Let's be honest. Sometimes we networkers deserve the bad reputation that our industry gets because we act like morons when we approach people. Here's a quick story that just happened to me this week:

I got a message from a guy on Facebook who said he had seen me in a top leader's group and asking me how long I'd been in the industry. I messaged him back letting him know a bit about me and asking him about himself. He said that he wanted me to join a group of his, but that I needed to friend him first. I polietly let him know that I used my personal FB page for personal stuff and gave him a link to my fan page so we could connect there.

He then asked me another question about what I was doing to generate leads and sales. After I told him, he posted, "hmmm take a look at this. We need leads daily and people that will buy from us immediately to create cashflow fast" along with a link to a capture page.

In literally 5 seconds, I went from thinking, "Hey I may have just made a new friend," to "This jerk doesn't give a rip about me, he just wants me to buy his crap."

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had the same feelings since he is now banned from Facebook even though I didn't flag him.

I say that to say this... we marketers sometimes have a tendency to get so excited about our opportunities and our success that we completely forget that we're dealing with a real person who has real wants and needs. We forget that it's quite possible that the person to whom we're speaking is perfectly happy and will continue to be perfectly happy without our amazingly glorious opportunity or products.

Now don't get me wrong... I'm not saying we shouldn't share our businesses or products with the world, I'm saying that many of us need to use a bit more tact ourselves or we need to be teaching our downlines how to use more tact in their approaches. Let's get away from the "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" stuff, and instead seek to figure out how we can serve people - even if that means they DON'T join our business.

Article written by Matt Hall. Matt Hall's blog http://thesponsoringsystem.com teaches networkers how to generate leads online so they don't have to harass their friends and families ever again.