Corporate Sales Tips

Direct Sales recruiting is easy when you teach your team to recruit from day one.

Direct sales recruiting is an important aspect of any home business. It is essential that all direct sales consultants become good recruiters so that they can grow a massive sales organization and leverage their income with less effort. Become an awesome recruiter to grow your home business.

Recruiting the Perfect Direct Sales Consultant

As a direct sales consultant, you often focus on getting bookings and making sales. However, to bring your business to a new level of prosperity, you can also recruit team members to work for you.

Recruiting consultants to work on your team takes more work and effort, but it can also exponentially increase your bottom line.

Home Party Consultants Join Your Team

There are many reasons why consultants will join your direct sales- party plan team:

Personal use. These people will join to make a few sales to friends and family so they can earn discounts on products.
Part-time. These consultants are looking to supplement their family’s income. They may only want to work on a seasonal basis or will most likely only present at one or two parties per month.
Full-time. These consultants want to work as a home party plan consultant on a full-time basis.

The perfect direct sales consultant would be the person interested in working full-time who also has a significant interest in developing another team of consultants. Recruiting someone who wants to build a team within your company’s organization will significantly boost your profits.

How to Recruit Team Team Members

Parties. One of the easiest ways to recruit new members is at one of yourbookings. You can offer incentives and discounts to get guests interested in becoming one of your team members.

Newspaper ads. Place small classified ads in local newspapers and community

Shoppers to get new recruits.

Use business cards. Hand out business cards everywhere and to everyone.

Join a business networking group. Local networking groups give you access to others business owners, other sales consultants, and new ideas on how to promote your business.

Create a flyer. Make an attractive and eye-catching flyer to post all around your local area.

Recruit online.

Where to Recruit the Perfect Team Member Online

To find the perfect direct sales consultant, you have a few options online. You can create a simple website that will explain who you are and what you do. Websites are relatively inexpensive to build and maintain, and are essential in the digital age.

You can also recruit by using social media. On social media sites like Facebook, there are millions of potential customers and team members. You can create advertisements or a page that promotes your products and your company.

If you aren’t already using social media, it is imperative that you create a presence on various social media sites; you’ll be surprised at how many people on these sites are seeking good opportunities.

Blogging and Article Marketing For Direct Sales Recruits

You can start a blog detailing your experiences with direct sales. Writing in a non-promotional style, you can outline the daily successes and failures of working as a direct sales consultant. You should write content that is informative, helpful, and honest. Along with blogging, you can also write articles on article-writing sites. Including links in these articles that send people back to your website will drive increasing amount of traffic to your site and help you achieve a greater online presence.

The perfect recruit is someone who wants to work full-time, is interested in creating a team, loves the product line, and has the desire and drive to be successful. All these methods work to locate the perfect recruit; you just have to put in the time and the effort.

Grow a massive home based business team when you learn more direct sales recruiting tips at: http://www.CreateACashFlowShow.com

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Leverage Direct Sales Customer Base with Outbound Sales

One of the most important assets a direct sales company has is its customer database.  It’s probably taken years to build this database and it’s filled with people who’ve bought your product at one time.  We all know there are many reasons that your distributors don’t keep in contact with their customers, but there’s no reason that the company can’t take on the job of marketing to these past customers.  The sales revenue generated from outbound sales efforts could be significant and the program can be set up to benefit your distributors too.

Setting up the Outbound Sales Team

You can begin by designating some of your customer service agents as “outbound” sales agents, determining which people have the potential to be good at this type of customer service.  The benefit of using your existing customer service representatives is that they’ve already been trained on your company and the products and they’re familiar with your customers.  Putting together an incentive program for these agents to make additional income based on the sales they generate is essential, but monitoring for abuse of the program is also critical.  Typically, you would provide the sales team with a list of customers who have not ordered in the past six months; the cut-off date can be four months or three months, whatever you feel comfortable with as long as you’re not contacting consumers that your sales field is currently working with.  Offering an incentive of discounted product, free or discounted shipping, or a second product for free if a certain sales level is met is also a good component for the program.   It’s also a perfect way to introduce past customers to any new products you’ve added to the line since the last time they ordered.

