A Solid Home Business Needs Balance

A balanced business is a solid business. When starting a home business it is essential that you put down a solid base to your business.

Share this by linking to the page from your site or print the full size image of of home business tree.

Think of your home business as a tree and each root on the tree is going to make it more stable. When first starting your business focus on securing shows or customers in all the different categories so that your home business is solidly rooted.

Starting Party Plan Business

When starting your party plan business it is natural to think of family and friends. As a matter of fact your company probably gave you the directive to write down your top 100 or so people that you have ever known since kindergarten and call them! Right!? LOL. That is a good place to start but no business can survive on just family and friends. We must first put down a solid root system for our business using every category pictured on the image.

Balance In Home Business

You will have balance in your business when you make sure that you put a few of your first 20 shows into each and EVERY category. Your business will be solid forever when you balance your first 20 shows in all of the categories:

• Friends
• Family
• School
• Work
• Organizations
• Neighbors
• Strangers

When your business relies heavily on one or two roots to hold it up, then, like the tree, with time it will collapse.

Starting A Balanced Home Party Business

Even if you are already in business for awhile, you can always start over. Starting your home party business with a specific focus on each group will ensure that your business tree never falls over!

• Put a strong business tap root down by seeking strangers for customers.
• Teach your sales team how to find strangers for their home business.
• Train your new consultants to have their first 20 shows fall into each category.

Don’t let your business tree fall over!

CashFlowShow – Direct Sales Radio Nicki Keohohou

DSWA Founder Guest On June 1st

Nicki Keohohou, president and co-founder of the Direct Selling Women’s Alliance (DSWA) will be the special guest on The CashFlowShow – Direct Sales Radio on June 1st.

Nicki is an influential speaker with global influence. Named as the second most powerful person in the direct selling industry worldwide by the 2010 Direct Sales Power 50, Nicki Keohohou is one of the CashFlowShow direct sales “experts”.

Direct Selling Business Recruiting

The CashFlowShow – Direct Sales Radio airs every Wednesday at 8:00 PM Eastern time. The topic for the upcoming show will be direct sales recruiting and will answer some of those hard to respond to questions that consultants often get when sharing the business opportunity!

Direct Sales Meetings Key To Success!

Team training meetings are important to the overall health and growth of your team. It’s also important to get your team to meetings so that they connect and make friends with other team members and learn business success tips to grow their business.

Recognition is always important and should create camaraderie. A real connection will create friendships which in turn will develop committed consultants. Plan your meetings to be fun and create a team of successful consultants!

Team Meeting Locations

Be sure to select a location that is convenient for the majority of the team.

• Your home or a team member’s home
• Park or playground for members with children
• Pizza parlor or other restaurant – many offer free private rooms
• Church meeting room
• Community centers at apartment complexes, mobile home parks, etc.

Get The Team To The Meetings!

Meetings are effective only when you get your team to come!

• Phone call – depending on your team size, an invitation by phone is personal and appreciated
• Snail mail invitation – we all like to receive a personal invitation in the mail
• Email invitation – email is a great way to send an invitation and/or follow-up with a reminder
• Text – texting is appropriate for last minute reminders
• Social media – communication is key and social media can be used for follow-up reminders, to create excitement or to connect with those who don’t respond to other methods

Prepare Your Direct Sale Training Agenda

A direct sales meeting agenda is essential. Don’t just wing it!

• Plan to start and end on time.   60-90 minutes
• Welcome and Introductions
• State the purpose of your meeting
• Recognize achievements and efforts
• Training segment – selling techniques/product training
• Incentives
• Summarize how the training will impact their business

Meeting Goals and Team Action Plan

A team commitment and implementation along with commitment and a follow-up plan will insure that your sales team takes action after the meeting.

• Interaction and participation
• Involve your attendees and they will feel more vested in the team and most likely continue to attend the meetings.
• Ask a top seller to offer tips to higher sales.
• Plan a Q and A segment
• Ask for testimonials
• Ask a member to host a meeting segment

Themed Team Meetings

Create a fun team training meeting theme. The theme should be relevant to the direct selling training, but fun enough to elicit plenty of questions.

