Stop Boring Your Customers! 5 Tips To Keep Your Demonstrations Fresh And Effective

As a direct sales coach, one of the questions I see regularly is on the topic of keeping things interesting during a home show or demonstration.

Before I offer my tips, I want to take a moment to offer a warning:

Just because YOU think your demo is boring doesn’t mean your customers do. When a consultant gets used to a routine, it can seem monotonous or tedious to “perform” the same show or demonstration over and over at every event or home party. For you, this is “same stuff, different day”, but for your host or clients, this may be entirely new for them.

In the advertising world, it’s said that when the company is tired of seeing their commercials on TV, that’s when they’ve finally started being effective, because people now recognize them. In that instance, change would be a bad thing, but very often, that’s exactly what the companies do.

The result is often counter to their desired outcome.

Think of it this way: if a musician or an actor has been practicing the same part for months on end, it can get very monotonous for the player. However, the audience will only hear them perform it once. Twice if it’s exceptional. Three or more times if it was recorded AND exceptional.

The audience will rarely get bored. And it would be in poor taste for a performer to show up and decide they were going to do something completely different just to “spice things up” for the show. Imagine the shock and horror if a saxophonist decided that, just for tonight, he was going to play some jazz instead of the Mozart piece everyone else was scheduled to play. Or an actor shows up ready to do Neil Simon, only to find out the director decided to do Shakespeare tonight instead.

Before you get itchy to change things up in your demonstration, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Your boredom is not necessarily the right reason.

That said, if you find yourself doing the same presentation over and over to the exact same audience, you may find it’s time to change some of the elements of your presentation to keep listeners engaged. Here are some suggestions:

4 Pillars of Direct Sales Success

In all my years as a consultant, coach and trainer, the one thing I’ve NEVER heard anyone say is this:

“When I was a kid, I always dreamed of becoming a direct sales consultant.”

I’m still waiting for that day.

The reality is that nearly every single direct sales professional comes into this industry because it is a means to achieve something else.

• Paying for a child’s college education
• Getting out of debt
• Having some extra spending money, or to just make ends meet
• Earning a few vacations (all expenses paid, of course)

And yet few direct sellers understand that when they sign on the dotted line, they are actually going into business for themselves. You have just started your very own business! Now you have a whole new set of challenges:

Direct Sales Success: “Level 5″ Leadership

I’ll admit I’m not an early adopter. I don’t wait in long lines to have the newest gadget or gizmo, and I rarely buy a book hot off the press.

So don’t be too shocked when I tell you that last year was the first time I cracked the covers on Jim Collins’ perennial best-seller, “Good to Great“.

When it was first recommended to me, I was working in automotive manufacturing, and saw it as a book for executives, CEO’s and folks a bit higher on the “food-chain” than the administrative assistant I was at the time.

Then a friend of mine, pursuing a career in ministry, offered it up from a batch of books her mentor passed to her when he retired.

A minister with a book about corporate development? Clearly, I had missed the boat.

So I cracked open a book that would not let me put it down.

For about 10 years, this book has been required reading in many MBA programs and in corporate boardrooms across the country. Why in the world am I making mention of it to direct sellers?

Level 5 Leadership.

3 tips For Training New Consultants

During the holidays, it becomes almost effortless to sign new recruits to your direct sales team. The lure of holiday cash, the abundance of parties, not to mention the great incentives from your company make joining a direct sales business almost too good to pass up.

Getting new recruits started can be a challenge, and getting them to stick around after the holidays can be even more challenging. Here are three tips to help you get new consultants off on the right foot:

Direct Sales Marketing Online: Recruiting Email Campaign

One of the tools that makes light work of online recruiting is your auto-responder system. In the process of “weeding out” prospects, an online marketing funnel will include an auto-response series of emails to determine the level of interest and pre-qualify potential recruits. The logic behind an auto-responder is that by automating the pre-qualification process, your prospects will move through the funnel without much effort on your part, until (and if) they decide to reach out to you for additional information (or to sign with your company).

The process looks like this: