10 Simple Steps To Success In Direct Sales

Every year thousands of men and women across America sign on with

direct selling firm-Tupperware, Amway, or a cosmetic

company-hoping to make money enough for new draperies, a new

davenport, or some new clothes. They sell a little merchandise to

a few relatives and close friends. Then they are through. They

quit before they give themselves a chance to learn the basics of

success in sales. "I am simply not a born salesperson," they

often say.

No one is born a salesperson, any more than one is born a doctor

or born a lawyer. Sales is a profession. To be successful in any

profession one must learn not only the basic techniques, but also

how to apply those techniques. Success in sales makes use of all

the abilities one is born with, plus all those acquired through

education and experience.

If you are looking for a career opportunity or "extra income" to

help with the family budget, direct selling offers you

dream-fulfilling possibilities. However, you must give yourself

time to learn the techniques of sales. Ask yourself. "How long

does a doctor to be study? A lawyer to be study?"

WHAT IS DIRECT SELLING?

Direct selling is marketing a product directly to the consumer

with no middleman involved. Most reliable firms are members of

the National Association of Direct Selling

Companies. They bring to the public fine products that are

modestly priced in order to insure mass consumption.

Most direct selling companies furnish their representatives with

a starter kit and essential supplies below-cost prices. In many

instances the investment is under $100.

There is an old adage which says "Give a man a fish and you feed

him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a

lifetime."

Many of them were able to change their lives for the better. They

took their families on nice vacations. They purchased a piano or

an organ and provided music lessons for their children. They

saved money for college education. They redecorated their homes,

bought needed furniture. One highly successful saleslady built a

new home.

The rewards of direct selling are many

1. You can be your own boss.

2. You can set your own hours.

3. You can own your own businesses with little or no investment.

4. You can pay yourself more than any boss would ever pay you.

5. You can give yourself regular raises as your business grows.

It is only fair to tell you that there are failures, too. There

are people who will not work for themselves. When working for a

boss, they rise early, are well-groomed, and get to the office on

time. However, when they are their own boss, they are still in a

bathrobe, drinking one more cup of coffee at 11:00 A.M.

If you can be your own boss and discipline yourself to do what

has to be done when it has to be done, direct selling offers a

most unusual earning opportunity.

THE TEN STEPS

Here are ten steps that will assure your success:

1. BE A GOAL SETTER. What do you want to accomplish? Do you want

to save for college education for your children? A new car? A

new home? You can have whatever you want, but you must want it

enough to do the things that have to be done to get it. Whatever

your goal, write it down and set a target date for reaching it.

Divide the time period into blocks of achievement that are

reachable. Work consistently toward accomplishing each day, each

week, each month what you set out to do. Goal-setting is a must

in every area of life. Little is ever accomplished without

definite goals.

2. BE A LIST MAKER. Each evening list all the things you want to

get done the following day. That gives you an organized approach

to each day. As each task is finished, mark it off your list. It

is amazing how much gets done when one works with a

"things-to-do" list. Also, have a notebook listing appointments,

potential clients, repeat clients, and referrals, and keep it

with you at all times. You will be adding to it constantly.

3. BE ENTHUSIASTIC. Enthusiasm is the high-octane "fuel" that

salespeople run on. Enthusiasm generates its own energy. Energy

and good health are synonymous with busy, happy people, people

who are achieving.

4. RECOGNIZE THAT THE MAGIC WORD IN SALES IS "ASK." In direct

sales we don't have to wait for business to come to us. We create

our own business by asking for it. Ask for appointments, then you

can do business. Ask for business, then you will close sales. Ask

for referrals, then you always have a full list of potential

clients. Be quietly, yet firmly aggressive.

5. EXPECT NO'S. Realize that no's are not personal. In sales, as

perhaps nowhere else, the law of averages works. Every no gets

you closer to a yes. Keep track of your ratio. It will help

improve your techniques. Are you getting ten no's to one yes? Is

your ratio five to one? Remember, the yes's are your income. Also

remember that "no" does not necessarily mean "no." Often a "no"

is simply a stall for more time to think. It may be a request for

more information about your product or your service. What your

client is actually buying is assurance. Assure here by your

helpful attitude and your complete honesty, that you want what is

best for her. She will most likely respect you and do business

with you.

6. Schedule Time Wisely.

 A schedule is the roadmap by which

salespeople travel. It takes the frustration out of the day. It

assures that the necessary things get done and get done on time.

Plan your work then work your plan.

