Personalized customer service sets you apart from all the others and leads to long-term, profitable relationships with your customers. Set a goal to make 2 customer service calls a day and watch your business explode!

Here just a few reasons to call your previous customers and hostess. Start making those calls today!

• To assure satisfaction with their product or service
• To introduce a new item from your product line
• To introduce a new company program or special
• To generate reorders
• To generate bookings
• To explore sponsoring possibilities
• To ask for referrals
• To invite customers to a local event

Phone Tips

• Put yourself in a positive frame of mind before you make the call so you can transfer your enthusiasm to them.
• The first fifteen seconds will set the tone for your entire call. Your most effective introduction is one with professionalism and enthusiasm!
• Start off right. “Is this a good time for you?” or “Have I caught you at a good time?” will show respect for her time and privacy.
• Have a purpose for your call (see the list above for ideas) and communicate it right away.
• Everyone wants to feel special, so always personalize your call with a compliment or a warm comment.
• Be enthusiastic and confident! You’re offering an exciting opportunity to be a hostess or a Consultant and it’s only fair that she has a chance to hear about it!
• Have a bulleted script in front of you to keep you on track during the call but be sure to not read it verbatim. The more calls you make, the more comfortable you will feel and the more natural you will come across.
• Never hang up without following up on your intention. People respect and want to do business with those who are purposeful and professional.

Jane Deuber is a Co-Founder of http://www.DSWA.org (the only association dedicated to the needs of the independent party plan and network marketing professionals). Discover what makes the DSWA so unique. Listen to three motivating and informative free teleseminars by visiting [http://www.mydswa.org/tele_class.asp]

Aside from generating new leads, getting repeat customer orders is also one of the best ways to excel with direct sales. Here’s what you can do to get your clients to keep on coming back for more:

1. Great customer service. Your customers will surely remember you and later on, become loyal to you if you offer them with great customer service. This should start even before they make a purchase. Be cordial and treat them right when they inquire about your products and services. Strive to offer them with the best possible answer so they can make well-informed buying decisions. Then, offer them with after-sales support. They must still be able to contact you even after making a purchase. This is one way of showing your customers that you are truly interested in helping them out and that you are not just after their money.

2. High quality products. People will buy from you over and over again if they see that they are getting great value for their money. You must offer these people with top-notch, high quality products. Your offerings must be working as designed and they must be able to bring huge difference to the lives of your prospects.

3. Keep your customer base updated. Make it a habit to send your customers an email or better yet, call them up each time you have new products to sell. Make sure that your offerings will match their needs and demands so they’ll look more valuable to the eyes of your prospects.

4. Customer loyalty programs. Set up loyalty programs where your customers will be rewarded each time they buy from you. Don’t worry as you don’t need to spend a fortune on these programs. You can give your clients free product samples, small discount, freebies, and vouchers. Based on research, buyers really appreciate getting something from free — no matter how small they are.

5. Host a party. You can throw a party for your customers and prospects at least once a year. You can take advantage of this occasion to unveil your new products or to simply have time with people who gives you great business. The good thing about doing this is that your clients will feel that they get more perks in doing business with you. This will keep them from going to your competitors. In addition, this can convince them to recommend you to their friends and family members.

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Sean Mize teaches coaches, consultants, and small business owners how to package their knowledge and sell it in high priced coaching, consulting, and online class packages, and is an expert at using articles like this to drive traffic to his website, and has taught hundreds of clients his secrets. Sean says “If you have an existing marketable service or skill that you can teach others, I can teach you to package it into a high-priced class or coaching program, guaranteed”

To offer equal time to my Father this month as I did my mother last month, I sat to think about the things I learned from my Dad that I have applied to both my direct sales business and my coaching business. Dad wasn’t a highly educated man – he never finished high school – but he was smart. He served in World War II, in Hawaii as a mechanic, and could fix just about anything. This guy took a Chevy Blazer, chopped off the back end, and built himself a tow truck because he always wanted to own one. He saw obstacles as opportunity, and like my mom, was as stubborn as the day is long.

Here are a few of the lessons Dad schooled me on that I now apply to my own business:

1. “Don’t tell everything you know, Kid.” Dad rarely called us by our names. He was 56 when I was born, so I think it just kept him from being confused. When he used this Dad-ism on me, it was usually because I was getting excited about something I felt I just had to share. What he meant was to hit the highlights, and save the details for people who are really interested – like when you’re trying to book a party or give your recruiting talk. Hit the highlights, don’t tell everything you know to the uninitiated. Save the details for the people who are really interested.

