Can Direct-Selling Compete With The Gig Economy?

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The times they are-a changin’, especially in the world of work. “Gig” roles now make up a significant portion of young and old workers’ time, though many still retain traditional jobs. Younger workers seek work that aligns with their life mission, generally to make the world a better place. The notion that multiple revenue streams are necessary to be prosperous, or even to take a vacation, has become a standard part of career planning. Gig platforms are emerging as the easiest way to establish additional revenue sources in the emerging economy.

Will direct-selling companies be ready to compete for part-time and full-time distributors in this new job market? There are several challenges facing any firm that wants to win and keep gig workers, and e-commerce and retail companies are investing heavily to be compete for sales and support staff who can bring the sales relationship into the home:

It is a plain fact that part-time work is on the rise. Although the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the traditional job market is still alive and well as of May 2018, the agency’s count did not include part-time work in its count of employment arrangements. The DOL suggests that only 3.8 percent of workers are in “alternative or contingent” work arrangements as their primary employment.

During the same month Labor issued its reassuring report, the Federal Reserve found a very different total by counting all work arrangements, not just workers’ primary employment. According to The Fed, 30 percent of adults are working on side jobs to raise their income. The gig today is viewed as necessary to making a sufficient living, consequently the gigs that fit most conveniently in a worker’s life are preferred by potential hires.

People are driving for Uber and Lyft, doing side jobs on TaskRabbit and, critically, many small and medium-sized businesses are turning to online marketplaces to find customers. Intuit reported 34 percent of U.S. workers were working side jobs in 2017 and projects the share of gig workers will rise to 43 percent by 2020. Today’s “hustlers” are choosing software-enabled work opportunities.

Put yourself in the distributor’s shoes

Direct sales opportunities may appear riskier than the typical gig job that promise lower but consistent income. Workers are willing to take the lower pay in lieu of higher income that isn’t certain, according to the Fed: “Three-fifths of workers would prefer a hypothetical job with stable pay over one with varying but somewhat higher pay.”

This is the lens direct sales recruitment must use when assessing its pitch to prospective enrollees. The worker has many choices for a side-income and, if they are going to engage in direct selling full-time need a successful program with world-class onboarding for distributors as well as better tools for selling than competitors.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested in a 2007 study that flexibility and a sense of being in control of one’s time and choices are key motivators for workers, across all generations. That’s an implicit endorsement of the benefits offered by direct selling. As the labor market has tightened, prospective direct sellers are able to measure their options and pick selectively based on social feedback about companies, how distributors are treated, and the tools provided to help them achieve success.

Just as pre-sales determines which sales program will be most successful, distributor recruitment today requires early engagement of prospects with targeted video and audio content, sales messaging delivered through the tools the prospect will use to sell, and a stellar onboarding process to keep them moving toward early success.

Turn the prospective enrollee’s view on your companies offerings: Are the tool mobile and designed to provide training that converts sales rapidly? Are marketing and sales messages reinforcing the importance of distributor success at every step? Has your content library developed to support personalization of sales experience, and does that include helping new distributors embrace and make your sales process their own? Without complete distributor engagement, customers will quickly come to doubt the marketing message overall.

The Brookings Institute reported in 2016 that gig work is thriving in cities, which direct sellers need to target with increasingly diverse personalized messaging. Brookings found that 81 percent of four-year net growth in non-employer firms took place in cities, where huge groups of transient workers are mixing, networking, and making life-long connections that direct sellers can leverage to build revenue. The gig wave will reach the suburbs and rural communities in the next five years.

The next generation of self-starters are entrepreneurial by nature. Millennials, Gen-Z and the newly born Gen-A have grown up in a world where information tools give them extraordinary powers of choice. They also tend to think in terms of building service relationships with customers, a natural fit with direct selling that, without the right tools, quickly leads to frustration and distributor attrition.

The first wave of gig work made commodity labor delivery more efficient. But the sales challenge in the 2020s will revolve around deep customer relationships facilitated by smart content platforms. This gives direct sales an advantage, because the industry has focused on one-to-one relationship for decades. Without the right tools and a clear socially responsible message expressed daily through sales training content, customer messaging, and within the sales network, direct selling will face declines in recruitment.

Even as retail and ecommerce companies launch campaigns to get a foothold in direct selling’s traditional stronghold, the home, potential direct salespeople are juggling more options than at any time in history. Is your direct-selling network ready to engage and support the next generation of self-starters who are willing to work hard for a profitable business and satisfying lifestyle?

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

 

Reference: Bankrate

Delivering Actionable Sales Process Analytics

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Sales managers must interpret and act on more data than ever. Since the appearance of the PC in the enterprise, the burden carried by sales management in every industry has grown heavier. Support roles, from the administrative assistant to accounting staff who helped with various aspects of reporting, have vanished from many organizations. Those jobs were taken over by software, starting with the spreadsheet, leaving managers with fewer people with which to consult and share ideas when making sales process decisions.

Personalization of the direct sales process was impossible in the traditional data reporting environment, but there is a change afoot. If your team is not listening to its market every day, it is falling behind competitors who do and as a result can deploy new targeted content to appeal to changing consumer preferences. Intelligent content management and sales coaching platforms provide coaching to sales managers, summarizing vast amounts of activity to identify patterns that can be applied to existing content and training libraries to deliver personalized customer journeys at scale.

