Training and Support in a Home Based Business Part 2

In the blog post titled Training and Support in a Home Based Business, we looked at some bullet points on training and support for Network Marketing companies. Now let's see how a network marketing company stacks up on these points. I blogged about Exponent Trading in this post.

Exponent Trading is a commission-based Network Marketing Company centered around selling on eBay and CraigsList. How does their training and support stack up against the points mentioned in that blog post? Let's see!

How is the training delivered (Paper, Multimedia, Seminar, other)? - The first training I saw in Exponent Trading was the initial binder they mailed. The quality of this training package was somewhat dubious. It contained some marketing hype and some consignment forms. During the time I was looking at Exponent Trading, there were numerous conference calls, but they mostly had to do with promoting the business, not training. There were a number of documents and short videos in the 'back office' section of the website, most of which were fairly good.

How often are the training materials updated? - I didn't notice any updates in the existing training materials. Some training materials (documents and short videos) were added to the back office during the time I was looking at Exponent Trading.

Is there support in the organization? - There is a business support number which you can call. However, it was my experience that it was very poorly staffed. Several times no one answered the phone and I had to leave a message. Other times, I spoke to someone but they could not answer my question and told me someone would call me back. In the cases where I had to leave messages, no one ever called me back! Furthermore, there was no upline support in this organization - a point which is very basic in most Network Marketing companies.

Is there a local support group? - There was no local group in my area, but to be fair to Exponent Trading, it only launched in July of 2007. It generally takes some time for those local groups to spring up.

All in all, the training and support structure of Exponent Trading is not very good. If we were giving grades, I would grade it about C minus. Tomorrow we'll look at another network marketing company and its training / support structure - ITV Ventures.