Online Holiday Shopping Parties

The holiday selling season can be the busiest for direct sales professionals. It can also be difficult to pin down a date with potential hosts. Your hosts may complain that everyone is travelling, or that it’s too difficult to get everyone in the same place at the same time to host a party.

One possible solution: hosting an online holiday shopping party.

Online parties are similar to offline parties, in that there’s a host, a presenting consultant, and guests. Beyond that, though, online parties can be very different – and maybe even a little complicated for a host or even a direct sales consultant to figure out. They can also be an incredibly lucrative source of additional sales from a party, so it is worth your time to learn more about online parties.

Here are a few tips for understanding and using online parties during the holidays:

Direct Sales Success: Facebook Ads for Online Sales

With over 500 million users, facebook appears to be a great harvesting ground for network marketers and direct sellers. For someone just getting started, it can feel like an overwhelming sea of faces and a ripe time to start pushing out marketing messages. One tool that facebook has created to help people effectively market their business to it’s users is paid advertising. Facebook has partnered with Google, and using their adwords engine has created a pay-per click advertising model that, when used properly can help a direct sales consultant reach out to a targeted group of new customers, eager for their product or service. Here’s a basic overview of how Facebook Ads may work for your direct sales business.

Direct Sales Strategies: Extra Sales Are In The (Bonus) Bag

During the holidays, most direct sales consultants add a few extra products to their home party display to encourage impulse buys and for customers to experience limited edition sets.

But what happens when you end up with a handful of seasonal items that are discontinued, no longer available, but are still in sellable condition?

Many consultants will give them away as booking gifts, or let them sit on their shelves. One of the ideas I share in Direct Sales 104 to increase sales is to create a “Bonus Bag” for your parties. Here are three ways to make the Bonus Bag work for you:

Save a Bunch, Sell a Bunch with Seasonal Products

It happens every year. Your direct sales company launches a bunch of “holiday must-haves” just in time to boost your bottom line and entice your buyers to spend more when they’re already in a spending mood.

It’s a great sales strategy. It’s akin to an upsell on steroids. Not only is it time sensitive, there’s a limited quantity, so those products are sure to go fast.

Problem is, sometimes they go TOO fast.

Invariably, one product outshines all the others, and when you come home to enter the show order – poof, they’re sold out.

It’s enough to drive a direct sales consultant insane. For a time, I even gave up on selling limited edition products because I ended up with leftovers: partially used, unsellable products that I didn’t want or wouldn’t use myself. I felt wasteful, and didn’t like the idea of spending money that wasn’t going to serve me well.

And then I got wise.

Direct Sales Success: The Fortune is NOT in the Follow-up

You’ve probably heard it time and again.

“The fortune is in the follow-up.”

Who ever said it first, could have been a billionaire if they only got a penny for every time someone said it.

And yet, they’ve only got it half right.

Follow-up is important, that’s true. But the real fortune is in the follow up system.

As I was working with a coaching client today, she explained to me that she spends approximately 6 hours a week doing follow-up calls, chasing down clients, consultants, and other leads in her direct sales business.

On a good day, the total income she can expect to earn for her efforts is approximately $200.

My Momma would call that “going out of the world backwards.”

You’re essentially LOSING money on your follow-up efforts. If you spent that same 6 hours doing two or three sales presentations, you could easily earn two to three times that amount of money.

This is exactly why consultants complain about the “hassle” of doing follow-up. It’s simply not cost effective.

Or so it would seem.