and build. But what's happening instead is a lot of leaders are defaulting back to a focus on personal sales, customer sales, or managing the team they already have. So if that's you and you spent the last year, maybe, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally, you know, doubling down on your personal sales instead of recruiting, you are slowing down the very business you're trying to scale. And this is so key. Um, gosh, I've coached top earners in the space who they're either on the verge of burnout or they're healing burnout because of their disproportionate focus on personal sales. And I get it, you know, I've been there, believe me, you know, um, in their mind, it's like, well, this is what I can control, right? I can control my personal sales. I can't control what my team's going to do. That's the thought anyway. But it's the very thing that will prevent true scaling because you become the lid on your business, right? As an individual, you can only sell so much. You're one person. But when you recruit and develop a team, a sales team, that is, you're incre you're increasing your capacity for income, for impact, for reach. That's the power of leveraged income. Now, this is the reason why so many of us get into this business. You guys know I'm a huge readerslash listener to books. And I recently read a book by Robert Kiyosaki called The Cash Flow Quadrant. It's a really great book. And the whole premise is how to create true freedom, financial freedom. And again, this is why so many of us get into the industry, right? We want time freedom, we want true financial freedom. So the cash flow quadrant, and you think about it like four squares, it explains how people earn money in these four different ways. The first is an employee. An employee is just like it sounds you have a job, right? The next level is being self-employed. This is where you have a business that pays you when you show up. So you are the boss, but you're also the employee. You are self-employed, you are employing yourself. This is important because you only get paid when you show up. Meaning, when you don't show up, you don't, the paycheck goes down. And this is where a lot of network marketers find themselves. The next level is business owner. This is when you create a system that works for you, right? In network marketing, this looks like a recruiting and duplication system that creates a sustainable sales team. And then the next level up is an investor, and this is where you have your money working for you, and this is where your money is generating ROI. Most struggling leaders are operating in the bucket of self-employed. And that looks like, you know, you sell, you grind, but your income is mostly dependent on you. You recruit sometimes, but when you don't show up and do the things, you see a drastic decrease in your income. Now, if you want to build true freedom within network marketing, you have to shift from this self-employed to business owner. And that's the thing too, like the real promise of this model, it's never about selling more product, right? It's about building something bigger than yourself. It's about building a team, building a legacy, a business that grows when you're not there every time, an opportunity to go on vacation for a few weeks and still have that income coming in and the generational impact of that on your family and to build something that impacts families beyond your own. And when I talk to so many top leaders, of course they want to create income and there's things they want in their own life. But so many times I hear, you know what? And I don't want it just to be about me. I really want to make sure my team's winning. I want to help other women create the same type of success that I have. In order to do that, that requires recruiting and then implementing that duplication system, which is the honorient mentoring. But the shift from self-employed to business owner, it starts with recruiting. But I don't have to tell anyone here that, you know, recruiting looks very different than it did just three years ago, certainly than five years ago. And this trust recession, what's the positive, it's actually creating a huge opportunity for the leaders who know how to build trust and are intentional about doing that. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because the leaders who understand this shift are going to dominate recruiting in the next three years. So, what did it used to look like? It used to look like cold invites, you know, sliding into the DMs, doing a reach out, opportunity presentations. And, you know, obviously we still do those presentations. I think that is an important piece. But now recruiting starts earlier. Recruiting isn't just about the reach out, it's what that person sees before they ever reply. And that's because marketing is the precursor to recruiting. Marketing is a precursor to recruiting. That marketing helps to build trust, it helps to nurture relationships, it helps to overcome objections, it helps to reduce the friction someone feels before they say yes. And I see so many direct sales leaders who are leaking trust. They're inviting to the business, but you go to their content, it's not showcasing who they are as a leader. It's not showing what's actually happening behind the scenes. And if your content doesn't clearly show that you're leading a team, that you're building systems, that you're casting vision, why would your ideal team member think you're the leader to follow? Right? I say that with so much love. You know, you've got to think about if someone came to your page, if they landed on your Instagram or Facebook today and they watched your stories for five minutes, would they know you're building a team? Because here's the truth: recruiting your dream team starts with showing up as her dream mentor. I call this the dream mentor shift. We spend so much time thinking about wanting to recruit this dream team, but we rarely stop and ask who is that dream team member looking for in a mentor? Right? Dream team members, they look for signals like leadership, vision, consistency, systems, alignment and values. So the most important question here is who is her dream mentor? When you think of that dream team member of yours, who is she looking for? What characteristics and qualities does her dream mentor have? And then am I showing up that way? So let me give you a for example. I'll use myself. So my ideal client is looking for a dream mentor who has a consistent podcast schedule, you know, who puts out a podcast every single week. Um consistent, she can rely on me. She wants someone who has done what she wants to do. And she wants a mentor who is understanding and warm, but is also willing to tell the hard truth for her sake. She wants someone who has her act together, someone who's organized, who's systems-minded, and who has a roadmap to help her recruit and duplicate. She wants someone who's made millions of dollars. This is the person that my ideal client wants to work with. So the real question here for you is what signals does your content send about you as a mentor? Right? There are three types of dream mentor signals to share in your content. And when I say content, I mean in your stories, on your grid or your feed, if you're using email marketing, in all the different places here. So the first signal is leadership. So thinking about leadership, what stories do you need to tell that will showcase how you are the dream mentor? How can you share your leadership and systems? Because serious builders and dream team members, they want structure. So that could look like a behind the scenes of a team call or assets or resources you're creating for your team. Like one of the things that I used to do that I teach to my clients is a