2. “Take care of your own self first, Kid.” This was Dad’s comprehensive way of telling us to mind our own business. Usually, this happened when I was busy trying to parent someone or something else. Stray animals, inattentive siblings. I thought I knew better sometimes. Dad’s advice was to take care of my own business first, THEN I could worry about helping my brother or sister or the stray cat on the street. My modern-day equivalent is to put my own oxygen mask on first. Self-care has become an integral part of my daily routine. This also applies to my business. I need to focus on my business needs before I look to the needs of my direct sales team or their extended team members.

3. “Don’t take no crap from anybody, Kid.” Pretty self-explanatory, I think. In my business, I’ve translated this into not chasing after clients, or begging for bookings in my direct sales business. I lay out my expectations when host coaching, and I stick to my guns. If someone’s waffling on their guest list, I call their bluff. I’d rather be up-front and know what to expect in my business, than stand around scratching my head wondering why my host has cancelled again.

4. Be proud of who you are and what you’ve accomplished. This one is hard for most of us – especially mompreneurs. We face so much guilt on a regular basis, that it becomes challenging to recognize the good work we do every day. Even if our efforts don’t always produce the results we desire, the fact that we’re giving it our all is truly commendable. I had to wait until my Father was in the hospital dying to finally hear him tell me he was proud of me. It was worth the wait, but not something I’d recommend to others. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you how great you are and what a great job you’re doing. See it in yourself – and celebrate it now!

Building a strong direct sales business takes courage and faith. Dad was a strong, positive old coot that didn’t take “no” for an answer. This Father’s Day, when you’re remembering your Dad, remember the lessons that you can apply to growing your business as well.

Copyright 2010, Lisa Robbin Young.

Lisa Robbin Young offers direct sales coaching and training to direct sales professionals looking to grow their business like a real business instead of an expensive hobby. Sign up for her free weekly ezine at http://www.homepartysolution.com.

It’s not often I write about booking, selling and recruiting, as there are plenty of Direct Sales trainers that speak on the core elements of our business. However, as a consultant in the trenches, I must chime in about taking advantage of the biggest selling season of our year.

And it begins NOW.

One of my mentors told me that the biggest mistake we make in sales is selling “in the month for the month”. In essence, we’re skating on thin ice in our business because we’re focused on the “now” rather than planning ahead.

Direct sales coach (and also a good friend), Julie Anne Jones, made a post on her blog about getting back to business once the kids are in school. It touched a nerve with me. If you’re just now “getting started”, you’ll have to play a lot of catch up just to get your business on solid ground in time for the holidays.

If that’s the boat you’re in, here are a few tips to get you moving forward faster:

1. Get clear on your objectives. Think about what you want your holiday earnings to look like now. And as Julie said in her previous post, make a plan. So often, we get cloudy on the execution because we weren’t clear on our goals and didn’t make a suitable plan. Plan for the vacation, the new TV, the gifts for the kids – and know how many parties you need between now and then to make that happen.

2. Know your benchmarks. What’s your average show sales? What’s the average ticket per customer? How many bookings do you average per show? If you don’t know those numbers, you can’t begin to plan. Benchmark your last 6 months versus the same time period last year. For some, their averages are slipping due to local economic issues (or other issues), but for others, because competition is waning, their numbers are on the rise.

3. Commit to “a little more” than before. Getting more than you’ve had before means being willing to do things differently. Are you reaching out to new markets, spending more time creating an online marketing strategy, or making more cold calls? What are you doing above and beyond the norm to drum up new, additional business to front load your calendar?

4. Sell into next quarter. I know several consultants that are booked 90 days (or more) in advance. Yes, it’s totally possible. For my business, I rarely have a client that can book in the next two weeks because of their own scheduling conflicts. I don’t fight it. I book 4-5 weeks out and coach my hostesses, using incentives to help them keep their originally scheduled date.

If you’ve already got a full calendar, good for you. Here are some tips to make November and December your best months ever:

1. Plan a special promotion at Thanksgiving. Each year, when other people are expecting/sending Christmas cards, I’ve already touched my most valued (top 20%) hosts and customers with a Thanksgiving card. Make a memorable connection, include a special offer, and follow up with a quick phone call to see if they’re able to order or book to add to your holiday sales. It’s a unique and different way to provide value and generate business.

2. Start approaching businesses and school offices now. Many times they’re already planning their holiday gift purchases, and if you wait until November, they’ve already made up their minds. Be proactive in contacting commercial customers – sometimes they have a huge lead time for approvals on orders and holiday gifts.

3. Remember to give plenty of advanced notice on all your parties. Consider sending invitations a week earlier than normal, and follow up with a phone call. It’s a little extra work, but the payoff is tremendous.

