Love Yourself

This is 2-minute reminder to look after and love yourself this holiday season. I am grateful for you. Please love yourself, too!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here in the States. And may the rest of you enjoy the week ahead!

Reconfiguring Life

Today, I’m making a BIG shift in my life.

My baby starts kindergarten.

When I started this business, he wasn’t even a year old, and my Mom had just died. I decided I wanted to build something that could really serve the world, and give me the ability to be home, love on my kids, and be a better person.

And it’s the same concept I teach to all of you. In direct sales, your business is an extension of who you are, and it’s hard to separate you from your business.

That’s as it should be.

Direct Sales Leadership: Dovetailing Tips For Success

In the direct sales industry, the act of “dovetailing” a show is commonplace and problematic. Leaders, with an abundance of shows, often “dovetail” a show to one of their team members to help them launch (or re-launch) their business.

The trouble comes when expectations aren’t set (or met), and what should be a seamless transfer of clients becomes an attitude war. Here are just a few problems I’ve come across in my coaching career (and in my own direct sales experience):

• Leaders pass off clients they don’t want to an inexperienced consultant that can’t “handle” them.
• Consultants develop an entitlement mentality, expecting their leaders to just “give” them shows when they need it.
• Clear expectations aren’t set when the show is dovetailed, and the consultant resents sharing the income from the show with their leader.
• Clients get confused about which consultant is “their” consultant.
• Consultants don’t follow-up, and lose the new clients, forcing the Leader to step in, which creates friction in the organization.

Let’s have a look at where the word “dovetail” comes from:

My grandpa was a carpenter, and explained to me long ago that dovetail joints are the strongest way to join two pieces of wood together. They’re also a bit complicated and time consuming to create, but worth the effort if done well.

If you examine the picture, you’ll see two boards coming together. Where the notch (called a mortise) receives the tab (called a tenon), you create a dovetail joint. When properly constructed, it is incredibly strong, resists coming apart, and is often used in high-quality construction of cabinet drawers.

Simply put, a dovetail is designed to last for ages. I have cabinets that have lost their bottoms, their knobs, and even other parts, but those dovetail joints are solid. Even without glue, a well-crafted dovetail will have a tight-fitting hold.

So it should also be in your direct sales business.

The leader is the tenon, extending their clients to a consultant, acting as the mortise (the notch that receives the dovetail).

There needs to be a tight fit. Leaders can’t just “pass off” their shows to a consultant and expect them to be successful. This is a gift that you extend as a courtesy for their demonstrated efforts at building their own business. Dovetailing is NOT a handout. Leaders need to set clear expectations with their consultants before, during and after the dovetailing of a show. These are my top suggestions for helping your consultants make the most of the “gift” you’ve given them:

1. Pre-screen your consultants. Let them know that they have demonstrated a level of responsibility in building their business, and you’d like to reward them from your abundance by sharing a show or two with them. Make it clear that this is your investment in them, and you want it to be a “good fit” for your clients as well as the consultant. You’re not just “giving them a show”, you’re making an investment, and you expect a positive return on thst investment.
2. Set clear expectations. Make it plain to your consultant how you will be compensated for dovetailing the show. In exchange for giving them your clients, at the minimum, you need to set an expectation that there will be some form of compensation. It doesn’t need to be money, but half of the profits from the show is typical. I often encourage my consultants to have better shows by telling them they’ll earn 90% (instead of 50%) if they hold a $1000+ show.
3. Work with your consultant. Unless this is an established consultant, and you are sharing a show because of a scheduling conflict, it is incumbent upon you, as the leader, to make sure your consultant knows how to appreciate and fully utilize the gift they’ve been given. If they are weak at getting bookings in the first place, “giving them shows” will create a dependency, and possibly an entitlement mentality. Offer the dovetail in exchange for some one-on-one practice with their booking talk, or whatever area of their business needs improvement. I have heard a number of horror stories from leaders that dovetailed a party with 20 guests and the consultant doing the show got zero bookings.
4. Prep your hosts. Let your hosts know about the dovetail. Make it clear that they always have a choice in who they want to work with. Also inform them that the consultant will be “theirs” unless and until the customer decides otherwise. Explain the nature of dovetailing, and give your clients the option to choose. There’s nothing worse for a new consultant than to do a show and watch all the bookings go back to her leader.

What about you? What other tips have you shared when dovetailing shows? Leave a comment below and share your ideas with the community.

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:

Reduce Cancellations in Your Home Party Plan Business

by Deb Bixler

If you are involved in conducting home party plan shows, there is a good chance that you have been in plenty of circumstances where your party ended up being canceled. In some cases, a cancellation simply cannot be avoided. Don’t let this fact get to you. In these cases, it is almost always possible to reschedule the party.

There are other cancellations that can be prevented, however. Generally speaking, these types of cancellations can be avoided long before they actually happen. Often, parties are cancelled because not enough guests are invited, or not enough have shown up. Here are some suggestions to help you understand what you can do to reduce cancellations in your direct sales business.