1. One of the first mistakes everyone makes in Recruiting was trying to find that one “perfect” Recruit, that you overlook the other nine who would also been “good” in this business.

2. Different people have different qualities. We constantly try to look or listen for those qualities which make a good designer. Don’t look for someone who is “Miss Perfect”. Nobody is perfect, but everyone can develop the qualities they need to succeed. Encourage the fine qualities the person does have.

3. Talk recruiting to everyone, but don’t try to recruit everyone. There is a difference. Try to look for women who are outgoing, ambitious, fun-loving, and who have a sense of creativity. Women who are like this are easier to Recruit and they are more likely to stay with it.

4. Never recruit with the idea of “what’s in it for me”. Always be willing to help people with the great opportunity. After all someone offered it to you.

5. Don’t wait for someone to approach you. Nine times out of ten, they won’t.

6. Don’t think of recruiting only on parties, Recruits are everywhere you go. Just Listen!

7. Listen to their needs and show how our company can fill them. For instance, if someone needs extra income and wants a job, don’t tell her about the cruises or other prizes. Chances are she won’t believe you simply because she can’t relate to it. Respond with the information she needs to know.

8. Anytime you find the qualities we look for in a recruit, tell her about them and how they would benefit her with your company. She may not even be aware of them.

9. Look for an attractive person but don’t let looks deceive you. Look for someone who smiles and can get along with people, one who loves the products and believed that your company is best for her.

10. Always let them se this JOB as the business it is, as the career they can develop. Whether they want to work full-time or part-time, it is still a job to be done to the best of their ability. If you see your business as a job, so will they.

11. Take her with you an your job, let her actually see how it all works and show her your profit. If you made it look hard, it is over but if it looks easy, she will want to be a part of it.

12. Listen to the woman who loves everything, can’t afford much, is looking for a job, bored, and/or wanting something to do because their children are grown or they want to stay home with their children. Please don’t bypass people who have careers now- for these are the people who want to work and make something of their lives.

Twelve Recruiting Tips for Direct Sales submitted by www.thewahmconnection.com

When a person starts in direct sales, some of the verbiage used can be very confusing. This article is to help clear up any confusion you may have.

Merchant Account – This is an account to process credit cards. Some companies require you get one to do business, others provide it for their consultants.

Hostess Program – This is what the hostess gets for hosting a party. It can be a percentage of sales, highly discounted items, extra sales credit, or any combination.

Back office – You need a login/password to access your back office. This is your companies website were you put in your orders, check your monthly sales and likely access any training documents available.

Downline – Anyone you have recruited to join the company. Your first line is the ones you sponsored directly, and your second/third/fourth/etc line is the recruits your recruit has brought in. Each line you potentially earn commission on, depending on your company’s setup.

Upline – Whoever has sponsored you into the company. Some people like to think of their upline in family relations. I.e. Your sponsor is your "mom", her sponsor is your "grandma", etc.

Hostess Package – Information you give to your hostess before her party. It can be mailed or it can be handed to her at the party she books off of. Typically it includes items such as a catalogue, order forms, business cards, a guest list (or ideas to brainstorm a guest list), monthly specials and any other items you might think will help with a successful party.

Hostess Coaching – Correspondence between you and the hostess, getting her ready for her party and assisting her to have the best party experience as possible.

CVV Code – Three digit code on the back of the credit card.

Hopefully this has helped you to know what is what in the world of direct sales.

Sharon Katzman is a Manager with Gold Canyon Candles. Through her business, she is able to help women to make an income and feel empowered. To find out more, you can visit her blog at http://www.thescentsationals.com
In her downtime, she enjoys crafting, reading, harassing her cats, and being lazy. You can find out more about Sharon by visiting her blog at http://allaboutme-sharon.blogspot.com/

As a Direct Sales team leader, it is our job to motivate and encourage our group members to reach their business goals and to recognize their efforts for a job well done. When it comes to motivating your team, there are many little things you can do to provide that inspiration to them to strive for bigger and better things with their home business. Here are a few ideas that I like to use.

1. Emails - You can send daily or weekly motivational short stories, articles and business quotes to your group. To give it a personal connection, tack on a short story or quote that pertains to you and your business directly.

2. Books - These can be in-print or e-books. You could offer them as a reward by challenging your members to reach a certain business goal. Their obvious prize would be to receive the book for free.

