5 Time Management Tips To Build A Direct Sales Business

Five Tips To Build Your Direct Sales Business on a VERY Tight Time-Budget Heather Price, our guest blogger is a direct sales relationship marketing expert and Send Out Cards representative living in Cleveland, Ohio.

Direct Sales Recruiting, Selling, Bookings

You’re booking, selling, and recruiting and have a handle on working your business.  But your kids get the flu.  Your dog needs to go to the vet.  You’re three loads behind on laundry.  Paperwork is due at your kids’ school.  Bills are due.  Your in-laws are coming to town.  You can’t find your living room floor.  Do you STOP booking, selling, and recruiting?  How are you supposed to find the time to warm chatter ten new direct sales leads at Walmart or work a business vendor show, let alone hold one sales party?

As I write this, I have a VERY intense sore throat keeping me from using the phone.  From that I had a doctor appointment last week and I have my next doctor appointment tomorrow (nope, it’s not strep!).  I have a parent-teacher conference for one of my kids tomorrow.  I have paperwork due to my kids’ summer day camp.  I had a large order come in for my business that I have to put away and organize.  I have a parent-teacher conference for my other kid later this week, plus two end of the year preschool parties (one in each class). There are weeks like this. But I’m still getting new leads, building my mailing list, selling product, and enjoying my business!!

5 Tips To Manage Your Time

So how do you cram your direct sales business into those little snippets of time you can make? Here are the top 5 direct sales time management tips:

• Network online.  You can easily meet 30 new people today online in less than 30 minutes without spamming and without being in their face about your business the second you meet them.  Just get to know them, friend them, make a note in your calendar to follow up with them about your biz another time.  Start layering.
• Add new names, addresses, emails, birthdays, phone numbers into your database.  Where are you getting all this info?  From the people you met while networking online.  Once a week send a note to your new contacts asking if they’d like to be in your database.  Collect their info.  As you’re doing this, you’ll find a number of people telling you they lost their consultant for your company and they need ___ product.
• Check in with your team.  Have a sore throat like I do and can’t use the phone?  That’s what email is for!  Check in with them FIRST about their family/life in general, but throw a business sentence or two in there— see what their goals are this week, their activity level, what’s going on.  Just asking them what’s up might spur them to do more than they’d been planning!
• Online mystery hostess party.  I enjoy doing mystery hostess parties every once in a while.  They’re a good mix of social media marketing and direct customer contact because I find it combines sales from loyal customers with sales from less frequent customers, and a nice percentage of online friends and contacts jump into the action.
• Work where you are.  OK, so you don’t have two hours for Walmart today and perhaps your upline challenged you to get 10 new leads today and Walmart is your warm chatter store of choice.  But if you weren’t working your business today, where would you need to go?  For me tomorrow it’s my kids’ school and the doctor.  For you perhaps it’s the grocery store, the bank, and the oil change place.  I’ll bet you can find someone at each of these places who doesn’t yet know what you do but would like to learn more, take a catalog, and give you their phone number!

If all you have today is half an hour to work your business, that’s enough time to meet a few people online, put some names and numbers into your database (you do send out catalogs regularly, right?), check in with your current mystery hostess party participants, email two or three team members, and meet three new people as you run three errands in the course of your day.  Don’t sit there playing farmville wishing you had time to make booking calls or pack up and go to a hostesses home and have a party……  do something productive with your time!

Heather Price, Direct Sales Relationship Marketing

-Send Out Cards

Heather Price  is a direct sales relationship marketing expert in Cleveland, Ohio and a Send Out Cards consultant. Have you ever lost a client because you’ve dropped the ball on keeping in touch and didn’t follow through? It’s so frustrating- what if there was a system that did that for you? Have you ever wished you had someone to print your marketing materials, stuff envelopes, address them and mail them for you? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just click one button and include a gift too? That’s what Heather does- She sets you up with a system that does just that…. plus it reminds you when birthdays are coming up. The result is better retention and increased referrals from your clients, a more streamlined marketing system, and you’ll never again forget a birthday. You will feel much more organized and accomplished when you can send 700 holiday cards in five minutes. Try Send Out Cards for free by calling me: 216-870-3142.

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