Use Fair or Expo For Training New Team Members

For direct sellers there are always certain times of the year that may be considered the slowest time of the year. These may be times when people are busy with family activities, vacations and have less time for booking and attending parties whether it be the Summer or holidays.

Find Business & Train Team

However, down time is a great time to take your products and your team to a fair or an expo. Not only are these great places to find business they are also an ideal environment for home business team training.

When you incorporate vendor events into your team training routine your team will have a solid show schedule!

NOW Is The Time To Find Vendor Events!

Now is the time to find the vendor events that you would like to participate in this year. New team members will stand beside seasoned direct sales veterans, hear the word choices, practice connecting with people and fill their calendars!

6 Keys to Successful Home Business Fair or Expo

• Create a welcoming and noticeable display. Dress to impress, but in a casual manner, and have a large, creative sign with your company’s name and logo.
• Have plenty of catalogs and brochures to hand out. Other forms of advertising are good to have if they are in your budgets: pens, magnets, etc.
• Have a generous sampling of your product line on display. You want people to see everything you have to sell.
• Have fun. Don’t think of it as work. Think of it as a good time meeting lots of interesting and friendly people…who might purchase some of your products!
• Have a raffle. You can give away a prize and offer an upgrade to the winner if they book a future party with you.
• If you have a product that can be used in a demonstration…have mini demonstrations! Obviously, if you sell jewelry, demonstrations won’t work. But, if you have kitchen aids, demonstrations might work to enhance your product recognition and sales.

New Consultant Orientation At Fairs

Once you have ensured that you will set up at a fair or expo following these six keys, you are ready to take a few team members with you. Fairs and expos are perfect places to train team members.

Leaders who take their new consultants to fairs or expos as part of their new consultant orientation will insure that they learn from top leaders and fill their calendars. Learn proven techniques to maximize your return on marketing your direct sales business at fairs and expos by qualifying leads at the event.

Why are Expos and Fairs the Perfect For Home Business Training?

Because there are people everywhere!

Fairs and expos draw huge numbers of people, providing your team members with plenty of opportunities to practice their demonstration and sales techniques.

The new consultant stands next to seasoned consultants and hear what to say and then immediately get to practice it.

They can learn how to present products, how to answer questions, how to alleviate concerns, and how to close the sale. There will be thousands of opportunities to practice a sale and interact with potential customers, and learn how to handle rejection. In sheer numbers, there is no better place for home business training than a fair or an expo.

Next time you book a booth at a fair or expo, take the team with you!

Wildtree Leader, Direct Sales Radio

Tammy Kerr is a Wildtree leader with over 9 years of direct sales experience. With an expertise in recruiting and team building, she was the first Wildtree distributor in Pennsylvania.

Since starting with the company just 5 years ago she has built a sales organization that spans the United States.

Team Business Building With Tammy Kerr

Tammy is our guest for the leadership interview this Wednesday (11/23/11) on the CashFlowShow – Direct Sales Radio as part of the show’s ongoing series of interviews with successful direct sales leaders in successful direct sales companies.

On this show, Tammy will discuss the importance of team retention. Being an awesome recruiter is one thing and yet if you cannot keep them, it is difficult to grow your team. The show will discuss:

• Techniques to grow your team
• Building levels within your team
• Finding consultants who stick with it

Wildtree Chemical Free Direct Sales Company

Tammy joined Wildtree in 2006 and has been enjoying the chemical free products ever since. Living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, direct sales and Wildtree have allowed her to be a stay at home Mom and create income at the same time she provides her son (who has a food dye allergy) with a chemical free diet.

Wildtree and Tammy are a direct sales success story. The product line is totally natural, containing no additives, preservatives, MSG or food dyes and continues to grow even in a bad economy.

Tammy’s motto is “Eating Right when money is tight!”. She is dedicated to changing lives for her team and their families.

What did one side of the brain say to the other side?

Nothing, they don’t communicate.

Ok, it’s a bad joke, but it demonstrates the fact that our brain has two hemispheres that work in different ways.

The most effective direct sales training should take into account both sides of the brain by stimulating both “right-brained” and “left-brained” people to think with their opposite side.

The CashFlowShow Direct Sales Game

That is what we have done with the CashFlowShow Direct Sales Game. We have taken the game mentality and applied it to your business. Direct sales businesses are rarely associated with game mentality which is why The Game makes learning so effective.