After many years of growing data burdens, leadership can spend less time exploring data and more on refining the details of the customer journey. If an organization has mapped its sales process for machine analysis, each step a distributor takes with a customer becomes actionable data that signals to management how to adjust content and messaging for success. Intelligent content platforms look at past patterns, compares that history to current activity, and applies probabilistic analysis to the data to catch significant changes in customer sentiment early. Machine learning-enabled tools will also assist management with distributor training, engagement, and retention with insight into which salespeople are struggling and excelling, even before the close.

For example, a video shared early in the customer engagement may begin to perform poorly because the because market attitudes have shifted — even a phrase that has become a negative meme in social networks can change the perceived meaning of a corporate message if left unaddressed. The signal a machine learner sends focuses on the conversion expectations for the video. If customers start to express lower purchasing intent after viewing the video, the tool alerts management. It is not necessary to wait to see whether the prospect becomes a customer. The system can point out emerging misalignment of messages with a high degree of certainty and determine whether a change is significant rather than temporary. There is no need to hunt for what changed, the conversion data makes the emerging problem clear.

Sales and marketing teams can quickly review the asset to identify what changes are needed, produce a new video and release it immediately. Today, the signal is also much less noisy than in the spreadsheet era when outliers often stood out without context, leading to false urgency and unneeded content production expenses.

Personalization, without the noise

The rise of highly targeted customer messaging could drown an organization in data without machine learning to assist with separating meaningful changes in content performance from normal variations in a marketplace. Because personalization delivers stronger results, it can make heroes of sales leaders who anticipate and respond to changing market conditions.

Direct sales companies, which have typically relied on quarterly outcomes, not daily insights, to recognize which marketing and sales messaging work and which are misdirected, are used to building intimate customer relationships. If your company is ahead of that curve, it is better prepared to compete in the on-demand marketplace emerging today. If not, take a look at the retailers seeking to step into one-to-one in-home sales relationships with consumers.

Direct sellers that ignore the opportunity to personalize the one-to-one sales experience using media and targeted messages could lose customers to retailers aiming to deliver everything a consumer might want within hours. Amazon even has a key to many customers’ door.

Improved distributor coaching and resource allocation within a sales network in the mobile-first environment transforms the customer relationship. Personalization makes the customer the star of their own show, concentrating all of a brand’s resources of communicating consumer expectations back to headquarter and translating that into improved products and experience. A company’s response to customer feedback is essential to building customer trust and establishing shared values.

The same kind of coaching delivered to reps in the field through an app can provide sales managers insight in real-time into how their expectations and actual sales performance align or diverge. It is a practice every company is preparing to embrace, and the companies that succeed first will retain long-term advantages over competitors.

Once made, in-home relationships are tough to break, as direct sellers well know. Retailers understand this too after seeing foot traffic decline as ecommerce nears 10 percent of the total market.

Smart content now or, perhaps, never

The level of feedback available today enables individual communication with distributors based on their personal skills, personality, and product knowledge. Sales management can take a systematic approach to coaching, sending videos, training, or product collateral to distributors, and following the results conversion data the same day. After sharing a video about a product the distributor has not sold effectively, the platform can tell if their presentation improved based on customer feedback captured during the presentation. If distributors consistently over-estimate their chance of closing, the platform can also provide coaching and report to management that additional attention may be needed.

Intelligent content delivery is a window into every sales engagement. Gig Economy Group’s What’s Next approach to sales coaching tracks each interaction, suggesting content to share and analyzing messaging for terms and phrases that ignite customer interest. Positive changes can be propagated through the entire sales organization rapidly, with each new customer exchange testing the underlying assumptions of the management team to confirm strategic alignment and efficacy.

By matching distributor strengths to customer’s expectations captured through distributor feedback in a mobile app even the individual sales relationship can be tuned for improvements. As the data set available to a machine learning system grows, more sophisticated insights become available. For instance, an introverted rep could be coached to share more with an extroverted prospect or remain quiet and ask questions of another introvert.

In direct selling, content programming and messaging guidance has been considered less important than the one-to-one encounter between distributors and prospects. Rightly so, in the past, but that is changing as online becomes the primary venue for brand discovery by shoppers. With in-home selling investments by retail reaching record levels, direct sellers must study how content, salespeople, and customers interact.

The insights available at each step in the sales process can convert a prospect into a lifetime customer, right in their living room, where direct sellers already have the advantage over retail and ecommerce competitors. The alternative is giving up the home field advantage direct selling brings to the game.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

What’s Next Is Personalization

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Personalization of customer experience requires two investments: machine learning-based targeting technology, and; human intelligence to interpret customer moods and feedback, as well as curate the media and messages served up for sales use. One without the other will create an inhuman and untrustworthy customer experience that feels to both worker and customer like following rules instead of exercising their passion and fulfilling their needs.