4. Start your VIP/customer appreciation programs now – when spending is high. This encourages repeat business throughout the year – even after the holidays. They’ll already have a few stamps on their VIP cards, so they’ll be eager to get them filled!

Don’t feel compelled to do all of these strategies, just pick a few and see the improvement from last year. The important thing is to be clear, focused and take new action toward attaining your goals. I’ve had consultants on my team sell thousands more in fall just using a handful of these tips.

Lisa Robbin Young is a marketing coach who specializes in online marketing and personal branding strategies for direct sellers. She’s also a consultant, still in the trenches, just like you. Her weekly ezine “PartyOn!” features articles designed to help you grow your business like a real business, not an expensive hobby. Learn more at http://www.homepartysolution.com

The members of your downline are the most important people you will ever do business with. Recruiting must always be our prime focus in the business. But what happens after someone signs up?

Training your new recruits and helping them to succeed is the key to succeeding yourself. Once you have developed and implemented systems that work and help build your business, it is essential that you pass these on to your team, no one should ever have to start from scratch when you have a system that works.

Staying in touch with your team is vital to the success of your business. Following initial training, it is still important to be in contact with the members of your team on an ongoing basis. Regular emails / newsletters should be a part of your regular communications as well as phone calls to check in with them, see how they are doing, and see if they are in need of any assistance or even just fresh ideas!

Online team meetings are becoming even more important as we build our businesses across the country. Doing individual or group conference audio and video calls can keep you even more in touch than ever before.

A Web Cam is another tool that should be on your “must have” list. Having the ability to do training, meetings, and even parties via Web Cam has brought our business to a whole new level and you should certainly be taking advantage of this.

Your Business Website is also important in maintaining good communication with your team, just as it is with your customers. A private team training area will allow you to have up to date bulletins and information available to your consultants at all times. A forum within your team area will facilitate constant communication as well not only between you and your team but between team members so they may share ideas and help answer each others questions.

Brandy Burge has been in direct sales for 6 years. She is in the top 10 consultants in Canada with Usborne Books at Home, a Sales Manager with Norwex Enviro Products, and proud owner of NorwexWebsites.com and DreamcatcherWebStudio.com. She does all of this with 2 small children at home.

Direct Sales consultants often allow their Summer selling season to be less than desirable. Here are some ideas for marketing for home direct sales in the Summer. You can put these into action quickly to generate income immediately.

• 1. Tailgate Show: Go to kids’ or relatives’ soccer, baseball or other sports games. Create a kid-friendly theme like ‘Creating Photo Bags or Purses’ or ‘Scrap booking for the the toddlers’ or ‘5-Minute Snacks for Hungry baseball Players’ or some other theme that fits in with your product line. Go to the game and open the tailgate, set up a card table, pass out catalogs, and provide lemonade and snacks.
• 2. Pamper the business Day (aka Secretary’s Day): You can call it what you want and have a day any time of the year. You do not have to wait for the government to tell you it is time for a special day. The point is that you are providing a service to the company to appreciate the employees. Call the business owner, chiropractor, bank or fitness center and tell them that it is Pamper the Staff Day/Month at YOUR Company. You are providing complimentary cookies and lemonade in appreciation for their professional services. Create an appropriate theme based on your products, such as Coffee Break, A Mug of Appreciation, Sweet Tooth for Sweet Staff, etc. Ask the office manager what time you should stop in with the trays. Put the gifts on real dishes and bring catalogs. Ask if it is OK to leave the books and what time you should return to pick up the dishes and any orders.
• 3. Become An Educator or Speaker: Perform a show or educational workshop at a school, church, sports club, Girl Scout group, outdoor fair or library. Create three snappy titles and start calling. You could literally have a couple of these on the calendar within days.

When you have a consistent marketing effort year-round sales will be consistant. Make a decision to have a solid business no matter what month it is. Be creative and offer services that have value. 

Direct sales and home party expert, Deb Bixler teaches home party plan sales consultants network marketing and education to grow their businesses. Direct Sales Resources Direct Sales Coach

Home party business opportunities have existed for decades, beginning with the all too popular Tupperware party. Everyone’s grandmother or at least mother has attended such a party, where the host invites her friends and family for an evening of fun. She greets them at the door and leads them to a living room with wall-to-wall folding chairs for the myriad of guests she has invited. Then a neatly dressed woman stands in front of the group, explaining various pieces of pastel colored plastic containers as women ooh and ahh over the wonderful guests of honor. The party ends with some sort of bar or cake and coffee or punch and a discreet area where the guests/customers can place their orders.

Since the inception of Tupperware parties, the home party business era has exploded. Women have parties to sell clothing, quick-food items, cooking utensils, and even cleaning products. Nothing is sacred from the home party, and in actuality, it takes very little to completely screw up a great party. A home party business woman or man must only make a few small faux pas to lead his customers scratching their heads.

