Is It So Absurd? (For Direct Sales Reps)
As you may remember, Linda Stacy and I created some helpful tips for direct sales reps who want to generate more leads online (you can grab yours here). We recently received a concerned email from a subscriber about one of the messages we sent out. If you're a direct sales rep that is trying to make it online or if you're doing well online already, this will be of interest to you. I definitely welcome your comments and any suggestions you may have for your fellow direct sales reps.
Here's the message we sent out:
One of the first steps to generating leads online will be to establish your online presence with a website. Even if your business opportunity already provides you with a website, you should create your own site outside of the direct sales business site. You want to stand out, and set yourself apart from the generic site that everyone else in the company has.
Building your online presence apart from the direct sales company you are working with has another important benefit.
What happens if the company goes belly up, or you decide for whatever reason you just can't work with them anymore?
This is a real possibility and happens every day. If you put all your effort into sending traffic to the generic company website, all your hard work is all of a sudden gone. But what if you build your site separate from the company? Let's take a look at an example:
Anne is a candle rep for a well-known candle direct sales business. She built her website separate from the site the company created for her and has all sorts of information
about using candles to create a romantic feel in a room, the different aromatherapy benefits of the scents the candles are available in, creative ways to use the candles, candle
gift giving etc.
In other words, she is establishing her online presence as a candle expert. If anything were to happen, and she decides to leave the candle business opportunity, she still has this
website and the targeted traffic of people interested in scented candles. She could use it to generate leads for another candle direct sales company, make and sell her own candles, or join some affiliate programs and continue to benefit from the work she did in the past few months building and promoting her site.
Are you starting to see how establishing your own online presence could benefit you?
Sign up for a 10-day trial of an easy website builder at:
http://www.onlinedirectsalesleads.com/sitebuilder.html
It's easy to get started in just a few minutes!
To your success,
Alice & Linda
DirectSalesDirectories.com
This inspired the following response from one of our subscribers. Now, I must tell you that this lady is an owner of a direct sales company, so she has a slightly different perspective and vested interest in keeping reps focused on her products. Still, I think she has some valid points and for someone who is focusing offline for their direct sales business, this may not be the route to take.
Here's what she wrote to us:
Dear Alice & Linda,
I have been receiving your emails and for the most part I have found the information to be useful. However, I am a little disturbed by the email shown below. Encouraging sales reps. to have multiple websites is the most absurd thing I have heard in a while. Especially, when the companies provide websites for their reps. I think it confuses the consumer, because they are not sure where to go in order to shop. Also, many companies allow their reps to personalize their homepage in order to "stand out" from others.
In addition, companies work hard to project a credible image in the direct sales industry, so its important that everyone has the same "generic" website. This uniformity is critical for brand awareness. Now, I know reps. need to be creative when trying to generate leads, but I totally disagree with the idea of multiple websites especially if the company does not promote that.
You also mentioned that companies "go belly up" all the time. Putting this kind of doubt in a reps mind is not the best way to sell your service. This negative idea implies that your company do not put much stock, as it were, in the direct sells industry. I think that most reps. are smart enough to research "good" companies.
There are many ways that a rep. can establish themselves as "experts" in their field. This can be done by educating themselves about the products that they sell and being able to share the information at parties, through emails and when meeting individuals one-on-one. Most "good" companies offer the tools needed for reps to do just that. After all, "good" companies want to do all that they can to move the inventory.
I realize that coming up with eye catching and unique marketing strategies are critical to selling a service or product, but the way you all worded this email is simply wrong on so many levels. Nonetheless, I wish you much success in your business venture.
Regards,
XXXXX
I do feel like our message might have been too brief and didn't really illustrate our whole point, so we wrote back. I had to remove a number of specifics below because they are related to her personal information, but I still think you'll get the point:
Dear XXXXX,
Thank you for your feedback. As our valued client and subscriber, your opinion is important to us. It's not our goal to change your opinion on the matter because we all approach business differently, but perhaps we can explain ourselves better.
We are absolutely not experts in promoting direct sales businesses offline. As you'll note, we offer no offline marketing advice and your mention of home parties, meeting one-on-one and following up with email is obviously a very viable strategy, since many successful reps build wonderful businesses in this very way.
We cater to people who want to do business online. We work with a lot of mothers who don't want to have to leave the house for business - i.e. they want to stay home with their kids - and they attempt to run their businesses exclusively online. Unfortunately, we've seen very few success stories when people rely on the websites and marketing materials provided by the company they work with.
Where we see online success stories is where people think outside the box and build something uniquely their own. This doesn't take away the branding of the direct sales company, it is a completely separate issue. For example, if we talked to a XXXXXXX consultant, we would never say take the products off the site and build your own shopping site. Absolutely not. The sites you provide your reps are extremely valuable in completing the sale and the fact that they can be personalized, is an added bonus.