No one wants to be automated, subjected to rigid rules that cannot change, but anyone dealing with lots of information can appreciate being helped by automation. The choice to be assisted by your company’s automation is the critical offer every future employee, contractor, and a customer will consider. The future will be decided outside your organization, by those who can make it a success. These are the personalization-readiness questions to answer in 2018:

  • Is your company’s sales team ready to change based on measurable feedback?
  • Are sales and marketing teams equipped with content and tools, including mobile apps and social network integrations, that help capture feedback that crafts a personalized experience?
  • Is your company organized around constant progress towards distributor and customer personalization?

“Digital technology makes the customer the star,” according to ZEITGUIDE, an influential trend-watcher in New York, and while stars need technology it is the audience they need most to achieve stardom. The What’s Next model, which serves the right content to a salesperson at the appropriate moment to close or move a sale forward, can be extended to provide unparalleled post-sales engagement.

Human interaction is the basis for turning each customer into a star influencer on behalf of the brand – these person-to-person interactions are where creativity and variations on machine rules invented by a human create the surprising experiences that customers remember and share.

Here is the essential shift of context necessary to achieve personalization with limited resources: Think of your marketing, sales, and support teams as the customer’s audience. Companies have tended to think of the relationship the other way, treating the customer as the audience. The brand’s job is to deeply understand the customer, reflect the customer’s desires through the organization, and deliver the fulfillment of those needs as “star treatment.”

Think of your marketing, sales, and support teams as the customer’s audience. The brand’s job is to deeply understand the customer, reflect the customer’s desires through the organization, and deliver the fulfillment of those needs as “star treatment.”

The star experience is based on a series of actions, literally what the expected next step in the marketing and sales funnel, laid out by company leadership and tested through interaction with distributors and customers. A rigid and unresponsive customer experience will always fail because every customer and all the sales and marketing people who interact with them brings different criteria for success. Every star is unique and wants to be treated as their own end, not simply the means to revenue.

The star treatment is a form of mass customization. Applying available content to telling a personalized story based on targeting factors. The next step in the evolution of on-demand markets will require breaking down content, processes, and the measurement of success into micro-steps that can be personalized more efficiently.

Rise of the Augmented Worker

The rise of the machine intelligence is widely seen as a threat to human employment. We see a new challenge for human workers, an increased focus on service and care, which will extend far beyond familiar caregiver roles, such as assisted-living for seniors and physicians’ assistants using AI to replace doctors in many clinics. Doctors are now freed up to spend more time with emergent and chronic care patients – they are not disappearing, just moving to a different level of caregiving.

The next generation of care-delivery roles will be the interface between highly efficient supply chains and customers. Market research firm IDC projects that the combination of customer data and artificial intelligence will create 471,819 new jobs this year, as people augmented by machine learning fan out to improve customer experience in novels niches, adding $1.1 Trillion in new revenue top the economy by 2021.

The business of caring will include marketing, which must understand and anticipate customers’ needs during pre-sales engagements, sales staff that modulate the delivery of marketing content and personal messages to the customer, and a wide range of post-sales services. For example, many direct-selling distributors provide personal training services along with the products they sell. Markets are fusing products, services, and human functions into a continuous customer experience in which the salespeople play essential supporting roles for the organization and customer.

Winning and keeping customers, not just conversions is will be the defining challenge in sales during the 2020s. Every company will need a process that preserves its brand and policies while supporting the flexibility required by customer-centric personalization.

Brand Consistent, Human Creative

How can a branded organization interact with a constantly changing cast of human contributors to their sales and service experience? Since the commercial World Wide Web was introduced in 1993, the rigidity of corporate boundaries has been under assault and C-level executives have agonized over finding and keeping the best talent engaged in a sea of mobile workers.

We suggest “What’s Next.” The idea is simple: Use the brand’s existing marketing content and sales processes to analyze what is effective and racking the variations introduced by individual salespeople during their interactions with customers. A machine learning platform trained to understand the process and measure how variations impact sales outcomes watches all marketing and sales activity to find the most effective variations. Successful variations on the steps are rolled into organization-wide best practices delivered through the brand’s marketing content and sales processes.

It is not necessary to throw away the playbook your company operates with today. By launching a new level of customer-centric care using existing marketing content and sales processes, an organization can minimize upfront investments to free more resources that can be applied to filling content gaps, upgrading and expanding sales communication channels – leading toward an omnichannel customer experience – and find the optimal sales/support-to-customer ratio to maximize average revenue per customer. The challenge is deciding to change from a long feedback cycle to a short one, a finger on the pulse of your market every day.

What’s Next can be applied from the first encounter with a prospective distributor by a direct selling company, extending the onboarding process into the pre-enrollment. For example, LifeVantage, which recently launched a new Gig Economy Group platform-based app for distributors, engages prospects through an app and, at enrollment, sponsors help download and install it on the new distributor’s phone.

LifeVantage is optimizing its sales interface through the app to address every prospect, customer, and distributor touch individually, based on its existing best practices. Incorporating distributor choices about which message to use with a customer at a specific part of the funnel provides the company with guidance about where to invest in new content, improve training programs, and increase revenue.

Start Before Day One

The most successful training programs begin before the employee’s first day and last months after many companies consider their hires fully onboard. At LifeVantage, the app allows training programs take over from the sales experience through the same tool the enrollee experienced as a prospect. Depending on their experience level, the new distributor can start with more or less brand and product training – it’s their option to skip ahead to the core work the app does, to manage the customer relationship. That feedback informs training program development.