Getting Buy-In from Network Marketing Team

At first, some of your network marketing team may object to the outbound sales program but there are ways to work around these challenges.  First, it’s essential to make an adjustment to the compensation plan to allow the distributor to get paid a percentage (maybe one-half) of their normal commissions based on any outbound sales, with the remaining portion of the commissions being set aside for the company to support the outbound sales program.   Explain to your sales force that the company’s outbound sales team is like hiring their own personal outbound marketing person but with better results because there’s no learning curve involved.  After all, 50% of something is better than zero.

Direct Selling Company & Distributors Benefit

This type of outbound sales program is a benefit for both the direct selling company and the distributors by developing customer loyalty to the products and also bringing additional revenue to the company and distributors.  Few distributors have the time or resources to contact people in their organization who are not active – they focus on the people who are active.  And, few distributors are willing to spend the dollars necessary to offer an incentive for inactive customers to continue buying the product, but the company can do it by developing an outbound sales team.

Sure, there will always be distributors who moan and groan, but I would tell them that having a team that’s working at keeping your downline stay active is worth the reduction in commission from any sales.   I’ve seen these programs generate more than $250,000 in sales in a month and the added benefit is the company is ensuring customer loyalty.

If you’d like more information on developing this type of program, feel free to contact me. Email Sheena

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Considering Expansion to International Markets?

Thinking about expanding your direct sales business to international markets?  No doubt, there’s opportunity for growth, particularly in emerging markets in Latin America, Asia and Europe.  The data from the Direct Selling Association shows that of $114 billion in worldwide sales in 2008, only 26% of that number came from sales in the United States.  But, before you take the big step, make sure you’re ready for the trip.  Just like you wouldn’t take a vacation to another country without making sure you had your passport and other documentation in order and did some research on the country you planned to visit,  the same is true for expanding your business to international markets – do your research first and be prepared for the adventure.

Choosing the Best Country For Your Company

Location Location Location.   How do you make the best choice in identifying the country or countries for your initial expansion to international markets?  This choice is one of the most critical to ensuring your success.  Some things to look at are the potential market share for your product in the country, the current economic and political climate for businesses, and legal and regulatory issues that may affect your business model or product.   Another key issue when considering expansion, is how you will monitor the expansion and growth in the market?  Obviously, it’s much easier and less costly to monitor operations in Canada or Mexico than making a trip to India or Russia to keep tabs on how the market is developing.  Although the internet may allow you to dip your toe in the water without the financing  required in the past, there’s no substitute for a hands-on inspection from time to time.  Whether your operating from a corporate office in the market or working with a licensee, it’s important to keep tabs on how your company and brand is being marketed and represented in the country.

Currency Issues

Show Me The Money.  Another critical factor to consider is payment solutions and currency exchange rates.  How will you collect payment for your products and how will you pay your sales force?  Is credit card a preferred payment method in the potential market or do consumers prefer to pay with cash.  This issue is particularly important if your company relies heavily on “autoship” as part of its business model.   It may be necessary at times to implement a special compensation plan “fix” for large currency fluctuations, like those we’ve seen over the past couple of years.   Balancing the price of the product for the marketplace and ensuring that the payout in the compensation plan is enough to attract distributors are key factors.

Communicating with Consumers and the Direct Sales Team

Gracias, Merci, Domo arigato.  Do most people in the market you’re considering speak English as a primary language?  If that’s the case, such as Canada, UK or even the Netherlands, great;  if not, giving close consideration to the language issue is very important.  It’s difficult to develop and increase sales revenue and grow your business if you’re unable to effectively communicate with the consumers and the direct sales distributors in the field.  If translation is necessary, you could be looking at a significant financial investment to translate your product labels, website and all of your sales and marketing materials to multiple foreign languages, not to mention the continued updating that’s required.

Of course, there are many additional issues to consider prior to moving forward with international expansion of your business and the above are just a few key points to consider.  It’s important that your company plan ahead for expansion and consult closely with your legal and finance team, as well as experts who have experience in bringing direct sales companies to international markets.  As with many things, the devil is in the details.

Watch for future posts on more topics related to expansion to international markets.

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