I get this question a lot, from distributors involved with many Network Marketing companies.

To a good many Internet Marketers, this question seems superfluous. To them, calling leads is akin to admitting defeat in their marketing efforts. After all, in the Internet Marketing world, if you want more sales you just generate more traffic which equates to more leads opting-in which results in more sales. Simple. Got it?

For those of us in Network Marketing (MLM), the answer is not quite so simple or clear cut.

Generating leads in MLM is a lot of work. Besides which, MLM is predominantly a relationship business. I know, there are a lot of "gurus" on the net touting MLM sponsoring without ever talking to the prospect. My experience varies somewhat from that particular business model. Maybe I am old school, but in my opinion MLM is still akin to building a sales/marketing team or a company. Teams are built on relationships. How can you have a relationship with a website and an autoresponder? I use the web and autoresponders very heavily, but I cannot imagine relying on them exclusively to communicate with prospective members of my team.

If a person has sufficient marketing ability to generate many more leads than they can possibly call, she can probably generate enough clients out of that number to build a good downline. I just can't help thinking, though, that the results could have been MUCH GREATER if she had just called a few of them per day to introduce herself. After all, some people will join a business opportunity from the internet alone while a lot more will join the team of someone they have learned to like and trust.

We all want our phone ringing off the hook with prospects begging to be a part of our team so they can take advantage of our brilliant leadership, right?

So, what did I just say? Should you call your leads or not?

Let's look at a hypothetical example. What if Melanie began her Network Marketing career last week. She has a domain name and a blog set up. She has written a few articles and posted them on the Web, as well as a Press Release. She has joined four work-from-home forums and has been participating in them two hours per day. She has set up a splash page and joined two traffic exchanges as a paid member which guarantees visitors to her website. She has also joined four Social websites and is participating in them two or more hours per day.

Whew! Melanie is a busy lady. She should be getting a few hundred visitors to her site as well as quite a few good leads. Let's say she starts getting five leads per day and it increases to twenty per day by the end of the month.

Should she call those four to twenty leads? If you had up to twenty good leads per day, would you call them? I know my answer. Of course, only about half or less will leave a valid phone number so the number of calls she has to make is even less.

In my opinion, once she has gone to all of the trouble of getting leads to request information, why would she stop just short of the finish line? Why not give these people a call and introduce herself and ask if they have any questions or invite them to an interactive conference call? My guess is that Melanie would multiply the number of distributors joining her team, along with the added benefit of actually having team members that know and trust her.

Your mileage may vary.

Happy Marketing.