On Day One, the LifeVantage enrollee enters and starts communicating with up to 10 prospects, substantially increasing the probability of a sales in the first few weeks. As those customer interactions become more specific, such as focused on a particular product, the LifeVantage app suggests additional product knowledge training to ensure distributor success.

Throughout the onboarding, the machine learning platform observes the distributor’s sales activity and compares it to the brand’s established processes. If the distributor ignored product training that, because of customer interest is becoming a gap in their sales ability, the platform suggests additional training.

The platform also helps to compose successful text and email messages based on phrases and words that convert well for other distributors in the network.

Sponsors and management can receive alerts about changes in one distributor’s progress, which they can address through one-to-one conversations, or to performance changes across the entire network. Working from a simple dashboard, marketing, and sales leaders can create new content and messaging suggestions, testing them in real-time and receiving feedback from the field within hours.

The outcome is a comprehensive, well-aligned worker-customer experience. The two roles, worker and customer, have tended to be treated as separate experiences, but in the era of personalization, when every participant can observe and comment on the values they expect to be realized by a company, worker and customer’s experience will shape the brand’s reputation.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

Personalization Advantage In On-Demand Markets: Direct Sales Or Retail?

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The economy is going on-demand, following consumers’ desire for immediate delivery of whatever they want. The sales landscape is erupting with innovation like Kilauea volcano, wiping out businesses that fail to adapt. The way out of the swath of destruction is personalization based on consistent content marketing and sales messaging. Is your company in the path of creative destruction or leading the way with technology to rapidly personalize messaging, test results, and share best practices across the organization?

Consumers have embraced personalization of sales experience, as well as product and services delivery to the home. They are also seeking more home-based work opportunities. More than 44 percent of Americans are adding side-work, or “gigs,” to enhance their income. More consumers welcome local expertise when considering a purchase and more people will be seeking part-time work. On-demand markets create both growth and distributor-development opportunities for direct selling brands. The flexible and in-home business model is becoming the norm.

Retailers, including Amazon, Facebook, and Walmart, are moving rapidly to bring the customer journey into the home, too. Amazon has begun deploying the Alexa voice infrastructure to facilitate in-home ordering, digital locks to provide secure home delivery, and, even, offer medical services. Facebook partnered last week with on-demand home services companies Porch, HomeAdvisor, and Handy.com to offer in-home services tied to products sold and delivered to the consumer. WalMart this week introduced Jetblack, a text messaging order service that will bring products to the customer’s home in hours in hours.

Direct selling and retail brands both face the onslaught of e-commerce, which is eroding the advantage of physical retail as pre-sales customer interaction shifts to digital devices. Trade and business publications frequently announce the end of retail, a claim that should be seen in context: e-commerce accounts for only 10 percent of U.S. retail revenue in 2018, according to eMarketer.com.

For example, Amazon reportedly “owns” 90 percent or more of online sales in home improvement tools, skin care, batteries, golf, and kitchen and dining accessories as of early 2018. However, as a share of the total market, Amazon converts only 10 percent of sales in these categories.

There is plenty of maneuvering room to counter e-commerce with personalized sales and service in the physical world. Resisting the change, though, will lead many companies into dead-ends. Sales experience is fragmenting due to the rise of technology, particularly mobile phones, and the consumer’s developing sophistication and dependence on social influence when buying.

Direct sellers and retailers alike will eventually follow food delivery, home services, and e-commerce into intimate relationships with the customer that start and end in the home. Direct sales companies cannot allow retail to get ahead in the race for individual customer experience. One-to-one selling remains a necessary part of the sales process.

The face-to-face advantage

Face-to-face selling is still alive and well, but it cannot ignore the digital personalization challenge. No longer will a single sales message work for every customer. Direct sellers, who enjoy the advantage of building on personal relationships, will need to craft their messages to deliver better customer experience than retail. Since retailers must first attract customers to their stories, direct-selling strategies are advantaged in the social marketplace. Distributors can develop friendships online to grow their business and forge strong local communities on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and other social networks with the same level of investment of time as a major brand.

Source: eMaketer.com

The online threat, nevertheless, is existential for consumer products and services companies that fail to recognize change and invest to build personalized and one-to-one customer experience. eCommerce will reach 15.1 percent market share by 2021, claiming an additional $365.68 billion in revenue, mostly from retail stories.

Recognizing that they could be consumed by the digital lava rolling through Main Street in cities and town around the world, retailers are not standing still or playing golf in the volcanic smog. Retailers are leading the charge into artificial intelligence to win a personalization advantage, spending the largest amount of any industry, $3.4 billion in 2018 on cognitive systems to augment their online and in-store marketing, according to market research firm IDC.

The Boston Consulting Group reports that retailer expectations for personalization are very high. In a survey conducted during 2017 by the firm, two-thirds of respondents said they will see a six percent increase in revenue from personalization spending. Half of the respondent retailers with more than 25 employees said they were putting at least $5 million into the machine learning technology last year.

