Posted on August 7, 2019 by dragonspitapothecary
I love collaborating with people. The fresh ideas, the cool ways you can discover something new or just the connection to others with common interests and goals. Working with others can be energizing and recharging. The act of sitting down with a group of like minded individuals who are also looking for help, feeling like you have a place to bounce ideas off one another or strike up the opportunity for work together is an incredible human connection and can be so useful in your business. How often we can learn from one another when we simply start a conversation!
I also love working alone. There’s time to think, I can create, I can get as into the weeds as I feel necessary or I can delegate where it makes sense for me and my business. At the end of the day the design and output are all the result of my work. I don’t have to run something by someone else first or get consensus, sign off or approval but instead can just act on what I know is a good idea for my business. This is the great thing about being your own boss. It’s up to you. All of it.
There are pros and cons to working with others and working alone. Sometimes it makes sense to go it alone and sometimes you need to seek the help of others, through a mentor or collaborative group. Business can be lonely and if things are not going well we can find ourselves highly frustrated and overwhelmed by how to turn it around.
When it comes to direct marketing or anything sales related there is often this thought that it has to be a completely solo gig. Like being told over ad over again is not enough punishment but you must also endure business all by yourself. You certainly cannot work with others because they are your competition! I seriously believe it is sales that created the word friend-enemies.
Friend-enemies are so very true in the sales environment. You are nice to one another (in public) but sizing each other to see who can do what better, who has what rank, what volume of sales each has and who has something clever they are doing to draw in new customers. You hold back your best ideas, your secret resources you found that save you tons of time and effort in your own business and you protect your names list at all cost!
Sales can be very cut throat and so competitive it’s amazing the customer experience can at all be positive and memorable. The pressure cooker of selling to make a volume level or rank has led to the slimy icky feeling of sales people in general and definitely been applied to those of us who are distributors for direct sales companies. And for what? Sure that sale may “make your month” but was it really worth it in the long run?
Does sales really have to be like that for you to win at it? Is it really a bloddy contact sport where you have to be violent to survive?
Are we really so afraid someone else will get a customer or sale that we could have had all because we risked collaborating or working together on something?
Do you really want to run your personal business that way?
Market Saturation
No business has 100% saturation of a market. Not Amazon. Not Apple. Not Coke or Pepsi. No one can say they are 100% in all homes, used by all people or that they appeal to every single person living on the planet. It may be the truly last true challenge in business that has not been achieved. If you’ve ever watched the TV series Mad Men you understand the creativity, aggressiveness and tactics used to attempt to reach market saturation but it still hasn’t ever happened.
In direct sales or MLM companies amazingly most markets are not that deeply saturated either. Even with products like Avon, Mary Kay and Tupperware, the three “old timey” MLMs, are not completely saturated in the market of any state in the U.S. These brands are familiar and most would recognize them but not everyone is a customer of these companies or familiar with a direct sales representatives that sell these products. This This is why there is a growing re-emergence to attract untouched new customers every year!
So if there are plenty of customers to go around, why are we so afraid to team up, collaborate, share or work together? Is it really such a big deal to share potential customers or names or resources if someone else would better serve a customer? I get it when you are small every sale counts and every customer gained is a seriously big deal. Trust me I totally understand that but I challenge you to think bigger. That 1 customer is not the last Earthly customer ever. Sure it was time consuming and effort driven perhaps to make that connection, initiate discussions and get to the point of genuine interest but are they your ideal customer and are you the best person to fit their needs? If so, sign them up! If not and you’re just doing it for the sale, I challenge you to consider the bigger picture, longer road and what scarcity you are really trying to conquer?
The scarcity mindset is what prevents a lot of sales people, including direct sales and MLM representatives, from realizing how they could actually help one another. How much of a disservice do we give our customers when we sell them something and have no connection with them ever again for future business, including referrals and references all because we wanted that sale so badly we couldn’t see they were not really our ideal customer?
Whereas if we had referred that customer to another representative who specializes in what that customer was interested or needed most or better fit their niche of ideal customer they would have had a lifelong customer, we would have a better relationship with both of them and probably some referrals along the way to our ideal customer! By our own greed for a sale we’ve created a disservice to a customer and the potential of creating a bad experience that will end up with someone not liking to work with direct sales people or purchasing products through a MLM ever again!