Here's the problem. If someone wants to exclusively market their XXXXX site online, they run into a few problems:
- They will have to pay for most of the leads they generate.
- They are competing with others that have virtually the same sites. Think of Tupperware reps, there are countless numbers of reps and tons of websites out there.
A duplicated site, even if customized, leaves little opportunity to receive free traffic from search engines or to generate any great level of word of mouth. Consultants will have to pay for pay-per-click ads and other advertising. If they’re going to advertise on Google, only 1 advertiser is allowed to advertise the same site per keyword. Other advertising networks may have similar policies. That puts a lot of restriction on your consultants.
The worst part of this is that most of the traffic sent to the site is wasted...since the depressing part of online business is that very few visitors that go to a site actually buy anything. Most will leave and never come back.
If consultants set up their own unique content, mailing lists or ecourses – they have a much better chance of getting search engine traffic, generating great word of mouth and other viral (and free) means of generating traffic and leads.
We’re talking about “going wide” when trying to capture leads. Yes, sometimes you are specifically advertising your opportunity or sometimes you’re advertising your product. But if direct sales reps want to generate a large pool of leads that keeps growing without the continuous effort and expense of advertising, they’re going to have to “go wide”.
Think about it, people come online every day for information. They don’t always want to buy a spa product that day, but they are definitely in the market for some pampering. A smart online marketer has created a number of ecourse for these information seekers.
She might have a free ebooklet on how to give yourself a pedicure. Subscribers to this ebooklet will learn how to do a pedicure and discover that they should definitely try the highly recommended XXXXX Foot Scrub and the XXXXX Foot Lotion too. A typical subscriber to this course just wanted to know how to give herself a pedicure and wasn’t necessarily planning on buying products or was possibly going to go out to her local market to buy what she needs. Instead after reading about these great product, the subscriber decides to order XXXXX products online instead. In addition, the consultant has collected an email address, so she can follow-up with her subscribers and make other relevant product recommendations in the future.
This can all be automated. The free report is written up, the follow-up emails can be scheduled into an autoresponder.
A typical Internet surfer might also want to know how to get rid of the dark puffiness under her eyes. Unfortunately, your great soothing eye mask probably won’t pop up on a search engines when a surfer enters “how to get rid of dark under eye circles” in a search engine. However, a consultant who has taken the time to write an informative article to help her readers solve their problem AND recommends the XXXXX product at the same time will more likely find herself at the top of a search engine.
The important thing is the RECOMMENDATION. The XXXXX consultant has positioned herself as an informative and trusted source of information. Her subscribers grow to like her and trust her. They take her recommendations for the great XXXXX products she recommends. It’s much easier to sell to people when they know you a little…we’re sure you’ll agree. Well, we’re showing people how to get to know people lots of people online and gain their trust, without having to email or phone people individually.
In our years of marketing exclusively online, we’ve learned that content is an amazingly powerful tool when marketing online. It can generate endless free traffic and leads for you…it’s hard to sneeze at that. Of course, we don’t mean to make it sound like it’s not hard work. It most definitely is and it takes a while to get things really moving along really well. However, in our experience and with our experience of working with countless others it’s well worth it. Once the initial hard work is done, it keeps paying you back over and over again.
We do hope we’ve been able to clarify our advice a bit further. It’s never our intention to steer anyone in the wrong direction, but rather provide strategies that have worked for us and others. We welcome your input and feedback anytime.
Respectfully,
Linda Stacy & Alice Seba
Here's the message we sent out:
One of the first steps to generating leads online will be to establish your online presence with a website. Even if your business opportunity already provides you with a website, you should create your own site outside of the direct sales business site. You want to stand out, and set yourself apart from the generic site that everyone else in the company has.
Building your online presence apart from the direct sales company you are working with has another important benefit.
What happens if the company goes belly up, or you decide for whatever reason you just can't work with them anymore?
This is a real possibility and happens every day. If you put all your effort into sending traffic to the generic company website, all your hard work is all of a sudden gone. But what if you build your site separate from the company? Let's take a look at an example:
Anne is a candle rep for a well-known candle direct sales business. She built her website separate from the site the company created for her and has all sorts of information
about using candles to create a romantic feel in a room, the different aromatherapy benefits of the scents the candles are available in, creative ways to use the candles, candle
gift giving etc.
In other words, she is establishing her online presence as a candle expert. If anything were to happen, and she decides to leave the candle business opportunity, she still has this
website and the targeted traffic of people interested in scented candles. She could use it to generate leads for another candle direct sales company, make and sell her own candles, or join some affiliate programs and continue to benefit from the work she did in the past few months building and promoting her site.
Are you starting to see how establishing your own online presence could benefit you?
Sign up for a 10-day trial of an easy website builder at:
http://www.onlinedirectsalesleads.com/sitebuilder.html
It's easy to get started in just a few minutes!
To your success,
Alice & Linda
DirectSalesDirectories.com
This inspired the following response from one of our subscribers. Now, I must tell you that this lady is an owner of a direct sales company, so she has a slightly different perspective and vested interest in keeping reps focused on her products. Still, I think she has some valid points and for someone who is focusing offline for their direct sales business, this may not be the route to take.
Here's what she wrote to us:
Dear Alice & Linda,
I have been receiving your emails and for the most part I have found the information to be useful. However, I am a little disturbed by the email shown below. Encouraging sales reps. to have multiple websites is the most absurd thing I have heard in a while. Especially, when the companies provide websites for their reps. I think it confuses the consumer, because they are not sure where to go in order to shop. Also, many companies allow their reps to personalize their homepage in order to "stand out" from others.
In addition, companies work hard to project a credible image in the direct sales industry, so its important that everyone has the same "generic" website. This uniformity is critical for brand awareness. Now, I know reps. need to be creative when trying to generate leads, but I totally disagree with the idea of multiple websites especially if the company does not promote that.
You also mentioned that companies "go belly up" all the time. Putting this kind of doubt in a reps mind is not the best way to sell your service. This negative idea implies that your company do not put much stock, as it were, in the direct sells industry. I think that most reps. are smart enough to research "good" companies.
There are many ways that a rep. can establish themselves as "experts" in their field. This can be done by educating themselves about the products that they sell and being able to share the information at parties, through emails and when meeting individuals one-on-one. Most "good" companies offer the tools needed for reps to do just that. After all, "good" companies want to do all that they can to move the inventory.
I realize that coming up with eye catching and unique marketing strategies are critical to selling a service or product, but the way you all worded this email is simply wrong on so many levels. Nonetheless, I wish you much success in your business venture.
Regards,
XXXXX
I do feel like our message might have been too brief and didn't really illustrate our whole point, so we wrote back. I had to remove a number of specifics below because they are related to her personal information, but I still think you'll get the point:
Dear XXXXX,
Thank you for your feedback. As our valued client and subscriber, your opinion is important to us. It's not our goal to change your opinion on the matter because we all approach business differently, but perhaps we can explain ourselves better.
We are absolutely not experts in promoting direct sales businesses offline. As you'll note, we offer no offline marketing advice and your mention of home parties, meeting one-on-one and following up with email is obviously a very viable strategy, since many successful reps build wonderful businesses in this very way.
We cater to people who want to do business online. We work with a lot of mothers who don't want to have to leave the house for business - i.e. they want to stay home with their kids - and they attempt to run their businesses exclusively online. Unfortunately, we've seen very few success stories when people rely on the websites and marketing materials provided by the company they work with.
Where we see online success stories is where people think outside the box and build something uniquely their own. This doesn't take away the branding of the direct sales company, it is a completely separate issue. For example, if we talked to a XXXXXXX consultant, we would never say take the products off the site and build your own shopping site. Absolutely not. The sites you provide your reps are extremely valuable in completing the sale and the fact that they can be personalized, is an added bonus.
Here's the problem. If someone wants to exclusively market their XXXXX site online, they run into a few problems:
- They will have to pay for most of the leads they generate.
- They are competing with others that have virtually the same sites. Think of Tupperware reps, there are countless numbers of reps and tons of websites out there.
A duplicated site, even if customized, leaves little opportunity to receive free traffic from search engines or to generate any great level of word of mouth. Consultants will have to pay for pay-per-click ads and other advertising. If they’re going to advertise on Google, only 1 advertiser is allowed to advertise the same site per keyword. Other advertising networks may have similar policies. That puts a lot of restriction on your consultants.
The worst part of this is that most of the traffic sent to the site is wasted...since the depressing part of online business is that very few visitors that go to a site actually buy anything. Most will leave and never come back.
If consultants set up their own unique content, mailing lists or ecourses – they have a much better chance of getting search engine traffic, generating great word of mouth and other viral (and free) means of generating traffic and leads.
We’re talking about “going wide” when trying to capture leads. Yes, sometimes you are specifically advertising your opportunity or sometimes you’re advertising your product. But if direct sales reps want to generate a large pool of leads that keeps growing without the continuous effort and expense of advertising, they’re going to have to “go wide”.
Think about it, people come online every day for information. They don’t always want to buy a spa product that day, but they are definitely in the market for some pampering. A smart online marketer has created a number of ecourse for these information seekers.
She might have a free ebooklet on how to give yourself a pedicure. Subscribers to this ebooklet will learn how to do a pedicure and discover that they should definitely try the highly recommended XXXXX Foot Scrub and the XXXXX Foot Lotion too. A typical subscriber to this course just wanted to know how to give herself a pedicure and wasn’t necessarily planning on buying products or was possibly going to go out to her local market to buy what she needs. Instead after reading about these great product, the subscriber decides to order XXXXX products online instead. In addition, the consultant has collected an email address, so she can follow-up with her subscribers and make other relevant product recommendations in the future.