Both direct selling and retail will depend more on personalization to convert sales as mobile-native generations age and become the largest group of workers.

“Over 70 percent of retailers are trying to personalize the store experience. That’s never been higher,” Forrester ebusiness and channel strategy analyst Brendan Witcher told AdWeek. “The reason is because so many customers respond to it. We see nearly three out of four consumers responding to personalized offers, recommendations or experiences.”

Success starts before the sale

Direct sales’ challenge is to stay in front of digital marketing efforts by retailers, which can be accomplished by building best practices within an organization and disseminating them using automation. Pre-sales communication, starting online or in-person, must become a focus of investment to ensure messaging is consistent and relevant. Using machine learning, an enterprise content platform can analyze messages and propagate successful content and sales steps to sales representatives using mobile devices.

Brand discovery also increasingly takes place online. Direct selling marketers must develop campaigns that drive and qualify leads. Content platforms then hand leads off to representatives using automated sales process coaching to deliver all the context to present a personalized experience to the prospect. From the first to the last, every touch must reinforce the brand message to successfully close a sale and establish a long-term customer relationship.

Consumers today do more research, check facts and customer reviews, as well as depend on conversational confirmation of their buying decisions than any previous generation. Often, engaging with a brand, retailer, or distributor is the last step in the process. Marketers can respond with better pre-sales content that develops trust with consistent messaging through the entire customer journey.

Machine learning-coached sales reps can step into the digital engagement at critical moments to add the human element that establishes trust, something retailers cannot do during their sales process today. Feedback captured by representatives sitting with the customer gives the smart platform hints about how to personalize the experience, refining the suggested content to share and messages the distributor can use to move the sale forward.

“The key to closing deals is presales’ ability to shape conversations with the client to position the company’s solution as the ideal ones,” wrote McKinsey’s Homayou Hatami, Candace Lun Plotkin, and Saurabh Mishra in the Harvard Business Review.  “This approach is not about developing a ‘smoke and mirrors’ pitch, but rather investing the time to have a deep understanding of the client’s needs (met and unmet) and then highlighting those elements of the solution that can address them.”

The foundation for a consistent brand message begins with mapping every touchpoint in the sales journey, from pre-sales and discovery through content marketing and sales process steps. The “attribution modeling” process allows management to identify what it expects will happen at each step and, using a machine learning-content platform, rapidly test and revise messages. Instead of launching content one or twice a year, then waiting to see its impact on sales in quarterly or annual results, it can be adjusted as fast as software updates are today.

The speed of software is the new pace of sales in the era of personalization. Companies are beginning to adjust to this accelerated communications cadence, and the tools for in-home personalization are catching up to web-only interactions. The combination of digital and personal engagement is a breakthrough moment in sales.

Personalization is the path out danger for retailers and direct sellers that don’t want to wait for the lava of change to erupt under them. For now, the one-to-one selling community has a sustained advantage over retailers who must attract the customer to their stores. If retailers’ investment in machine learning and personalization goes unchecked, direct selling could fall behind despite their strong foothold in consumers’ homes.

Content In Context: Cultural and Generational Awareness

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Five generations co-exist in the economy and they live in thousands of cultures. Digital technology has wiped out traditional boundaries while culture has become more influential than ever. If a company cannot overcome generational and cultural differences, it will be relegated to a short life with little revenue. Future business growth will bump into ceilings created by differences in values and communication styles more often than those resulting from limited access to markets.

One-to-one selling is uniquely placed to grow revenues by testing cultural differences using rich libraries of content remixed by salespeople using customer feedback and assisted by intelligent platforms. Personal interactions in direct selling are the richest source of feedback available in business, allowing direct sellers using the data to see through values barriers long before the competition. Retailers can survey consumers endlessly, but their insights cannot match the feedback captured by a salesperson sitting with a customer in their home or during an intimate online conversation – before, during, and after the sale.

Younger workers have established that they want a mission in their work, and frequently opt for less traditional rewards than their parents to achieve flexibility in their lifestyles. Just as when they make decisions as a consumer, Millennial and Gen-Z workers value experience above compensation in many cases. The first thing a direct sales company must do with the next generation of distributors is establish that the mission behind what they sell aligns with social and environmental goals of new enrollees.

The development of onboarding and training programming, as well as customer-facing content that will be presented by a salesperson physically or through virtual channels, are a minefield in which cultural and generational mistakes can drive down distributor retention as well as decrease lead generation and conversion rates. Unfortunately, many companies think of their communications strategy – their narrative – as a black-and-white problem when they live in an age of rainbow perspectives.

Well-articulated stories told by a company about who they are, what they do, and why they do it, are the foundation of a global multi-generational communications strategy. Success grows out of variations on core themes expressed in subtly different language that maintain authenticity. Think about the difference between Baby Boomers’ idea of “cool,” Millennial’s use of “savage” to mean the same thing as “cool,” and teens today who say “It’s lit” or “Gucci” to confer coolness.

Every cultural interface is a communications challenge, one that marketers and sales leaders can transcend with solid data about which messages perform their expected role in the sales journey.

