Which Compensation Plan for Which Colour?

Have you ever been really bummed out by why some people are successful in your company and you’re not? Have you been annoyed by the fact that some newbie who joined just a few months ago has already reached his first pin level, while you haven’t even moved from zero after one year?

The worst thing you can do is to feel inadequate about it, because it’s not your fault. Over the last few posts, we’ve covered a lot about personality types and how to relate to each of them. In this article, I discuss how each personality performs in the various compensation plans.

Yep, that’s right, some personality types are just not “wired” to perform well in certain compensation plans. Here’s why…

The Yellows, being the nurturers, have little chance of being successful in a stairstep breakaway or unilevel pay plan. The yellows want to work with people and coach them. They are team players and they want to help out the people in their team become more successful than themselves.

So the Yellows work best in plans that go deep – all the way down to infinity. They’ll do well in plans where they can place people under other people to get a real team dynamic happening. Binary plans are good for the Yellows, as long as volume requirements for both legs are reasonable.

The same goes for the Blues. Blues also work best in plans that go deep. Blues are great team motivators – they want everybody on their team to have as much fun as they’re having. In a narrow width pay plan, or one where new people can placed under existing people, the Blues can create a lot of spillover and get a team synergy happening very quickly. This makes them excited and they stay in the business.

Here’s the problem with the Stairstep breakaway plan for the Yellows and the Blues. If a Yellow was to go deep in a Stairstep breakaway and work diligently with her two personally sponsored frontline distributors and coach them to become leaders in their own right, eventually they will breakaway from her and her income would disappear. I don’t think she’d be so nurturing after that happens.

That’s not a problem for a Red though, because he can continually put new people on his frontline. He won’t coach them, he doesn’t care if most of them don’t produce because he can just keep putting them in. He knows that eventually he’ll sponsor a producer (also a Red). That producer will eventually breakaway. That’s fine because he’ll just put more people in his frontline using his “churn and burn” method.

So Reds work best with pay plans that go wide, such as the Stairstep or the Unilevel. The Reds think that network marketing is a sales business and they’ll have no problem closing people on the deal. They’re not going to coach anybody. They’re only going to pay attention to their producers.

If you’re not a producer, you’re a loser – don’t bother re-signing next year. If a Red tries to build deep, it won’t work because he would want every person in his downline to be just like him, a complete jerk – “it’s my way, or the high way” – and about 90% of his organisation will quit because of his arrogance. That style of management works great it the corporate world, but it doesn’t work in MLM.

So how about the Greens – the Analysts?

Well, Greens can work in any pay plan that they can “scheme” to get the maximum pay out of. They like complex compensation plans where they can figure out exactly what’s required to get that elusive leadership bonus.

They can get new people in on the minimum autoship and tell them how to get the maximum out of the pay plan. That way, their downlines grow organically into that leadership bonus level.

To your MLM success,

Wayne Wu
Founder, The Profitable Networker

P.S. I would love your input! If you have an opinion that would contribute to this discussion, please leave me a comment below.

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Related posts:

1. Understanding the Unilevel Compensation Plan – The Good and The Bad
2. How the Stairstep Breakaway MLM Compensation Plan Works
3. The Matrix Compensation Plan – Who Wants Some Spillover?
4. Which MLM Compensation Plan Is The Right One For You?
5. Does Your MLM Company Have a Fair Compensation Plan?
6. Binary Compensation Plans and Their Complex Balancing Acts
7. Build Trust Fast by Changing Colours Like a Chameleon

Tagged as: Compensation Plan, Personality Types, Pin Level, Spillover, Stairstep Breakaway, Team Synergy