3. Meetings and/or Chats - I suggest holding offline meetings or online chats for your downline group. I love attending my uplines meetings and chats as its a great way to learn new ideas, share with my fellow teammates and I get really motivated to continue to strive forward with my own home business.

It is equally important to recognize the efforts and accomplishments of your team members. Here are a few ideas that I like to utilize with my own group.

1. You could challenge your new teammate to obtain xyz amount in party sales and xyz amount in home party bookings during their first 30 days in the business. If they meet or exceed this challenge, offer them a reward. This can be a free product, free business supplies or a gift card.

2. Hold a monthly recruiting blitz for your team. You could reward the person who signed up the most new recruits with a prize.

3. Challenge your team to out-book you on home parties! This will motivate you and your team. A little healthy competition between you and your team is always a great motivator. If your team books more parties than you, reward them with a pizza party.

4. Its always fun to hold monthly personal sales challenges. You could reward every member who reaches xyz amount of sales that month with a prize or you could just award a prize to the member who had the highest sales for the month.

One of the most important jobs of a team leader is to motivate, support and recognize your teammates for a job well done. By recognizing them for their business efforts, it helps to build a stronger relationship with them. It lets them know that you appreciate them and their dedication to the business.

Shelly Hill has been working from home in Direct Sales since 1989 and is a Manager with Tupperware. Shelly has been leading her own Direct Sales team since 2003. You can visit Shelly online at http://www.workathomebusinessoptions.com for additional free business articles and Direct Sales tips.

If you are with one of the Direct Sales companies, I am sure you know all about how important it is to add new team members to your home business. When you build a successful downline team, you will make a certain percentage of your team’s sales, which adds to your income stream.

As someone who has worked in Direct Sales since 1989, I thought I would share some of my best tips on where I find my newly recruited team members.

1. At The Party: My number one source of adding new members to my business has been when I have recruited them from a home party. During the party presentation, I drop numerous hints about how fabulous it is to work from home with ABC company. At the end of my presentation, I always spend a few in depth minutes talking about the home business opportunity with the attendees.

2. At Offline Networking Events: My number two source for adding new members to my home business has been when I have attended local home business networking events. When you attend these events, you are meeting and greeting with other like-minded home business professionals who are interested in you and the type of business that you represent.

3. On Online Social Media Networks: My number three source for adding new members to my home business has been when I have ran advertisements on various online social media networking sites. These advertisements can be text ads or graphic ads and both have been effective for me. When I run ads on these networking sites, I try to target people who I think would be interested in my business. For the most part, I target stay at home moms.

4. On Online Work At Home Web Sites: My number four source for finding new members to add to my team has been through text ads or graphic ads that I have placed on various online work at home mom or stay at home mom web sites. These type of web sites attract the type of people who are most likely to join a Direct Sales business.

5. In Print Offline Media Publications: My number five source for finding new members to add to my team has been from classified advertisements that I have ran in various local print publications. To be honest, I don’t get much of a response from newspaper ads. However, when I place print ads in regional magazines, I have gotten a great response.

Well…there you have it! These are the top 5 places where I find new members to recruit into my home business opportunity. No matter where you decide to advertise your business, you always need to make sure that you are targeting the type of people who are most likely to be interested in the type of business that you represent.

Shelly Hill has been working from home in Direct Sales since 1989. Shelly is the owner of the popular online site called Work At Home Business Options at http://www.workathomebusinessoptions.com where you can find free home business articles, direct sales tips and free home business resources.

Congratulations! You’ve got a strong direct sales downline or are beginning to build one! This is one of the best parts of being a direct sales consultant, – the fact that you can share your passion for your business with others, help them to earn a little extra money and get paid for helping grow your company as well.

Now that you are a leader of a team, you’ll need to build a strong relationship with downline members to not only help them stay strong in their business, but to help your business grow stronger as well. A strong downline relationship will be one that’s mutually helpful and everyone benefits.

But you may be wondering how to insure that downline members feel cared for while still maintaining some type of balance with the rest of your life. Here are 5 easy tips for maintaining a great upline/downline relationship.

1. Start off with a bang. When a new recruit first signs up, it’s vitally important that you communicate often with her. One thing that I have found very helpful here is to develop a series of emails to send to new downline that talks them through those first days “on the job”. It will help them feel like they are connected to the company and to you. Each day while your new recruit is waiting for her kit she should hear from you. This is very easy to do with an autoresponder system, but can also be done by just copying and pasting into an email message every morning.