The left side of the brain is:

• Logical
• Sequential
• Analytical
• Rational
• Concerned with the parts of the whole

The right side of the brain is:

• Subjective
• Random
• Intuitive
• Creative
• Concerned with the whole

Effective sales team training should utilize exercises and games that stimulate, challenge, and exercise both sides of the brain. Your team’s growth and profitability will be accelerated by using a variety of different exercises.

The Direct Sales Game & Left Side Thinkers

For members of your sales team who are left-brained, it is important to train with exercises and games that avoid using logic only. The exercises should also use images and visualization techniques that stimulate creativity. Getting team members to listen to music or draw will stimulate their right-side thinking and encourage them to be more creative.

Training Right Side Thinkers

Right side thinkers usually detest details; training exercises should attempt to get team members to think about the small details of a situation or a problem. Get them to look at the components of something instead of just looking at the big picture. Other exercises should teach how to make schedules, set goals, record the progress toward these goals, and take a sequential approach to problem solving. Working with numbers will also help to stimulate the left brain.

Successful Consultant Training

Using both sides of your brain in training will create a more successful direct sales consultant. To be the most successful that you can be, it is essential that the two sides of your brain work together. The right side of your brain wants to push limits and boundaries, while the left side wants to put everything in a box, count it, and categorize it. By working together, the right side of your brain will design a creative promotional campaign while the left side of your brain will take what has been created, break it into sequential components, quantify it, and count the money it makes.

The Game Leverages Leadership Efforts

The CashFlowShow Game is a leadership training tool used to develop creativity in left-brain thinkers and to encourage right-brain thinkers to work successfully with details.

Give your sales team the tools they need to succeed by training with exercises and simulated situations that work both sides of the brain.

Though the two hemispheres of the brain sometimes act like opposing forces, it is possible to have them working together. When the two sides communicate, your team sales will go up.

What did one side of the brain say to the other side? “Hey, let’s work together and we can make more money!”

JOIN the CashFlowShow Direct Sales Game!

Online Team Building & Training Meetings

With the long-distance recruiting that is taking place due to the internet, the online or teleconference meeting is becoming more and more important. Everything that was discussed in the previous three articles on building a sales team and conducting direct selling meetings applies to meetings that are taking the technological approach.

Sales leaders who are keeping up with the times and recruiting using the internet will conduct live meetings as well as meeting formats such as webinars, tele-seminars and online forum or chats. Technology-based meetings have additional challenges in serving the five purposes of an effective meeting.

Conducting Meetings Long Distance

Even though your meeting is being held online or via teleconference, the goal should still be to conduct a meeting that includes all of the main purposes of a team training event:

• networking
• collaboration
• friendship
• education
• support/recognition

Working to incorporate all segments into your teleconference and webinars will improve the effectiveness of your meetings, as well as attendance. It is important to remember that someone attending technology-based meetings from the comfort of their home have certain distractions that do not exist in live meetings. Meeting attendees are most often multi-tasking which makes attention to the subject matter difficult. Your ability to create a fast-paced attention-grabbing seminar is key to the educational experience.

I recommend using the same meeting format, and the same information that you used during your live meeting. Plan once, use twice would be a good motto to keep your life simple. In addition, this ensures that local members also participate in the online or conference call meetings as well, since they will be asked to present their mini-workshop to the long distance reps. Maintain a consistent meeting schedule month to month for both live and long distance meetings.

Online teleconferences and webinar meetings require special emphasis on the connections/networking challenges that these meetings have. Remember that:
Friends do not let friends down. Networking creates friendships and friendships will improve team retention.

It is therefore essential to prioritize this piece of technologically-based training events. As a leader, it is important that you personally connect with local consultants and ask them to come on the long-distance meeting. In this way, you can develop the connection between the local team and the long distance team.

It is important to include the networking segment into your meetings because it will foster friendship. Yes, it is possible for long-distance sales consultants to develop relationships, friendships and connection in technology based meetings. Some of the techniques mentioned in the previous articles can be incorporated into an online or teleconference meeting with a little extra creativity.

Team Building With Networking

For some examples of team building and networking activities for technology based seminars might be:

• Assign long distance consultants a partner to have a phone conversation with prior to the call. Then introduce each other to the call.
• Ask reps to share about themselves or “what went right in their business this week” while showing a picture of each rep on the webinar screen.
• Another fun “get to know one other” technique is the “I am awesome” empowerment game. This is a fun game that will definitely generate friendships!

