Competition Bashing is Bad For Your Image

Someone approached me on Facebook and was trying to get me to look at her product. When I wasn't interested, she used totally the wrong approach!This woman sells a nutritional product. I told her I am quite happy with the products I use because I feel great. She proceeded to tell me about all of the great independent research on her product, and said that my company has no research (I never told her what products I take, she is making an assumption based on something.) When I told her that how I feel is the most important thing to me, she told me that my feeling great is simply the placebo effect. Can you imagine? How arrogant! When I told her that her approach is all wrong, she called me closed-minded and said she felt sorry for me! Man, oh man, where do I begin?Now, a lack of independent research would not prove that a product is ineffective. But that's not the point. The point is that bashing the competition:
Reflects poorly on you as an individual
Reflects poorly on your company
Reflects poorly on the industry
The first point is rather obvious; my mother always said, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."How does it reflect poorly on your company? Well, people in MLM talk about duplication all of the time. It means that you teach your people how to market, they teach their people the same techniques, and so on. So it's reasonable to assume that she learned this from her upline, who learned it from their upline, and so on. I have in fact heard other distributors from her company talk about their research. I just never heard them go so far as to use the placebo effect argument. So, I don't know for sure if she came up with that on her own or if someone taught her, but the possibility exists that she was taught. In any company, when you see someone using a particular tactic, you wonder if they devised it on their own or if the company is responsible for teaching people to do it that way.As far as the industry goes, if people see lots of distributors bashing each other's company, they begin to assume our industry is just like politics. How do most people feel about politicians? They trust them about as far as they can throw them. Why? Because they are always engaged in mud-slinging. In any sales situation, if you spend more time slinging mud at the competition than you do explaining the benefits of what you offer, people wonder if you do in fact offer anything of value!When someone says they are happy with their current product, the proper response is, "that's great, I am glad you found something you like." If someone mentions they are considering another product or company, if you have heard that some people like it, the proper response is "I have heard they have a good product too" or "I know some people who love that company." If you have never heard of that product or company you could say, "I haven't heard of that one, but there are many great products on the market" or "there are many good companies to consider." Then proceed to focus on the benefits of your product or company without bashing anyone else's!This approach will gain you respect, and make you appear very confident. They will be thinking, "if she is willing to compliment another company, her company must really be great!"