This can all be automated. The free report is written up, the follow-up emails can be scheduled into an autoresponder.
A typical Internet surfer might also want to know how to get rid of the dark puffiness under her eyes. Unfortunately, your great soothing eye mask probably won’t pop up on a search engines when a surfer enters “how to get rid of dark under eye circles” in a search engine. However, a consultant who has taken the time to write an informative article to help her readers solve their problem AND recommends the XXXXX product at the same time will more likely find herself at the top of a search engine.
The important thing is the RECOMMENDATION. The XXXXX consultant has positioned herself as an informative and trusted source of information. Her subscribers grow to like her and trust her. They take her recommendations for the great XXXXX products she recommends. It’s much easier to sell to people when they know you a little…we’re sure you’ll agree. Well, we’re showing people how to get to know people lots of people online and gain their trust, without having to email or phone people individually.
In our years of marketing exclusively online, we’ve learned that content is an amazingly powerful tool when marketing online. It can generate endless free traffic and leads for you…it’s hard to sneeze at that. Of course, we don’t mean to make it sound like it’s not hard work. It most definitely is and it takes a while to get things really moving along really well. However, in our experience and with our experience of working with countless others it’s well worth it. Once the initial hard work is done, it keeps paying you back over and over again.
We do hope we’ve been able to clarify our advice a bit further. It’s never our intention to steer anyone in the wrong direction, but rather provide strategies that have worked for us and others. We welcome your input and feedback anytime.
Respectfully,
Linda Stacy & Alice Seba
13 Comments:
Alice.
A good read and a great reply.
It is all in the preselling!
That is simply the key to what you are saying about isn't it?
Take care,
Rob
It sounds like your subscriber knows direct sales but doesn't know internet marketing. That is your area of expertise. If someone is doing direct sales online, they would need to expand their prior opinions to include the principles of internet marketing.
All of your points were right on. The reader needs to brush up on pure and simple "marketing", something that many direct sales reps lack.
Alice,
I totally agree with you! As someone who has been in direct sales for about 10 months now but came at it with your perspective on internet marketing.
My sponsor also promotes using your own personal website because that is how she build her 6-figure income with direct sales.
I'm curious to know if she(or he) sends a reply to your email.
Thanks for sharing, I learned things for my business just by reading! :)
Alice - sound advice. I'm going to link over to it so that my visitors can also benefit. Thanks.
Your completly right Alice when it comes to Direct Sales duplicate websites. In order to really make it online you have to create your own presence. Thank's for sharing.
I love your responses. Anyway, I'm not here to put anyone down, this lady certainly has some points however rejecting a method that has worked well for others is also very narrow minded.
There are many ways paths to success.
The comment about Direct Sales businesses going belly-up is valid, too. Some of them do. Definitely research before joining ANY company.
I love this article. Your reply was perfect. As a consultant in direct sales I choose to promote my business online instead of traditional methods like home parties, door to door sales, etc. The majority of Direct Sales companies now offer their consultants the option of purchasing a replicating company website but unfortunatly many companies place strict limits on their use. One company in particular will sell you a "consultant site" but you are not allowed to have it linked anywhere online. You may not use thier name in any manner and you may not list the site in the search engines either. Now did this company think before they acted? I doubt they did. It is my opinion that if these companies wish to have an online presence then they also need to understand that the internet is a whole different ballgame.
Thanks Wendy. I really appreciate your feedback. That is something people really need to consider before thinking they can do direct sales online - many companies do have strict rules.
I absolutely loved that article so much that I shared it! I think having your own personal website is a bonus to online and even offline marketing!! The website(s) your company offers for either the product or the business opportunity can be directly linked from your personal website right? Yes it can! Or should I say...you should be able to!!
Having your own website is a win win situation in my opinion...
I also believe that not preparing for YOUR future and keeping an "open mind" should "something happen" is only setting YOURSELF up for failure!
Keeping it real...
Alice,
Good reply. The websites we have set up by the company are great for ordering, etc, however, we receive zero traffic unless we direct someone there. It is a "revolving" site and only those at the top level have their site in the loop. Hard to get started that way.
Having our own site allows us to do our own marketing to get the traffic we need.......and link to the company site for ordering. Simple way to increase our traffic without duplicating what the company has done.
Thanks for the clarification!
Alice:
I absolutely agree with the comments mentioned regarding multiple websites and confusing the customers. I just mention it because I had asked for a link to be added for my business. When I went in to check the website there was a huge website with loads of information on Send Out Cards.I would just like to add a small message and then give them my website to go to for more info.
Penny
www.mywingstosuccess.com
Post a Comment
<< Home