The World of Direct Selling’s guest writer Michelle Larter is the Worldwide Director, Direct Selling at IMN, a leading newsletter service provider for direct selling companies worldwide.
Michelle has over 20 years’ experience – nine years focusing specifically in the direct selling profession as a consultant/leader to build her own direct selling business.
Guest Post by Michelle Larter
A New Year, a New Path to Direct Selling Success
With the start of each New Year come resolutions. For direct selling consultants, these resolutions often center around increased profitability and growing their businesses.
The key to success– and the cornerstone of achieving these resolutions – is the ability to grow distribution and increase average sales volume. Party plan companies grow their average sales volume per consultant by booking more parties, recruiting more sponsors and building stronger customer relationships.
Here are some tips to help you increase profitability and grow your business:
* Build relationships all the time. Your party calendar books a month out typically, so taking a “break” will lead to a slow sales month. If you know you are taking a vacation, or will have trouble setting up meetings during the week of a holiday, work to set up twice as many as you usually do the week before to maintain a consistent party schedule.
* Instead of throwing out expired catalogs, use them as a mechanism to make connections in your community and get your contact information circulated. You can direct traffic to your website, or to sign up for your newsletter, to stay apprised of the latest offers and promotions as they come out.
* Collect email addresses at parties, on social media channels and from visitors to your website (if you have one) that can be added to your database. As you collect emails, be sure to communicate how you plan to use them, and how frequently your new connections will be contacted. For example, if you are passing their name on to corporate so that they receive a monthly newsletter, give them that heads up.
* Kickstart or strengthen a newsletter program by:
- Encouraging corporate to invest in a professional newsletter, if they haven’t already, that can be tailored by each consultant or distributor. While the newsletter content is managed at the corporate level to ensure message and offer consistency, the consultant can choose to personalize it, adding in special events or local promotions, for example. Newsletters can be personalized to let your customers and prospects know about dates you have free to accommodate parties.
- Giving your newsletter entertainment value. Mix incentives, featured products and lifestyle content (recipes, fashion advice) to stay relevant to your network, even if they don’t think they are in the market for new products or aren’t ready to host a party or start their own business, the goal is to build and strengthen relationships and provide value beyond the sale. Track which newsletter offers are redeemed, and which articles are read in order to tailor future newsletter articles for more effective marketing campaigns.
- Allowing your newsletter content to be shared directly to the reader’s social channels. Include a pre-built tweet in your newsletter to encourage sharing.
Building your business is all about reaching your networks’ network and keeping an open line of communication with your customers and prospects.
I often tell people to be the old catalog collector. Dropping old catalogs all over town or using them in place of business cards is a great way to find new business. It is a way to network everywhere you go that will generate a business deduction too.
A good consultant uses all the ideas you listed to create a balanced business!