Are you struggling to generate a steady significant stream of home based business sales? Are you tired of not having enough home based business sales to offset your costs?
What I’ve realized learned from some of the best retailers of home based business sales products is that you need to do this one thing really well to boast your revenues. It could be true that you may be an excellent one-to-one salesman and can probably sell ice to an eskimo. However, that is a very difficult skill to duplicate down an organization. Let’s face it: super salesman do not grow on trees, and very few amounts of people that you will come across will actively and passionately go out and sell for the sheer love of it.
The truth is that most people are deftly frightened of sales.
They don’t like it, they secretly feel embarrassed of the products they have to offer, and they feel sleazy for selling to people. So as a team leader, you must find a resolution that will take the individual pressure off of them but still be able to tap in to their networks. And what do the top retailers do?
The best home based business sales retailers run events!
OK… maybe that’s not a well-kept secret, but there’s a science to how you run events that determine whether or not you leave with a sale or empty-handed. Here is what separates a typical event from a selling event:
1) You must provide value -
Our most effective home based business sales events occur when we dispense valuable information to our target customer base. Case and point, my wife is a great retailer. She specializes in cosmetics, and as a company trainer, she is also a certified makeup trainer. She invested in herself to make herself in to a makeup expert and uses her expertise to boost her sales. She conducts general education classes and makeup workshops that target ladies who are interested in learning professional-grade makeup techniques that are simplified for everyday use.
By providing this value, she is able to attract a larger volume of guests, which increases her chances of completing a sale, a powerful form of attraction marketing.
2) Product Demos -
If you’ve never done a product demo for your home based business sales events, you are losing valuable sales opportunities. One of the lessons that I’ve learned being in network marketing and seeing so many affiliate products, mine and others, is that most products are top-notch. Very few network marketing companies carry inferior products, but the downside is that they also don’t invest in mass market advertising, which is why you are involved in your home based business franchise. You are the marketing mechanism for them.
Think about it: if demonstrations weren’t powerful, why would infomercials, Costco, department stores, and kiosks at the mall all utilize this strategy to draw you in?
When you host your events, you should always focus on doing some sort of demonstration of your product after the general information has been covered. Make sure you pick products that have symmetry with the topic that you are covering at the event, else it loses its value.
When doing your demonstration, be sure that if you are promoting a health and nutrition product, have a control piece as well. What that means is that you should have a demo without using your product to demonstrate to the audience the difference of using your product, and what it means to not use your product. For my website company, we have programmers sit down with the prospect and show them the capabilities of the website via live webinar to demonstrate the ease of use of our platform website builder.
3) Have Roles -
A well-run home based business sales event needs to have team unity where each team member knows their role in the sales process.
- You always have a presenter who gives out the information. That person also does the demonstration.
- Another team member sets up the demonstration while the speaker is engaging the audience.
- A team member needs to greet the guests as they come in and help them get situated by filling out a questionnaire to extract extra information (i.e. “What question do you wish to address in terms of health and nutrition?”)
- You need to designate a sales person. That person should be the “closer” that collects the payment and is responsible for upselling packages and promotional items.
If you have a team that is well-versed in these tasks, then you will watch your sales revenues spike because it’s not reliant on one person doing everything.
4) Build Packages and Promotions -
Sales sell in a traditional business, and so too in a home based business sales event. Try to create promotional packages grouping several products together, or run a special on promotional items to entice customers to buy at the event. Make sure you stress that the sale is ONLY for this event so it creates a sense of urgency.
Promotions that work best for us are bundles of several low-end items, as well as offering tiered pricing and incentives for purchasing a certain dollar amount. In comparison to events that don’t have packages, sales for packaged items always increase overall sales by 33-50% at our events.
5) Always Promote the Next Event -
We have a saying in our company: “Who’s the best speaker? The next speaker!”
What that means is that one of the keys to genuinely strong home based business sales teams is that they always promote the next event before the current event is over. It opens up the opportunity for you to book your guests for the next appointment. It also allows your team to provide incentives for guests to invite their friends to the next event, which will organically grow your retail audience and increase potential of sales.
Make simple, effective, and professional flyers for the next event and have them ready to distribute to the attendees. Give them a few extra to give to friends. If you use that incentive suggestion in the previous paragraph, they will no doubt be motivated to promote the event for you. We offer discounts for customer from the current who attend our next event.
Conclusion: At the end of the day, it’s all about teamwork and commitment. When you have a group of entrepreneurs that are dedicated to generating significant revenues for yours and their home based business sales events, then you will have the beginnings of a fantastic lasting formula of success. If your speaker does a good job, they will have already done half the sale because they stressed the importance of why the product is needed. The demo moves the customer to want to buy, and the closer comes in and finishes the job. It’s a fluid sales process.
Now that you have learned an effective mechanism to boost offline home based business sales, let me introduce you to a way to leverage the internet sales aspect too. Would you rather have only one channel of distribution, or two? Multiple streams of revenue are always a plus, especially if they work in unison.
There are a lot more tips that we can share for running events, but to go on and on would take all night. If you can’t wait until our next piece for more retailing tips, then reach out to me via my blog and I will be glad to help.