Top 10 Things to Implement in Your Direct Sales Customer Group in 2018

There's nothing like a brand new year to get you inspired, right? Clean slate, time to try all the new things you've been thinking about, time to really make a plan. I adore a new year, and every single successful system I use in my business was kicked off in a January. In that spirit, I've put together a list of 10 things to plan for now, that will make your customer group kick booty in the new year.

1. Birthday Club. Every single month, create and post a graphic during the start of the month, celebrating all those that have a birthday that month. Ask that everyone who has a birthday that month comment below with their birthday to be entered into a special birthday club drawing. Take it a step further, and when you wish your friends happy birthday throughout the month, send them a link to your group and let them know they can be entered into your birthday club drawing if they are interested in joining your group.
2. Monthly Engagement Drawings. Create a post a week that is purely an engagement post. Not business related, but all tied to a theme, such as Halloween during October, St. Patrick's Day during March, etc. All commenters on those engagement posts go into a drawing for whatever prize you happen to be giving away that month.
3. Unique Hashtags. Create some that are specific to you and your business (or at least not insanely common), and use them frequently. Just 2-4 will suffice, and this will serve the dual purpose of helping you stand out, and allowing your peeps an easy way to search for things relating to you/your products (i.e. tell them to search for #floridachick when they are looking for a particular series of posts that you've tagged.)
4. BFF (Best Facebook Friend). Start this award for those that are always super active on your group, commenting, posting and participating. This is a concept I've used in my team group for awhile, but I think it would be a lot of fun to play with in your customer group, as well. And with Facebook having added analytics for groups not long ago, it's even easier to stay on top of who your top contributors are.
5. Theme Days. Pick at least a couple days of the week and give them themes. Such as #MotivationalMonday, #TipTuesday, #WordlessWednesday, etc. Your group members will get used to seeing and come to anticipate that day's theme, and you should see a spike in your participation (just don't make this all work and no play!)
6. Monthly Theme Parties. Choose a theme for the month and party inside your group around that theme. Depending on your product line, you might do themes like "Spring Cleaning", "Back to School", "Vacation", "Night on the Town", etc. Get creative and present your products in ways that keep to your theme.
7. Monthly Polls. Every month, ask your group what they'd like to see you highlight through doing a poll near the beginning of the month (or the end of the month, for the following month). This gives them a voice, and polls tend to get great interaction, because they are so easy to click a button and answer.
8. Random Holidays. Choose 2-3 bizarre holidays to celebrate each month in your group. You can see a list of random holidays here. You can choose holidays that relate to your business in some way, or just pick something completely fun and off the wall, and share photos, gifs, etc. that go along with the holiday. 
9. Cross Promotions. Build relationships with other direct sales women and choose one to cross promote every month or every quarter. This exposes each of you to one another's audience, and can help build both of your businesses. Just make sure that you completely trust the person you're inviting to share within your group, because you are trusting her with your most valuable asset - your customers.
10. Product Parade. Choose one product per week to offer at a small discount to your customers, and then highlight features, benefits and uses for that product all week long. 

Okay, not so hard right? When you sit down to do your 2018 planning, take some time to think about which of these ideas you're going to implement into your customer group this coming year, and what that's going to look like for you. And then come back and tell us all about it!

5 Things to do for Your Direct Sales Business in December

Most direct sales companies have their holiday shipping guaranteed cut-off date around December 10-15th. Many consultants think that means they can just take the rest of the month off, but that really couldn't be farther from the truth. There ARE ways you can turn those last few weeks of the year into productive time, so let's take a look at a few ideas.

1. Sell. Hold an inventory sale from products you have on hand. Many of us have items that have retired that we still have from our displays - these can be someone's great last minute gift all the way up until Christmas. Host a stop and shop in your home, and offer gift wrapping (or gift bagging) so that people can leave your home with their gifts ready to roll.
2. Book. Work on filling your January calendar! If your last few November and December parties didn't fully book you up for January, NOW is the time to reach out to past January hostesses, potential hostesses who haven't nailed down a date yet, or just anyone who has shown interest in booking. You do not want to roll into the new year without your January calendar solid, so do the work now.
3. Inventory. Take an inventory of your business supplies and figure out what you need to order to start the year off right. Do you have all the catalogs, order forms, hostess goodies, etc. that you are going to need? Many companies change catalogs over in January, and thus make the new book available for consultants to order in December. If this is you, or if you have a couple more months left in your winter book and you aren't going to have enough to get you through til the end, get your order placed. Because remember point 2, you're going to be booking up your January and you're going to need to have those hostess packets ready to mail to all of your excited January hostesses.
4. Marketing. Revamp your marketing plan for the new year if it needs it, or if your marketing plan is solid, make sure you have your necessities stocked. I have a lot of solid systems in my business, such as Hostess Happy Mail and my Customer Follow-Up System, and now is the perfect time of year to make sure that I have all I need from Vistaprint and my back office. If you don't personally have systems in your business that are working for you, now is a great time to start some. The new year is always something of a clean slate, and honestly is when almost every system of mine got it's start, one year or another. 
5. Mastermind. Do you have someone you work closely with in your business? Set aside time to mastermind with them on what you both want from your businesses in the coming year. I have two people I work closely with - Mariekan, from the same direct sales company, who I have partnered with to train our teams together, and Jessica, who is a friend from another company who is my go-to girl to bounce ideas off of. Each December, I have planning meetings with each of these people. With Mariekan, we get together for four days straight and plan out our entire year of team trainings, our schedule for calls, zooms, topics, etc. Yes, it's a lot, but you can't imagine how organized we feel heading into a new year with a solid map for what is to come. With Jessica, we do an overnight, and lay out our goals for our personal businesses in the coming year, talk strategy and marketing, and create vision boards to help keep us on task. Both of these masterminds are crucial to my success, and I highly recommend you do something similar. 

So, what will YOU do with the final few weeks of the year? I suggest you figure it out...and then be on the lookout for another post coming soon about the top 10 things you want to implement in your business next year...