7. Be Positive in Your Attitiude.

 Success in sales, as in all

areas of life is 90 percent attitude and 10 percent aptitude. All

of us must work at developing habits of constructive thinking. I

am proud to be a salesperson. Sales make the wheels of our

economy turn. Bernard Baruch, advisor to several presidents, is

quoted as saying, "If every salesperson sat down and took no

orders for twenty-four hours, it would bankrupt our country!"

Every company that manufactures any kind of product depends upon

salespeople to move that product. Without salespeople business

would be paralyzed.

Remember, sales is one of the highest paid of all professions.

Statistics show that good salespeople enjoy incomes far above the

average.

8. Have An Office Area. Most direct salespeople work from their

own homes, but it is essential to have a place where you can work

in a organized and efficient manner. An office plus a strict

working schedule gives you dignity. Both are absolutely essential

for efficient operation and accurate record keeping, so important

to the success of any business.

9. Be Involved. Most sales organization offer contests to

stimulate production. Include winning contests as part of your

business goals. Contests make your business fun as well as adding

considerable dollar value to your income.

10. Learn How To Handle Money  Intelligently 

A regular nine-to-five

job usually means a paycheck at the end of the second week.

Direct sales "reps" handle money constantly. Direct sales is

instant income and constant income. Therefore. it is absolutely

necessary to become an efficient money manager.

Deposit every penny collected from

clients into a checking account set up especially for its

business. Since bank statements show an exact record of all

monies collected, and business expenses can be verified by

canceled checks, record keeping becomes simple and accurate.

Everything except a few "petty cash" transactions can be directly

taken from bank statements.

Money saved regularly and put at interest, soon develops a second

income in addition to earned income. A long-term goal, which is

realistic in direct sales, is to be able to live in retirement

off the interest earned on savings.

Would financial security mean a lot to you? If so, ask yourself

these questions:

* Am I honest?

* Do I really like people?

* Am I willing to learn?

* Am I willing to work?

* Am I capable of being my own boss?

If your answers are yes, to find a good product

for the direct sales market, one that you like, one that fills

the need of a lot of people, and go to work for yourself! .

You can turn dreams into reality. 

Your Customers are People Too Treat Them as Such

With so many business run online today, the personal touch of doing business is sometimes lost in the mix. Everyone is so accustomed to emailing, sending in support tickets or leaving messages on an automated system, that you forget that there are real people running the business.

If you can identify with this, maybe it is time to add that personal feel to your business. When was the last time you actually talked to a customer or send them a thank you note? Sometime ago I guess.

One place to start is by adding an About Page to your website and including your photograph. This immediately allows people to start connecting with you.

Your about page doesn't have to be long, but it should include a little about your background, both personal and professional. A photo of yourself or even one with your family or pet makes your site more human.

If you sell products online why not start adding something extra into your customer's receipts. This could be a link to your Facebook page or Google+ page. Encourage them to connect with you there and let you know how they liked your products.

Getting your face and name in front of your customers is important for several reasons. You want to build a base of repeat customers, but you also want your customers to refer your business to their friends. One way to encourage this is by going that extra mile.

This could be sending out a physical thank you note in the mail. Or just remembering your customer's birthdays and anniversaries. If you run a local business why not phone a customer just to say thanks?

Setting up a newsletter is another way you can connect with your customers. In addition to using this letter to inform your customers of new products and sales, you can use it in a different way.

Why not encourage your customers to send in photos of how they used your product or service. People just love to show off photos, and depending on your business, this could work extremely well for you.

Another advantage of this is that it provides you with content for your newsletter. You could set up a 'Customer of the Week' event and highlight one person each week or month.

The main thing to remember is that your customers are real people and want to be treated as such. They want to know who you are and what you do, so why not give them what they want and expand your business in the process?

Dealing With Those Tricky Customers

Internet marketing can be a cat and mouse game with you being the cat and the customer being a very wily mouse.  Internet denizens are a clever sort and if they see something on your web site, they will not hesitate to sign up for a membership and even agree to receive your promotional emails.  But those tricky customers have ways to dodging your email advertising so even though you think you are advertising to them, your messages are actually vanishing off the face of the earth.  So we have to be just as clever as well.

Knowing how customers think is a big part of being successful in your marketing plans.  Internet customers are just like customers in the old marketing model.  They are curious about promotions and they want to enjoy your give aways and dodge ongoing advertising.  The cat and mouse game is to get them to want your advertisements by attaching them to things they want and get them to give you their email addresses and even to add your email identification to their preferred contacts list so your marketing emails fly right through their spam filters. 

