Ensure that your marketing materials do an excellent job of communicating the essential aspects of all of your products. The more your representatives know about your products, the better they will perform at selling and recruiting.

Walk the Walk

You and your employees should use as many of your products as possible.

Direct selling companies often give employees a monthly budget to spend on company products of their choice. For a relatively small investment, you will have employees who can speak to personal experience with your products. Their confidence will help in communicating features and benefits to prospective and current representatives.

Also, give your employees the opportunity to use new or improved products for a short period of time before they are released for sale to your representatives. They may tell you about additional benefits you hadn’t considered which will help you in promoting the new or reformulated items.

Update and Innovate

If you want to be known as the company with better products, you need to not only update, but also innovate. Updating merely brings your products up to the same level of other products currently in the market. Innovation makes you a leader.

Innovation can take many forms. You can innovate with changes to outside packaging, inside containers, scents, flavors, colors, shapes, and suggested additional uses.

No Dazzle, Just Fizzle?

From time to time, all companies have products predicted to dazzle the marketplace, but instead the company finds they fizzle instead. Have you tried your less than stellar products yourself?

Endeavor to understand why underperforming products are not selling well.

If you have a product that isn’t selling so well, have you asked your representatives why they think it isn’t moving? You may be surprised to find out product quality isn't always the cause.

There may be other reasons which could include price/value mismatches, misunderstood benefits, confusion on use, or perceptions that the products may be too similar to others you're selling that are determined to be a better value.

Poor performing products need to be improved, replaced, or retired. Make these decisions firmly with the understanding that regardless of how few of an item has been sold, when you discontinue an item, somebody will complain that the item was their “favorite.”

Watch the Field

Take the time to get out there to observe presentations by new representatives and by representatives at differing levels of field leadership. This knowledge will help you to ensure your message is filtering down through the ranks.

Assist your representatives to adjust their presentations by providing updated training on product usage and benefits along with better techniques and methods of presentation. These things will keep the field excited and motivated to sell.

Conclusion

Freshening up products is an integral ingredient in the success of direct selling companies.

While it would be easier to have a great product line that needs no tinkering, remember that new and improved products motivate a behavior that’s important to you.

When you give your sales representatives new products to sell to existing customers, those customers order more!

Without new products, old customers don’t order as much.

When you freshen up your products, you are also freshening up the income opportunity for your sales representatives. As a result, recruiting and retention both improve. This makes your business stronger!

For freshening assistance, contact Jay or Victoria at Sylvina Consulting at 503.244.8787.