Messages must be mixed by the sales representative, who uses corporate content like a disc jockey selects music, to deliver a personalized human experience to the customer in their home, a coffee shop, or a retail store. For the first time, they can do it efficiently using machine learning librarians that serve content in context during the training process, sales process, as well as pre- and post-sale to keep customers involved in the brand’s community.

Budgets don’t need to be broken trying to cover every possible angle on a story from the start. An intelligent content delivery platform using distributor and customer feedback allows management teams to make incremental investments to address new labor and customer opportunities.

Look beyond the format trap

Many organizations see the cultural challenge in the simplest terms, too simple for their own good. They believe one generation or geography favors a different form of communication than others. Often, managers will assert that only 30-second, 60-second, or two-minute videos are acceptable to audiences, when the average time spent watching video online totals 2.6 hours daily, just minutes below TV viewing time.

Beware certain conclusions. Test what distributors tolerate when training and examine customer fall-off within videos as well as whether they drop out of the sales process after viewing a content asset. Distributors in learning mode may spend hours with a company’s videos each day. Each audience has different expectations that can be mapped to understand what message and format to suggest.

Differentiate your organization from most companies that invest heavily in just one communication strategy, albeit delivered in many channels. Plan a content strategy that spans cultural differences. Leaders who think their people can consume information in just one way can fail to engage new workers and customers, particularly when values-based products and services are discussed.

“By making the same message available in multiple formats (thus increasing the number of times you communicate a message), you’ll ensure that you reach all workers,” The American Management Association wrote, for example, when explaining communication preferences. “Silents [born 1925 – 1946] and Baby Boomers [born 1946 – 1964] may appreciate verbal communication about changes in policy or procedures, while Generation Xers [born 1965 – 1980] and Millennials [born between 1980 and 1996] may prefer the use of e-mail, instant messages, or corporate broadcasts.”

Content libraries have swollen with documents, video and audio programming, interactive training, and myriad other formats because of globalization. Marketers struggle to keep up with the demands of a multi-national presence, but that investment is the only path to ongoing growth. New markets are established using content programming that defines value propositions and introduces direct sales reps and customers to new products or services.

Think of the emerging cultural challenge as being like localization of content, the practice of translating text, video, and application software into many languages. Having five, 10, or 15 versions of the same message in different digital and physical formats does not necessarily help a company communicate effectively across borders. The English versions of a message must be translated without offending important cultural sensibilities into 80 or more languages to address the major linguistic markets around the world. The translated messages say virtually the same thing, but with unique tone and style that fits a target market.

Content targeting is not just a matter of agreeing with the language and values of the distributor and of the customer, it must also facilitate their continuing conversations. Their personal relationship may be built on cultural or generational bridges. A smart content platform can assess the identity of the distributor and their prospect based on distributor-entered data and sculpt a set of messages that genuinely connect these people during a sale.

We’re different, and not

The reality managers face as personalization comes of age reaches beyond acknowledging differences in values, they must also recognize and build on cross-generational and cultural similarities.

For example, different cultures emphasize the importance of leadership as an achievement in work. According to a survey by Universum in 2017, Millennial professionals in Nordic countries are far less likely to want to become leaders in their organizations than their U.S. and Mexican counterparts. Work-life balance is a driving concern for younger professionals everywhere and so many say they avoid leadership roles, but older people see stress as a natural component of their day. Across generations, however, the desire to be part of leadership varies by only four percent, from 61 percent of Millennials, 61 percent of Gen-Z, and 57 percent of Gen-X.

Content assets designed to emphasize different aspects of the company’s values or product attributes can plug critical gaps between cultures and generations. These gaps must be identified through real interaction with employees and customers, in effect probing the sensitivities of target groups. Distributors using a mobile app can relay back to management qualitative data that augments quantitative feedback to help them judge where to invest in new content or adjust the sales processes.

Intelligent content platforms are ideal for this kind of data-driven content and sales management experimentation. New programming can be rolled out to a narrow target audience, tested and, if the content leads to better engagement or increased conversion, deployed more widely.

The cost of poor cultural fit within an organization amounts to between 50 percent and 60 percent of an employee’s salary, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Poorly engaged distributors sell less and move on faster, both of which drag down profits.

Without a clearly articulated company mission, values, and policies, organizations have no basis for achieving a fit. They can’t explain themselves and there is no benchmark from which to measure cultural alignment with distributors and customers. We suggest the attribution modeling strategy, which maps the sales process step-by-step. That effort is the basis for beginning to engage distributors during onboarding and throughout their career with the selling network. It provides logical paths to content reuse in support of customer communication.

Having built the distributor and customer relationships on smart content management services, direct sales leaders can use the inherently social nature of the business model to go “viral” with market-defining messages. New geographies can be accessed through distributors who, for example, emigrated from a country that the network would like to test. Targeting messaging to these bridge distributors allows management to explore the limits of their content investment and build new programs confidently.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

Distributor Retention: Accelerating Time-to-First Sale

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Direct selling is challenging work, but the distributors who achieve early success do build long-term businesses, often as a sideline to a day job. The emerging gig economy presents direct selling companies a rare opportunity to claim more revenue across markets traditionally dominated by retail. As workers become more mobile, many are opting to mix gigs instead of dedicating themselves to one job from 9 to 5. In this mobile and values-centric environment, in-home sales and personal networks can connect virtually any product or service to a market.