I Am Awesome, Team Training Game

The “I am awesome” team training game is a fun game that will definitely generate friendships! Here is how it goes:
Assign meeting attendees partners whom they will call once per week between the meeting. One is “awesome” and the other is “terrific”. Each team is asked to call their partner once a week. They will talk twice in a week as they will call each other once. On the call it goes like this: “ Hi Awesome, this is Terrific” How are you?

The conversation is only about good things in their business or finding solutions to a challenge. No negative talk allowed. The must call themselves by their new given names and use each others names several times in the call reminding each other how Terrific or Awesome they really are.

On the next team training event, the networking portion focuses on how powerful, rewarding and fun the event was.

As you can see there are ways to creatively add networking and friendship to a technologically-based meeting. I know that the education and recognition aspects are simple, so take your live meeting and use the exact same template, then put all your additional efforts into developing friendships.

• Meeting makers make more money.
• No one quits when they are making money.
• Friendships will improve team retention.

When you take the time to plan a successful team meeting either online or offline, your team will grow.

Template For Direct Selling Consultants’ Training

Planning a direct selling team meeting does not have to be hard! This is the third article in our series of meeting planning for direct selling team building.

The first article Successful Direct Sales Meetings, discussed the importance of meetings for networking.

In Effective Direct Sales Team Building, the focus was on effective training and collaboration.

Your Consultant Meeting Topics

The average direct selling company has 3-4 general services. Every meeting should include training on all of the most important topics that you train on. It could be any of the following:

• Bookings
• Prospecting & Finding business
• Sharing the opportunity AKA recruiting
• presentation and sales skills
• Host coaching

Those are just ideas. The individual topics will vary depending on your sales company. Try to pick the 3-4 top or primary topics for your company, as most other topics will fall under those, such as “product knowledge” would be a subtopic under presentation or sales skills.

Best Meeting Topics Template

This meeting topic template will serve all your personality types and bring the sales consultants the best possible learning environment. When you use the same system for meeting planning, your meetings will be simple, stress free and serve all of the personalities of your team.

Your monthly meeting would then be divided into 5 parts with each of the primary topics being presented at every meeting in one of workshops. A sample meeting agenda would be as follows.

• Arrival time & Networking
• Workshop 1: Presentations: discuss presentation skills, sales skills, product knowledge
• Workshop 2: Opportunity: work on recruiting skills, interview questions, recognizing red flags, etc.
• Workshop 3: Bookings-Finding Business: dedicated discussion of finding business, leads or bookings and becoming better at it.
• Workshop 4: Host Coaching
• Recognition & Wrap-up

Every meeting would include a segment or mini-workshop on each topic. Every other topic would most likely fall under one of the main topic headings as a subtopic.

Plan Your Meeting Presenters

One of the biggest mistakes that many leaders make is that they are the only one conducting the meeting. After you figure out what your primary training topics are, then you can apply them to the three-part template as I did above.

Now each month just divide the meeting up into your appropriate parts as they relate to your business and pick a presenter for each segment.

• An outside speaker
• A newbie
• A seasoned rep
• A consultant who is not that good but did something well
• Another leader in your organization
• You
• A video
• Home office representative

Direct Sales Training Format

The leader then picks a different training style for each meeting workshop segment.

• roundtable
• divide into groups
• lecture
• networking
• game
• theme
• video-audio
• combination of two of the above

This meeting template makes planning a meeting simple. By applying a different presenter, different formats, and different material on the same topics that focus on the key business skills necessary to be successful in your direct selling business, you will train everyone on what they need and not alienate the seasoned reps with boredom.

Delegate the different parts of the sections out at each meeting for the next meeting. Utilize the skills of your organization to assist with the meetings. If you have a very social person, then they should be the greeter. If there is an awesome recruiter, then that person may be the one in charge of taking the visitors and new consultants under her or his wing so that no one feels left out. Using the personality types within your organization will make it easier for you to host a meeting, keep everyone involved, develop friendships and create a team that leverages the personalities of everyone in the room.

Six Sales Meeting Tips

• Do not be the presenter every time.
• Do not “add on” when the other presenters are done – it makes it look like they did not do a good job.
• The networking segment is very important. Put time into making it different each meeting.
• Use themes to generate interest.
• Keep them guessing by using the different formats and presenters.
• Delegate and be specific. Tell your presenter exactly what point you want covered. Give them a format suggestion and meet with them via phone prior to the meeting to determine their content plan.

Online Meeting Planning – Sales Themes

Our last article in the series of effective team building through meeting planning will focus on some specific challenges with online and technology based meetings. Sales meeting themes always make a fun meeting. Keep your sales team guessing with a different direct selling theme at every meeting.