Retention starts with recruiting. If your company isn’t recruiting new representatives, your business will grow smaller. Retention is just as important as recruiting. Retention is keeping your recruited representatives active in the business as long as possible. The impact of retention is huge. Do you know the average rate of retention of direct selling companies?
What Do Investors Want?
If you have a great idea for a new business, you may need some financial help to get your business off the ground. To get funding, you should think of yourself as a salesperson with potential investors as your customers. The best salespeople believe it’s smart to get to know your customers. If you are…
How to Survey a Direct Selling Sales Force
What are they thinking? If you’re not asking this question about your salesforce, you should be! While some of your representatives will share their concerns and compliments with you, most won’t. Unsolicited feedback is important, but you shouldn’t rely upon it as your only gauge of field attitudes.
Business Partner Decisions
“I chose the wrong person.” “We didn’t share the same expectations.” “It turned out that our ethics were very different.” Just like marriages, business relationships can break apart for fundamental reasons. Whether you’re in search of new business partners or you’re already hooked up, there are smart things you can do now to strengthen these…
Why Compensation Plans Are Changing
As I have written for many years, a good compensation plan financially and ethically fits your business while motivating and rewarding very specific behaviors from your sales force. In all, there are 12 essential compensation plan behaviors. 12 Compensation Plan Behaviors These behaviors are… Personally purchasing your products or services. Selling to customers (non-participants of the…
A Recipe for Successful Team Conference Calls
Like a cake, the secret for a successful team conference call depends on the right mix of ingredients. Whether the call is to be held by the company with its top leaders, or by a leader with her team, our recipe works for both. 1. Start on Time with a Roll Call When you start…
The Answer: Why Simple Compensation Plans Don’t Work
In this five-minute video, Jay Leisner will show you what’s wrong with simple plans and what your compensation plan must do to motivate and reward the right behaviors. This content was presented in Dallas, Texas at the Direct Selling Association’s “Be Connected Conference” on Thursday, December 4, 2014. Learn more about the 12…
Pruning Your Tree: When To Deactivate Your Reps
Terminations, deactivations, and reclassifications are all terms used to describe the process used by network marketing and party plan companies to end the businesses of their independent representatives due to insufficient activity. Having consulted with direct selling companies for almost 30 years, I have seen a wide variety of approaches used by direct selling companies…
Why You Should Invest In Yourself
If you are building or growing a direct selling company, your success in business depends on what you know. The smartest business leaders are always students. They never stop learning. If you want your sales force to understand the importance of continuing education, your sales leaders need to show them by example. Who shows your…
Compensation Plans: Structure Matters
In compensation plans, there are positions of achievement we call titles or ranks. To qualify for them, independent representatives meet volume and structure requirements. Both are measurements of organizational performance. A volume requirement is a measurement of volume from (a) an individual independent representative, (b) a group of independent representatives within one’s downline, or (b)…
Why Do MLM Software Implementations Fail?
It’s sad but true. The world has had too many failed MLM software implementations. A failure occurs whenever software is inadequately delivered, trained, or used. Fortunately, when you understand the reasons for software implementation failures, you can take steps now to prevent another failure. This post was inspired by a question asked to me by…
Have You Visited Our Vimeo Channel?
Sylvina Consulting is a publisher of great educational content for new and established direct selling and network marketing companies. In addition to their top-rated 250-page book, Start Here: The Guide To Building And Growing Your Direct Selling Company and their Amazon Kindle e-book MLM Software: What You Need To Know, Sylvina Consulting also has its…