The first step for a direct selling company is to win and keep a distributor. A new enrollee’s initial success can create a large network of personal relationships that convert into sales revenue. When their first sale converts within 14 days of enrollment, during the “Golden Two Weeks,” a new distributor is likely to stay with the network for an average of 72 months. That six-year commitment substantially improves the direct selling company’s revenue. Direct selling training company ServiceQuest estimates a 10 percent increase in retention grows revenue by 49 percent over 10 years.

Younger workers also tend to start seeking alternative employment if they don’t make an immediate connection with the company’s mission while finding sales success. Mobile apps connected to intelligent content and training platforms will be the primary point of customer engagement in retail and direct selling within five years. As much as 50 percent of customer relationship management already takes place in the cloud and market researcher IDC predicts spending on artificial intelligence to deliver personalized customer experience will grow by 46.2 percent CAGR between 2016 and 2021.

The next step in the evolution of one-to-one selling is personalization, the delivery of targeted training to distributors and, in turn, helping them to present exactly the information each customer will respond to with a purchase.

A personalized experience that begins when a distributor enrolls in a direct selling network unlocks early sales success. Using a What’s Next approach to a brand’s sales process, sponsoring distributors working with smart mobile apps can address the recruit daily, even hourly, to keep them taking the steps toward a first sale.

First Impressions: Action and Purpose Ignite a Business

It’s also time to for direct selling to put the attrition issue behind it and point out that success in every business is hard to achieve and grow. Reinforcing the business challenge a new distributor is starting in combination with simple actions a new distributor can take is essential to moving the tentative recruit to confident selling. It’s not necessary to apologize for high attrition rates, the industry can focus instead on making more distributors successful.

Keeping a recruit today is difficult in every industry. Annual churn rates in retail are 53 percent compared to 56 percent in direct sales. Only traditional employment models have an advantage in hiring and even they face higher attrition rates when the economy nears full employment – 26 percent of the U.S. labor force quit their jobs in 2017, up from 20.3 percent in 2010. Moreover, 90 percent of entrepreneurs fail within five years. Success is hard-earned and, regardless of the form the company takes, an entrepreneurial success will never be easy.

At LifeVantage, Gig Economy Group’s first partner app takes the new distributor through a brief series of mission- and policy-establishing video programs then turns to get them to enter their first contacts as part of Day One activities. Then, a What’s Next process kicks in to get the distributor selling instead of finishing their contact entries and resting.

The LifeVantage app suggests actions the distributor can take with each new contact based on selections made in the app about customer interests, from buying health products to joining the network as a distributor. Drawing on a growing library of video programming, the LifeVantage app composes an introductory message to a new contact and attaches the appropriate video to share. Critically, this is not done in the background, rather the distributor can review and change the message and media selected or discard the suggestion.

The distributor’s choices help shape their understanding of LifeVantage’s process, and if they make changes or refuse the suggested content, the Gig Economy Group platform records the results. The platform can mine changes to identify improvements in messaging, so even a brand-new distributor will start to reshape the company’s sales process with improvements if their changes convert more sales. Final decisions about content and messaging rest with sales and marketing management, who are able to deploy budget based on real-world results that change conversion rates.

Contacts become the raw material for a conversation between the new recruit and the company, with activity and conversion data available for both to review. No contact is left untended. The app reminds the new distributor to make an initial outreach and to follow up at each step in the sales process. Customer feedback collected by the distributor also shapes the ongoing content and messaging selections targeted to each prospect, driving personalization from the first interaction.

The first day with a sales tool must result in first actions taken for three to five contacts at a minimum to convert a sale within two weeks.

Activity Breeds Sales

With a measured sales process, improvements can be rolled in daily to test and revise messaging, sales cadence, and training. The distributor’s experience is one of an intense focus on their process, reinforcing their psychological need to see investment in their potential.

In today’s sales environment, pre-sales activity is vital to closing a new customer. Content management platforms can push the right content, but without feedback gathered from customers by the distributor, it is easy to push a prospect out of their comfort zone. When a customer’s interest level goes down, the distributor is encouraged by the platform to revert to informational engagement, building the prospect’s trust using video and suggested messaging that identifies objections that can be addressed.

Failure to develop and keep a personal connection is one of the seven reasons salespeople don’t close deals. Using the wrong closing strategy, failing to listen, and the representative’s own insecurity also contribute to poor conversion rates. A smart platform that encourages feedback can adjust the suggested closing strategy, prompt the rep to listen and record feedback, as well as build product knowledge and confidence.

Yet it still comes down to making the calls that close the gap between prospect and sale. If the direct selling company does not help the new distributor follow up, providing the right messages and variations that address customer feedback, the rep will not close the deal and, if history is any guide, start looking for their next opportunity – one where they close in the first few weeks.

The proof, however, is in conversion. That requires extensive follow-ups, which many salespeople never have the determination to complete. An app can coach distributors through these steps until they become second nature.

With so many economic activities moving to the “edge of the network,” where people meet and interact with one another in person and through social and other digital channels throughout the day, direct sellers have an enormous opportunity to increase their share of the market. The tools are ready and people are living mobile lives that invite frequent trusted interactions. Is your company ready to move a new enrollee to their first sale in the “Golden Two Weeks?”