2. 15 minutes a day. Set aside fifteen minutes of each workday for downline phone calls. Use those minutes to call one to five members of your group for a quick “just checking in” call. Leave a message if you get voicemail. The idea is to let them know that you’re
thinking of them and giving them a chance to hear your voice. This is a great time to ask how they’re doing with their non-business life as well and get beyond your direct sales company to show you care about them.

3. A downline website. Creating a simple website for my group has been the best thing, by far that I did to keep communication open and strong with my group. We have weekly topic discussions, contests, upload important files and just have fun with the whole group. Through this many relationships between members of my group have blossomed just because the website allowed them to “break the ice”.

4. Meetings and/or conference calls. This is another great way to foster unity and strong relationships within your group. Many of you probably have downline that are out your area, so have a quarterly conference call with everyone just to touch base. There are many free teleconference services via the internet that make it very easy to do. And if you can, have a face-to-face meeting once in a while as well. Some group leaders have meetings monthly or quarterly. Others do a once a year get together with everyone.

5. Ecards. I love ecards for celebrating birthdays, achievements etc. First of all it’s FREE, which is great, but it’s so convenient and just plain fun. Use one of those Internet calendar functions to keep track of birthdays. Once a month go through the upcoming month and set up the ecard deliveries for the birthdays and company anniversary dates for the next month or more. You can set these up to deliver up to a year in advance! It’s a wonderful thing. There are hundreds of sites for free ecards on the Internet. Have fun searching for ones that suit you!

The key? Communicate in any and every way that you can. You will find that your direct sales team members will stay with your company much longer when you’ve fostered a strong relationship by keeping in touch! Have fun and happy team building!

Annette Yen is 20-year veteran of Direct Sales and leads a great team of women in her direct sales business. To find out more about how to start a strong relationship with your new recruits, sign up for her free e-course at www.directsalestools.com .

I’ve always been impressed with those who could sell a volume of product or build huge downlines. You’ve seen it. It looks like some sort of magic. But is it really?

I imagine this really frustrates you – seeing another do the same activities yet see greater results. I used to be stumped with this until I discovered their secret. They aren’t doing the “same” activities.

Those that succeed in direct sales business do something different. And I’m going to let you in on one thing you can learn and imitate.

No one is your prospect, either for your product or your business opportunity until they are “actively” seeking what you have. I will say that again. You don’t have a prospect until you are sure the person is “actively” seeking your product or your business opportunity.

You can breathe a sigh of relief. It is a huge relief to know you don’t have to work yourself to death to try to sell to someone that isn’t interested. That just enormously cut down the time you spend selling.

That is what marketing is for. You want to attract prospects that are actually looking for a solution to a problem. And that solution happens to be your product or business opportunity. Can you see how futile it is to waste your valuable time with someone who isn’t really a prospect. Why? Because they aren’t aware of having any need or problem related to what you have.

You might think at first that you are ignoring a huge pool of possible customers. Nope. It’s not the case. When you stop wasting all that time with people who are not prospects, you can wisely invest more time with those that are. They are your hottest prospects. The result is more sales and a bigger downline.

And who knows, maybe later those that weren’t interested will change and suddenly be a prospect. But until they do, please don’t spend your valuable time trying to turn them into one.

You will need to develop some marketing skill. Marketing can be described as all the ways you get your message out there so you can attract prospects. It’s a skill to learn the tools and methods of marketing. Let’s start with talking about an awareness. The awareness is that you are marketing so those that have a need or problem you can solve will hear about you. And you will then have more prospects that become customers and business partners.

You cannot proceed to sell until your marketing has brought you some prospects to sell to. It’s the only way to do business. Otherwise you spend too much time with no results. It’s not your lack of sales skill. You are just talking to the wrong people much of the time.

What are you looking for? You are looking for prospects. A prospect is someone “actively” seeking what you have. The key word is “active”. They are searching, reading ads, asking friends for recommendations. And then they see what you are offering. It works. Your message makes sense to them and if they see that your product is the solution they have been seeking, there’s a good chance you can close the sale.

Deborah Lynn McNeely is the author of articles for women in direct sales. She guides them with unique ideas about using intuition in business. Her articles guide you to useful tools and resources for success in your home business. Deborah has other articles to help you see more results in your direct sales business. Grab your complimentary copy of “Intuition Counts In MLM: A Plan By Women For Women” at: http://BestMLMforWomen.com