monthly marketing calendar to create a culture of recruiting, to create clarity on what we're inviting to. Maybe you want to share a mentorship moment where someone had a breakthrough, or you could do an overview of a training topic to overcome an objection. Like, for example, people may say, Well, I don't have any social media experience. So you could share, like, hey, I am doing an overview of what's working well on social media to teach people how to earn$1,000 in their first 30 days. You could be showing a system, maybe you have a 30-day content calendar to get people started, or a custom AI bot to help them with having conversations. What you're doing is you're showcasing how you are a leader. That's a leadership signal. The second dream mentor signal is culture and community, right? People join a team, but they stay with the community because of the culture. I was actually coaching a client recently who shared a moment in her convention, which it was really sad. She she shared with me that her upline was being edified by all the leadership. She was on stage. Um, and then when she got her upline got up there, she didn't say a word about this particular leader who has been key to her success. And in that moment, she said that she felt invisible. Heartbreaking, right? That is an example of culture gone wrong. On the flip side, I was on a call this week with a client who uh she attended a retreat, and she told me for the first time in 10 years, she felt seen. She felt valued. Now the CEO was at the retreat too, which is really cool. That's indicative of the company culture. But this is important. How can you showcase the culture of your team? Another client did a Galantine's event and they did uh PJs and they did a like a gift exchange. So they were showing that as part of the culture. Um, another client, um, she had a retreat just this past weekend and she was interviewing team members on her stories, and she was asking them, what was the thing that surprised them most about the retreat? Again, showcasing the culture. Okay, the third dream mentor signal to sharing your content, vision. This one is really, really important. I did this a ton in my first two years of the business, and this really helped me hit six figures in 20 months. People follow leaders with direction, right? So casting a vision of the future of where you're going, of what you're doing, of who you want to help and what you will help them do. Like you're telling people, hey, this is where this team is headed. Let's do it together. You know, I'm, you know, we're a team of like-minded women. We value faith, we value impact, we value wellness. And I'm on a mission to elevate what's possible for other working moms. You know, that was me, that was my story because I was a former corporate working mom. And you may say, hey, I'm linking arms to three women this month to help them earn$1,000 and another three to help them build a six-figure business. And when you show up and you cast vision like that, your certainty, your belief, your purpose inspires people to join you, right? That confidence recruits on your behalf. So you really want to think about your when you're showing up on social, and again, on email too, if you're doing it there, consistently breadcrumbing these signals around the business opportunity. And if you think about how a recruiting funnel works, I think that's a useful thing to think through too. At the very top of any funnel, but specifically a recruiting funnel, is expanding your network, right? You have to constantly be meeting new people so that you always have new people to share the opportunity with. So once you meet someone new, you know, someone goes from cold to now they have an awareness of who you are, from there, you need to start to nurture and build trust. And there are two ways to do that. Two ways to nurture and build trust. One is your marketing, and that is front facing. Front facing is what people can see, and that's your stories and your feed and your grin and your email, right? But the other way to nurture and build trust is back facing. It's the back end, it's what people can't see. And that is the private connection that's happening behind the scenes. And the most successful recruiters are doing both, right? Because remember, marketing reduces the friction of someone saying yes because you're building trust, you're overcoming objections, you're sharing stories, and people start to see themselves in those stories. And without that trust built beforehand, and you just throw send out a DM and invite someone to the business, it feels random. And I just I see this happening so frequently right now where people are just inviting people, but the content isn't showing that they're building a business. Or maybe what they're they may be doing what they would consider to be a bold reach out, but really it's just a hable message, right? Because they haven't built any trust, they haven't created a connective tissue with the relationship. So you want to think about building trust publicly and building it privately through conversation before you make that offer. Remember, your dream team member is looking for those signals. And when your public presence, your public social media presence doesn't match your private pitch, this is where trust breaks because there's a lack of alignment, there's a lack of integrity behind what you're saying publicly and what's happening privately. So here's what I want you to hear. In this trust recession, recruiting does not belong to the most aggressive leader. This is not being, it's not about being the most aggressive, it belongs to the most trustworthy one. So I want to share with you and I want to leave you with a very clear action stat. And I call this the dream mentor audit. So first we're gonna look at reflection. So I want to recommend you go back to your last seven days of content. Look at your last seven days, your feed, you can even go through stories and your archive, ask yourself the question Am I showing up as her dream mentor? Does this content, the posts in the stories, does it actually show leadership signals, systems, culture and community signals, vision? Or are you mostly just talking about products? Because a lot of times, guys, you're a dream team member, they're just like they're not just looking for a product, they're looking for a leader to follow. Okay, so now here's the action. Once you do that reflection piece, this week, post at least one piece of dream mentor content. It could be showing a team call, talking about you know what you're training on, or a behind-the-scenes training moment, or casting vision for where your team is headed this year. Let people see what it looks like to build with you. And if you do, tag me, I'd love to see it and cheer you on. And remember, in this trust recession, people are not joining the loudest leader, they're joining the clearest one. So clear leadership, clear signals, clear systems, and a clear vision. Because I promise you, your next dream team member, she's already silently watching. The only question is, what is she seeing when she does? Okay, we'll see you on the next episode. If you're a six-fader network marketing leader and you know your recruiting and duplication systems need a revamp, this is exactly the work I do in my private one-o-worker chain. I help established leaders become the mentor their dream team is looking for so that growth becomes duplicatable, scalable, and sustainable without the burnout. If this episode resonated, you can apply for a free mini session using the link in the show notes. We'll look at your current systems and goals, identify what's actually creating the ceiling in your business, and map out the top three ships that will position you to double your monthly income.