Much of what goes into web site design is making a web "place" that will draw customers to register for a "membership" or otherwise provide you with their real email address.  When you develop a system that is working with actual visitors on your web site, you can then build a mailing list that is of much greater value than any list of email addresses you might buy from a mass mailing email service.  Your email list is pure gold because it consists of real customers who actually had an interest in your web site and your product or service and who are likely to come back if your marketing is well done. Not only is that email contact list gold to you as a business, it is of great interest to other businesses in similar lines of business as you who will pay well to get their hands on that marketing email contacts list for the same reasons you value it.

However, those tricky customers of yours even have ways of stepping around your validation schemes and it all lies in the fact that anyone can set up as many email addresses online that they want.  You know from your personal use of email that you have one or two primary email accounts, probably with your ISP that go directly to your desktop email software such as Microsoft Outlook.  But most of us also set up two or three or many more other email accounts with services like HotMail, Yahoo and others.  Its easy to set up an account on these services to use for games or to register for contests.

Those alternate services are where tricky online customers can trap your emails and actually give you the impression that you are advertising to them when you are not.  A typical ploy by internet denizens is to send any incoming emails that are not personal or of immediate value to a yahoo, hotmail or other free email service.  The result is that even if you harvested their email address when they signed on for a service or became a member of your web site, your advertising emails are being "dumped" into these alternative email inboxes which the customer has no intention of keeping up with. 

The customer might check those email boxes every few weeks and just hit "delete all" on the inbox knowing that they don’t want to see any of  those emails.  And when they do that, there goes your advertising and you may never know what happened.

One way to try to bypass this problem is to make verification of email a part of the registration process.  In that way, the customer has to log onto that email box to see a verification email and hit a link in that email to validate that it is a valid email address.  But the final answer is to make your marketing emails so interesting and valuable to your customers that they don't want to "dump them" into a holding tank email because they want to see what you are going to send them.  And when you get to that level of relationship with a customer, you really do have a gold email list that will result in much higher sales for your online business.




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How to Achieve the Appropriate Tone in Email

Are your email messages too casual?  Or, are they too formal?  Are you using the appropriate tone?

Email messages are different from typed letters.  You can’t be “too” formal in a letter.  In an email, too formal looks silly.  What’s the appropriate tone for an email?  -- slightly more casual than a letter.  Yet, there’s a fine line between being too relaxed and too stiff.

To some degree, the attitude and culture of your company will dictate the amount of formality necessary.  For example, floral shops and hotels won’t be as formal as a bank or law firm.

As you compose the message, consider the person who will be reading it.  Know your audience.

The job gets easier when you’re replying to a message.  You can already see the tone of the sender.  All you have to do is match that tone.

When in doubt, strive for a tone that is professional, yet conversational.  One easy way to achieve a conversational tone is to use contractions (I’ll, we’ll, he’s, she’s).

Also, it’s acceptable to use pronouns.  In conversation, we use the words “I, we, you.”  So, use these in emails.  For example, “It is suggested . . . “ sounds very stiff.  Instead, try, “I suggest . . .”

Be careful with the pronoun “I.”  Using too many can be perceived as egotistical.  You don’t want to appear pompous.  If you notice an abundance of “I’s,” try rewriting every other sentence.  This will create variety, and that pesky personal pronoun won’t be as obvious.

Email is a great form of communicating.  Just remember that your old typed-letter writing style should be adapted so your messages don’t sound stilted and stiff.  On the other hand, email is NOT a license to be sloppy.  The most effective email messages find a happy balance.  They have a conversational tone.

How to Make Your Customers Feel Special

The idea of marketing to a specialized niche of very active customers and then using that base to recruit in a viral way is new to the internet but one that goes way back in the non internet world of marketing.  It is well known that if you create an elite group of dedicated customers, they will become a recruitment army for your business and become your marketing team that works for free without even knowing they are doing so.

This approach to marketing is not as focused on email communications as many of our internet marketing efforts were ten years ago.  But that is a good thing for two reasons.  The first reason is that dynamic marketing, meaning selling through a relationship model is far more effective and yields a higher per sale basket total as well as a much higher incidence of repeat sales than cold call selling and it is far less frustrating. 

The second reason is that using email as the backbone of your sales program has become more and more problematic because of the influence of spam and spam filters which have made the free flow of marketing emails much more difficult to manage.  Because spam filtering has become so aggressive and so successful, email delivery of marketing material is harder to do and takes a greater investment of time and ongoing knowledge that pulls you away from your customers and from your businesses.  So the migration to dynamic selling and away from cold call and mass marketing email techniques is a natural evolution of the internet marketing model in the new century.