It’s not market saturation that’s the problem in sales. It’s the saturation in our own heads preventing us from seeing beyond the sale and greed of our own volume and competition with others. It’s the saturation of competition and drive for volume that has driven us to sometimes rather rudely not work with other sales people, share names with one another or in any way lend a hand and therefore missing out on the opportunity to have meaningful customers that fit our business model and prosperous cross sales relationships where we can truly mastermind solutions and come up with new creative ways to attract new customers that work best for all of us.
Perhaps that’s just the nature of the beast called sales but again I challenge you to reconsider if that is necessarily the right mode of operation for your direct sales business and how much doing this has hurt your growth, professionally and personally. Perhaps if you’re one of the lucky multi-millionaire direct sales people you don’t need to care but for the majority who start this business and fail I say there’s more of us that need to shift the mindset to do things differently.
Law of Attraction
Natural living, essential oils and other products appeal to a wide variety of people. Men and women of varying ages, occupations, interests, and so on. Anyone can use an essential oil and natural product. Anyone who is interested in natural health, essential oils, are concerned chemicals and toxins, heavy metals and more have the possibility of who is attracted to doTERRA’s high quality and pure products. That’s a huge market base!
If you want to be successful you have to understand the law of attraction. Niches are the area of specialty your business focuses on and where you excel at servicing and supporting a certain mix and make up of customer. It doesn’t matter the product you sell. You are not the brand of your product. Your brand is you and sales comes down to the law of attraction. Who is attracted to you and who are you attracted to? As a customer you know what kind of sales person you most enjoy working with and as a distributor and small business owner you know who your favorite customers are. That’s your niche.
As a sales person and small business owner, you need to know who your ideal customer is. Who is it that when they call you or see you out, your face lights up and you are happy to see them and the you? What about them makes them your ideal customer? The answer is not that they spend a lot of money buying your services or products or that they refer lots of people to you. These things are nice but we need to dig deeper because again everyone can be a customer but not everyone is your customer.
When you start up your business with a direct sales company, you need to envision what your ideal customer looks like and what your face to your company is going to be. See you don’t sell doTERRA, Avon or any other product,you sell you. You sell your beliefs, thoughts, actions, services and support. You sell what attracts people to learn more, to try it and to eventually get their money out for purchasing what you have offer. You sell the experience. The actual product is secondary.
Dry Spells
I hear all the time that people cannot find new prospects or customers. I myself have said I just don’t know anyone new! Yes every business has dry spells but it’s not because we don’t know people. These dry spells are also not because the market is fully saturated with people using essential oils and natural products that I sold them or because there were too many other people in my area selling what I am selling. It was not the result of me running out of people to talk to or finding ways to meet new people. No it wasn’t any of that. The majority of time it was me. I was the problem and limitation.
The problem when the dry spell of names shows up is usually, when I get to the heart of the matter and am completely honest, is me getting tired of doing the same thing and not seeing the results I thought I should have. It is me stopping the creative process in being true to myself and what I want for my business. When you try to sell to everyone, you stop seeing people as individuals and all you see is walking dollar bills that you want to capture. You stop being personal in your business and you stop seeing the possibility of what a relationship could be to you in terms of personal and professional needs.
It’s not to say I truly wasn’t meeting any one new at a particular time but realizing how much I was in my own way of preventing what was already in front of me from being fruitful.
Interested in more?
Direct sales does not need to be a dog eat dog world. Imagine how much more successful we would all be if we got down to what we were best at and all had a clear vision of our ideal customer. Imagine if that was the premise for freeing us from this unproductive competitiveness that prevents us from being the best we can be to our customers and feeling secure in what we do to the point we share names, referrals and resources where it is in the best interest of the customer and yourself. How much different would the impression of direct sales be if we were open to approaching it differently?
If you’re ready to start your own business and are seeking a different approach with real people interested in working together and cheering one another on while providing the support to be successful to each other then please reach out! Let’s find out if what you’re looking for is right here!
Contact me!
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