Throwing the worst home party ever begins with the cold shoulder. When the door bell rings, the horrible host will open it, say hello, and then leave the guests standing at the door. She will not offer to take their coats but will instead just hurry them into the sitting area so they can hear the business owner’s pitch.

The presentation of a horrible party is a touchy element. The horrible business woman will push only her most expensive product. She will briefly mention the cheaper items as a sort of starter, but her emphasis will stay on how the customers can utilize her higher end products.

She will also do well as a terrible business person by reminding her customers and her host’s guests of their obligation to the host. She might mention how badly the host needs the free products that their purchases will result in. Then she will once again go back to re-explaining their need for her most expensive product. If all else fails, she will shame them into purchasing the product by mentioning her own need for financial assistance and possibly some of her most recent failures of parties.

Finally, the horrible business owner will set her ordering area up in an area where everyone can see what is occurring. Then she will call on the customers one at a time by name, demanding that they come to her so she can take their order.

We can all learn from our mistakes, and examining what makes a horrible party may well lead us to conclude what makes a great home party business opportunity. If we want to experience success, we will certainly seek a way to avoid the same critical mistakes that the horrible host and business woman commit.

Jim Biscardi is owner of Dynamic Wealth Systems, LLC and writes on a variety of subjects. To learn more about this topic Jim recommends you visit: www.DynamicWealthSystems.com

Are you in a direct sales home business and trying to figure out, like me, how to streamline your systems so that you can spend more of your precious business time working on income generating activities? As a home business owner, what you want is productivity, not activity.

Well, I’m here to tell you that there are some simple steps you can take now to help your business for the long term and an Autoresponder is one of those ways. An autoresponder is actually an online program that takes a prewritten email message or series of messages that you’ve created and sends it out automatically when someone signs up at your landing page or squeeze page.

That sounds a whole lot more complicated than it really is. It’s actually pretty easy, let me give you examples that might work in various aspects of your direct sales business to help you see how easy this really is:

1. Follow Up On Leads And Tracking Do you advertise either online or offline? Now with an autoresponder you can put an email address into your advertisement so when one of your potential customers or prospects emails you to find out more about your company, they are automatically sent your initial packet of information instantly. You can even put a different email address into each ad, making it easy to track which ads are producing results and which are not.

2. Generating Leads – Everybody loves free things. Do you have a coupon or e-book that you can probably give away to potential new customers or recruits? Set it up in your autoresponder and create a web form (all free with most systems) that you can place in your blog or on your website. Then you just add a quick statement like, “Get information and get free gifts, like it?” sending interested prospects to your autoresponder where the gift and the information are sent to them automatically!

3. Motivation With Contests – Set up a series of contest emails for either your customer base or your downline. For instance, have a “scavenger hunt” through your catalog and use the autoresponder system to create the excitement over a series of days.

4. Newsletters For Your Downline – If you’ve built a team of distributors under you, you’ll want to stay in touch with them regularly. Now an autoresponder can do that easily. You can set up a first email with a “Welcome to my team” and then you broadcast your team’s newsletters through the list.

You can also greatly boost your team’s production by helping your new consultants get off to a great start in their new business with a series of email training messages geared toward those days when they are waiting for their products to be delivered to their home. Enthusiasm during the first days are really important.

And also it can be used to solve general problems, is there a specific area or problem in your direct sales business that seems to have all the members asking the same question on that specific problem? Set up another series of emails specifically for that problem’s topic and set up your team members there as the questions come in.

5. Newsletters For Your Customers – You can also stay in contact with your customers by using an autoresponder email series just like you do with your downline. Make an automated welcome message is way better than no welcome message at all.

6. Leadership Communication – As your direct sales business grows, you’ll need to have leaders on your team. You can to things like setting up a series of emails congratulating them on their promotion, success and encouraging them in their new role as leader. Many people in direct sales have no idea what it means to lead a team of their own because they have the habit of being led all the time and you can set up a system to get them trained, mentored, and equipped as well and have it work for you continually while you’re doing your things, it’s completely automated.

I’m guessing that most of you, unless you’re brand new to direct sales or a home business, already have much of the information for many of the above idea. With an autoresponder, it’s just a matter of action that uses the information to the system where it can work for you, even when you’re off doing other things. You should really give it a try and almost all autoresponders have a free trial offer so you can check out how they will greatly boost your business before you decide to do it.

Tantawi Sagara is a leader in Internet Marketing and Social Media, offering a chance to people interested in changing their life and learn directly from a leader, read HisStory on his blog, and get more tips on http://freeforyoutosearch.com