The direct sales business revolves around direct selling-personal contact and sales made outside of a traditional retail setting. In other words, direct selling is much more focused on relationships between people than selling in a retail store is where customers bring their purchases to anonymous counter clerks.
Virtually any product that’s made today can be and is marketed through direct sales. Using this model, direct sales businesses market everything from cosmetics to farm equipment and from nutritional supplements to kitchen appliances and cookware.
If it’s for your body, your home, your job, or your garden, you can get it through direct sales.
There are different forms of direct selling, too. Some direct salespeople focus on one-on-one interactions with customers. When you’re selling a big-ticket item, you want to spend as much time answering each customer’s questions as you need to in order to make the sale.
Other direct sales businesses use the demonstration or party model. For example, direct sales reps for cookware companies will often do a demonstration of the products by cooking something in the host’s home. Guests get a look at how effective the products are, and they get a tasty treat at the end of the presentation. Talk about positive reinforcement!
So far, you might be thinking that direct sales looks a lot like multi-level marketing or MLM. But there are a few crucial differences between the two.
With direct selling, you are paid a much larger commission on your actual sales. You’re not worried about recruiting and training other salespeople-your only concern is with how well you’re doing at making sales.
When you’re doing direct sales, you are representing a solid product or service line. Some MLMs put most of their focus on recruiting downlines; the actual product or service is secondary, and sometimes they’re only cheap, insubstantial products designed to keep the MLM legal. MLMs that focus solely on recruitment come dangerously close to being illegal pyramid schemes.
Also, unlike MLMs, with direct selling your main relationship is with your customer, and your focus is on attending to that customer’s needs. Is it time to call Sue to check how she’s enjoying her cookware? It’s been seven years since Larry bought the tractor from you-it’s time to contact him about a possible replacement.
Those are the kinds of tasks you’re concerned with as a direct seller.
But if you’re in an MLM, you’ve got to motivate a lot of people in addition to your customers. In order to make any real money, you’ve got to recruit, train, and stay in almost constant touch with an increasingly large downline. Dealing with customers becomes secondary.
Finally, the direct selling business pays off in immediate rewards. You make the sale-you get your commission. The MLM companies can take a lot of time to pay off, and the vast majority of people who get involved in MLMs make hardly any money at all.
If you’re willing to wait a long time and work very hard for few returns in exchange for the chance to build a network of close friends, the MLM business model might be for you.
But if you want immediate results and would rather focus on selling than recruiting and training, direct selling and the direct sales business are probably a better place for you.
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