So the online experience of your customer takes on a greater importance in your marketing plan.  But you will find that devoting more time and money to building a web "place" that your customers participate in actively will be far more rewarding than any scattershot approach to email marketing could ever be even before the eruption of spam which made email delivery such a nightmare.

One way to give your customers the feel of being part of your organization is to build a specialized membership area of your web site that customers must make an extra effort to become part of.  In fact, many online retailers actually charge a small fee to be part of this membership site.  That is effective because the fee gives your members the sensation of being part of a closed community and the revenue is good for your cash flow.

Your customers who chose to become part of the membership area of your web site should get some special privileges and rewards for their elevated status.  So you might create a discount card that creates a desire to spend more in your online store only for those customers who are part of the elite membership area.  Your customers will think they are getting something very special when in fact, all you are doing is exchanging a small part of your mark up for greater volume of sales which is always a good trade off for you as a retailer.

One of the big values of creating a membership area is that those who populate that membership can become part of the team to make contributions about future product or service offerings.  This is tremendously valuable to your development teams because the more you "pick the brains" of your customers, the more you will offer products or services that are going to be a success when they hit the market.

You will see a greater sense of brand loyalty grow out of the people who enjoy exclusive membership in your reserved area of your web site.  Make it a point to make that part of the site look elegant and luxurious.  Its all just graphics but in cyberspace, graphics have a reality all their own.  And don't take your eye off of the goal of using the membership area for recruitment of new customers through referrals or to take marginal customers and make them devotees as well.  A few gift memberships can go a long way toward accomplishing those goals.

How to Give the People What They Want

If you went to your email inbox right now and counted up,  you would probably find that you subscribe to at least one if not several email newsletters published by a web site that you enjoy going to from time to time.  We like getting email newsletters in the same way we like to subscribe to magazines at home.  They are fun, informative, sometimes humorous and they give us perspective on a specialized field of knowledge.

So it might not surprise you to learn that the newsletter is one of the most successful forms of internet marketing there is.  In fact, it may even have surprised you that a newsletter is a form of internet marketing.  But it is a potent way for an online retailer to market his web site and online products or services to a focused customer audience.

A newsletter is also an outstanding way to sidestep the problem of failures of email delivery because customers will partner with you to make sure that newsletter gets into their email box.  This is a big difference from cold call emails you may have used to use where you send purely marketing emails to customers only to see them get trapped in spam filters and sink to the bottom of spam quarantine folders never to be seen again.  A newsletter is a marketing email that your customer wants to see. In fact, most times the customer made an effort to log onto your web site and find the newsletter subscription page to make sure they got on your mailing list.  This is a refreshing change to see customers working hard to let you market to them rather than buying software to dump your marketing emails into a spam folder.

The reason newsletters are so effective at avoiding email delivery problems is that customers almost always will take the time and effort to be sure to add the sending email address of the newsletter you create for them to their "white list" of preferred email contacts.  And because a newsletter can contain from ten to forty percent marketing material, it is like the customer is treating your marketing message like royalty and making sure it gets to them every week.  In fact, customers become so used to getting that newsletter that if it did fail to arrive, they would take the initiative to find out why.

You don’t have to be a high speed publisher to create a nice newsletter format to use each week.  You can buy templates for the newsletter format or use some of the default templates for newsletters that Microsoft Word comes with.   But you may want to enlist the aid of your most computer savvy employee to create the newsletter each week because it calls for some patient and artistic layout talents to make it look good.

You might think of your newsletter as a web page that you deliver to your customers.  It should have interesting and compelling content, just like your web pages do.  But there are also plenty of spaces for advertising and promotional pieces that can be used to drive the customer to the web site to make sales.  And because it is an e-document, links in the newsletter can immediately transport the customer to the point of purchase on your web site shopping card pages.

You can also use the articles you prepare for the newsletter to talk about your products and services in an informative way.  By generating interest through text discussion of what you sell, that creates desire to make a purchase as well.  You can even use the advertising space in your newsletter to sell to affiliates and partners who want to market to your customers.  In that way, the newsletter can be a direct revenue generator even before it serves to guide subscribers to the purchase experience.

You may need to take advantage of  the writers on your staff to create the content of your newsletter each week.  But don’t overlook content that is already at your disposal.  Articles, blog entries, discussions on message boards and letters you get asking questions about your products and services are natural article fill to use in your newsletter.