Master the Machine: Tracey Walker on Why Teams Run Out of People

Your best recruit joins full of energy, burns through their friends and family list in a month, and then quietly goes silent. You watch it happen over and over, and it’s tempting to blame the recruit, the company, or the industry itself. Tracey Walker closes out the Unstoppable Mastermind series by naming the actual pattern behind that silence, using a real conversation she’d just had with a top earner in a completely different company.

As a team leader watching people cycle in excited and cycle out discouraged, you’ve probably wondered whether that churn is just the cost of doing business. Tracey argues it isn’t, and that the fix sits closer to home than most leaders want to admit.

Why Does Your Top Earner Keep Their Team Away From the Skill That Actually Built Their Business?

The friend Tracey describes is already a top ranker in his company, running his own blog, clearly comfortable with marketing himself. But when it comes to his own team, he tells them to just focus on building the business instead of teaching them how to actually generate leads the way he does. He has the skill. He isn’t passing it down.

As Tracey Walker puts it, “You see the disconnect? So leaders are doing this, and everybody else is doing that. You see the disconnect?” That gap is the whole problem in miniature. A leader who has already figured out marketing sometimes assumes their downline should stay focused on “the business” instead of learning the marketing skill underneath it, as if the two were separate things. They aren’t. Without that skill, the downline runs on nothing but the friends and family list, and that list has a bottom.

Is High Attrition Really This Industry’s Fault, or Something Else?

Tracey pushes back hard on the idea that people fall out of network marketing because the tools are too technical or the company is too complicated.

The attrition rate in this industry was already high before us. Already high before us. It had nothing to do with us. People are not in and out of the industry because of us and the technicalities of everything. They in and out because of the simplicity of it all.

That’s a direct challenge to a very common excuse. It’s not the newer, more automated tools driving people out. It’s the older, simpler methods running out of runway the moment a person’s personal network is tapped, with nothing built underneath to replace it. A friends and family list was never a marketing strategy. It was a starting point, and starting points end.

What Changes Once Your Whole Team Can Fill Their Own Pipeline?

Here’s the internal benefit most leaders miss while they’re busy protecting their own edge. Once your team actually understands how to market, your own effort stops being the bottleneck for everyone else’s results. Tracey paints the picture directly, contrasting a leader whose team can generate its own leads against one who still has to personally chase down every person who quietly stopped showing up.

As Tracey Walker puts it, “Go ahead and get 1,000 of these people over here while I work on getting 25 people over here while I can pull out my laptop over in Bora Bora, do my team meeting on the webinar, and you’re still trying to call all your people to find out why they’re not on auto ship next month”. The difference isn’t effort. It’s whether the skill that built your business ever made it down to the people building theirs underneath you.

The mechanism here is simple to state and genuinely uncomfortable to practice: teach the marketing, not just the enthusiasm. Simplify the process in your own mind first, since a leader who’s still confused about the steps can’t hand anyone else a clear version of it. Then hand it down completely, the same skill you used to build your own results, instead of quietly keeping it as your edge while telling everyone else to just stay focused.

• A leader who keeps their marketing skill to themselves creates a permanent ceiling for everyone under them.
• High attrition predates any single company or tool. It comes from relying on a finite list instead of a real, repeatable pipeline.
• A team that can generate its own leads frees the leader from personally rescuing every stalled recruit.

The full session goes further into how Tracey coaches leaders through actually teaching this skill set down through their own organizations. Create your free account and you can watch the whole session, plus download the audio, at empowernetwork.com/watch.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

So what do we do, Herschel? We stand up here for six hours, every event, and I break down the same stuff over and over in as many different ways I possibly can to different groups of people who cycle in and cycle out throughout the days and ages, right? So that's what it is. I mean, this is the same thing.

I just, I want to take a picture of it myself. I am going to take a picture of it myself, and then that way, we can start teaching on this. I said, you start teaching on this. I'm going to tell you, that's what I meant about it was in my head, and I just couldn't figure out how to get it out, and so now this environment helped me to get it out.

Now, guess what I'm going to do? Maybe not tonight, but guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to go into a whole rocket launch campaign on this and that, this versus that, and not knocking either one. People know, if they know me, they know me.