Should We Play Meeting Games

Some people love them, others don’t.  However, used correctly meeting games can be fun icebreakers and create excitement among your attendees.

Web Conferencing For Direct Sales Meetings

It’s not always possible for all team members to physically attend meetings.  Large teams are sometimes spread all over the country.  There is a solution: direct sales team web conferencing.  This service can be used to unite as many team members as possible right on the internet and is a wonderful tool to reach out to all your team members just as you would a regular meeting.

Ask your meeting attendees for ideas and a list of useful topics to improve future meetings.   Expecting your team to participate in the meetings will help them become more engaged and a valued member of the team and they will get a chance to develop leadership skills.

Merilyn Strange, Avon Direct Sales Leader

Merilyn Strange is a member of the Avon President’s Club, a Certified Beauty Adviser and has received numerous Avon Awards for Excellence & Achievement for her business success.  She is a member of the Direct Selling Women’s Alliance and a Certified Elite Leader and on the CashFlowShow expert panel.

Direct Sales Team Growth More Than Training

Successful direct sales team leaders provide more than team training -  they also connect with their team on an emotional level. In order to maintain team growth, good leaders connect with their team, become friends and sustain a level of emotional support.

Solid team training is important and the one-on-one conversations really make the difference between an average team and a growing direct sales team with momentum.

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Benefits Of Leadership

There are many benefits of moving up to a leadership level in direct sales and yet oftentimes your consultants will be reluctant. That is frequently the result of only training your team on the benefits of leadership and not showing them in an emotional way the real value to their lives of the leadership levels. They system of converting the features and benefits of leadership into emotional stories that are sprinkled in a conversational manner to team members on a regular basis is one of the best ways to create desire for leadership.

This is best described in a previous post on how to create desire for direct sales products, opportunity and services. One of your services is teaching people how to be leaders, so learning this technique of sharing real life stories that people can connect to will assist in growing a team of leaders.

Desire For Leadership VS Training To Be Leaders

You can put out training concepts that encourage leadership and/or you can create desire for the leadership opportunity using this simple technique:

Feature / Benefit Of Leadership: Reduced Trip Points Earn Trip With Less Effort All-Expense Paid Vacations With Little Effort

Emotional Connection Of Leadership:

“Since moving up to director I have earned every trip offered with less effort. Last year Jason and I renewed our wedding vows on the beaches of Cancun! It was like a second honeymoon and MYFavoriteCompany picked up the tab!”

Good stories paint pictures and good pictures create desire!  When you sprinkle these types of stories to your team on a regular basis you will engage your team emotionally and create a momentum of growth that keeps a new leader or two in the pipeline!

Make a list of all your direct sales company’s leadership features and benefits, then write a story for each one to share with your team. Start sharing!! Start growing!

Direct Selling Sales Incentives

Chances are your direct selling home office or party plan company has put some awesome incentives into place for the sales force. As a team leader the best thing you can do for your company and your team is to support those incentives by piggy-backing off of them and reinforcing the behaviors that the company is looking for.

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Leaders Support Home Office Incentives

Direct selling leaders do not have to recreate the wheel. Your home office has already put time, money and research into creating incentives for your team. All of your efforts should be to reinforce those incentives.

Make sure you are not adding more or different incentives to the plate of the consultants and therefore confusing the team and reducing the efforts of your company.

Direct Selling + Party Plan Incentive = Go To Conference

Your home office may have an incentive that rewards your team for going to the direct selling company’s conference by matching sales dollars in a certain month to offset the cost of going to the company’s national conference. If you add an incentive to the month for generating bookings, then you dilute your team’s focus.

Instead, a good matching effort would be one that focuses on increasing sales that month. Possibly, you could offer an meeting topic on “How To Have $1000 Home Parties” and a reward or recognition for all $1000 shows during the home office sales incentive period. This would enhance and support the home office incentive to increase sales.

This type of incentive supports the home office business incentives rather than diverting your consultants’ attention to an additional area of focus.

Direct Selling Companies Invest In Team

Your direct selling company is investing in your team, so it is not necessary for you to add to that. When you support the home office’s efforts it will be more affordable to you and your team will have better results. Practice piggy-backing your incentives on the home office’s incentives for best results.