I'm going to go into a whole rocket launch campaign know I'm associated with one so they can make their own judgments and conclusions but I'm not looking to bash one of the other I'm just going to simply point out what it is in an effort to do what simplify it in the mind in the mind that's it if it's simple here it's simple if it's not simple here it's not simple but the actual the fact of the matter is that it's not hard it's not people just can't see it this way yet so that's our job whatever you're a marketer so we just got some content that helps you to bridge the gap between a problem and a solution if you can go out there and you can show people how what we have is the solution to their problem guess what slam dunk every single time you're the internet marketer isn't that right well you know we just sat down yesterday with a gentleman he's a high school friend of mine he's just blowing up a brand new company that they brought him and his wife in and with cheryl mentioned to the blog he says to him but he already had a preconceived concept of what it was and his biggest issue even though he's already a top ranker in there in just two months market so the top earner is saying marketing yeah but he already had a preconceived notion of what power network was yeah from a business standpoint from business but he has no he's on a whole different planet in his thought process because everything he needs is right there in that circle market and he just that brings it all to the point that it's like this is why you need to be there so you say well how do i sell a power network like this but it depends on what this is a this is a specific target market what i'm suggesting is that if you have a market that's not traditional network marketers as you create a map like this that shows problem and solution okay you can't go to the person that's trying to be the thing that's the single mom and you say well look this how this is not they problem over here though right so you got to break it down so that it makes sense but this is my target market right i know this side and i know this side i've been on both sides of the fence so this is who i'm talking to i know this market more than i know any other market because i know the struggles and the pains and this and that so i can talk to them about it from experience not from theory but from my own personal experience, things I did not like, things I wanted to change.

That's this. But, and as you say, when you're speaking to other people in other companies, it's not even about coming over here to be their primary business. It's about stay where you're at. That's great.

Excellent. You're doing awesome over there? Wonderful. Let me show you.

Once you get your team, because it's not about you no more. You're already a top person. Look, when you get your team to understand how to market, and they understand how to fill more people into this pipeline, and maybe you got quite a few people on there that their circle of influence is not as prominent as yours may have been. Once you can show people how to do this, your leverage will shoot through the roof.

Here's a phrase that he said, and Cheryl said, well, why don't you show them a blog? Because he said, I already have a blog. Cheryl said, why don't you expose them to blogging? He says, no, no.

He says, you know, he says, I blog, but I want them to, just focus on building the business. You see the disconnect? So leaders are doing this, and everybody else is doing that. You see the disconnect?

And the preconceived notion of what he doesn't understand, the seat time, the blogging, the Facebook, and all that, because I don't even follow him on Facebook. He's not, he was supposed to be a consultant for it, but he's not really that good. So therefore, he's inconsistent, and he's done with it. He's a master of the left, except they run into the…

This, right? This, right here. So this is essentially their system. Their system by which they run people through their machine.

And what his problem is, is that if I distract people with seat time over here, they will have less focus on doing the things inside of here. And what we're saying is they're already not doing shit over here. You're already… You're already trying to get them to raise up like Lazarus.

It's already happening. Right? I'm with you, bro. I'm telling you.

I know. I get it. They're already struggling over here. I mean, I was kind of like, yes, I don't ever say that.

It's one of these numbers, you know, but you don't want to sit there debating. Because you can't, you can't, you convince someone against their will, they're of the same opinion still. So he got to want it. He got to want to know, Steve, man, what y'all got?

You got something that can help me get the marketing out to my people? That's a different posture. But you saying, hey, why don't you blog? Ah, well, I do, but no, I don't want them to.

Because if they do, then they're worried about blogging. And blogging ain't getting people exposed. But yes, it is. Yes, it is.

But they don't know that it is. Why? Because they're not lining these things up. That's our job.

If you're going to target this group, that's our job. You're going to target any group is to find out what processes people are going through, where their weak point is, and then how does this company, product service wise, solve that? So out of all of this, we're not really having people here. I mean, we could, but it's technical.

Right. It's technical. It's technical. It's technical.

But this, y'all are dying over there. Y'all are dying a slow death. Right. And that's why.

The attrition rate in this industry was already high before us. Already high before us. It had nothing to do with us. People are not in and out of the industry because of us and the technicalities of everything.

They in and out because of the simplicity of it all. Are y'all with me? I mean, we didn't make people, we're only three years old. We're only three years old.

We didn't create that problem. We're actually trying to solve that problem. And people want to hate on us because we're trying to solve the problem because it's too technical. It's too this.

Okay. Well. Go ahead and get 1,000 of these people over here while I work on getting 25 people over here while I can pull out my laptop over in Bora Bora, do my team meeting on the webinar, and you're still trying to call all your people to find out why they're not on auto ship next month because that's a whole nother process when they fall off and your money is on the line when they fall off. I mean, our money is too.

But so I know today was kind of long. I do appreciate you guys. Did you learn something? Yes.

You get some value.