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

Product Knowledge Is Retention Power

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As companies like Best Buy add local service and home consultation, direct sales organizations must train distributors on every aspect of the products they sell to remain competitive. The personalized in-home selling trend will reach every corner of the consumer market over the next five to ten years, placing the direct selling one-on-one customer relationship advantage in mortal peril. Product knowledge training is the basis for improved sales, faster product and business process innovation.

But most companies struggle to keep their reps trained, let alone ingest the ongoing feedback from the field that can ignite higher revenue and profits. Too often leadership’s expectations are based on ageing practices that are obsolete in the era of cloud services.

As selling becomes personalized, mobile, and mission-based in the hands of values-driven generations, the tools needed to successfully mine the data created through these interactions are the highest priority for a sales organization. In direct selling, the imperative to gather and analyze feedback from representatives is rising in the face of aggressive retail investment in personalization, not to mention improving distributor retention rates in an increasingly mobile workforce.

Product knowledge is the foundation of customer engagement and trust. “87 [percent] of consumers said they would be unlikely or very unlikely to make a repeat purchase with a retailer that provided inaccurate product information,” according to Shotfarm.com, a Chicago content management company. Each sales rep who flubs a fundamental product knowledge question because they are selling outside their area of competence due to poor coaching runs the risk of permanently losing a customer for the brand.

Combining content management with machine learning to deliver personalized product training to salespeople in the field redefines the challenge of keeping product knowledge up to date. “Smart” tools assist in building product knowledge and coach salespeople toward the products with which they are most likely to succeed. As marketing, training, and sales content libraries grow, machine librarians will be poised to help distributors tell a consistently expert story about products.

Augmenting a sales rep with appropriate content and sales process coaching ensures a brand can deliver the right content to a curious prospective buyer at the right time.

Today, sales and marketing leadership is challenged to rethink the training process to accelerate sales conversion rates while building higher customer retention rates based on distributor engagement in the branded selling process. Every salesperson-customer relationship is unique and companies today must treat them as such. This is a new opportunity, one born of the information era and utterly foreign to traditional sales strategy that uses one training program across the entire company.

Starting with achievable expectations

It is not necessary to try to train everyone in an organization about every product in the same way. Instead, training is conceived as a personalized experience that addresses the specific learning and selling styles of the salespeople in the field. This groundwork lays the tracks to personalization of customer experience.

Tracking sales activity using automation turns organization-wide product knowledge training into a tractable problem. Since direct-selling representatives tend to specialize in niche areas within a brand’s product portfolio, targeted training allows sales management to fine-tune product knowledge investments. Knowing precisely which products a direct sales distributor is trying to sell, machine learning enabled content platforms can identify knowledge gaps and serve up training that addresses the individual distributor and their customer’s needs.

Instead of aiming for 100 percent product knowledge across the company, the platform allows leadership to treat product knowledge challenges in isolation, using the sales coaching process to move distributors toward complete competence in their area of interest. People in the field experience less frustration because they receive more information that is relevant to them, which leads to a higher retention rate among distributors. That product knowledge competence extends to the customer experience as distributors become deep experts who can answer every customer question quickly and accurately.

When great distributors stay, they keep their customers with the company.

Diane Valenti writing for the Association of Talent Development suggests managers develop “return-on-investment” expectations as a baseline for training investments. “Assuming that sales reps are applying what they learned, you can measure whether what they are doing is getting results using sales metrics that you already have in place,” Valenti said. “Don’t invent anything new.”

Direct sales companies can start out with the content and process they have today and modify it, rather than try to reinvent themselves from scratch. Existing training video, audio, and documents can link to assessments of how well a sales rep has learned.

As a starting point, marketing and sales teams in direct selling organizations can base assessments of distributor competence on individual sales success, not just the all-up sales results for the organization. By capturing more feedback from each rep, such as asking them review questions a part of a daily or weekly briefing delivered to their phone or having them record customer interest level after each conversation, leadership can move quickly to refine training programs at the individual content asset level to improve overall performance.  This investment leads to improved conversion rates and average revenue per customer as the likelihood customers will become dissatisfied due to knowledge gaps in the organization is reduced because each representative is well trained.

Resisting investment in training is costly. Ignoring feedback from reps can be deadly. The Center for American Progress estimated that organizations with poor training see $13.5 million in costs due to poor skills, employee disengagement and higher turnover. For a direct selling network with 20,000 distributors, the direct costs and lost sales could be as high as $270 million annually.

Product knowledge training based on extensive feedback and personalization is a source of product and marketing ideas, not just a means to sell.

The ideas captured by listening intently to reps responding to customer needs can be used to redesign products and improve the customer journey. Insight at the field level will determine which companies win. Boston Consulting Group research in 2015 found that fast innovators are more successful, bringing new features and categories to market more quickly to generate as much as 30 percent of revenue annually from new products. Survivors of creative destruction don’t eke by, they thrive.

Successful training based on knowing “What’s Next?”

The training process itself is the map to organization-wide improvement.  An attribution modelling strategy systematically allows a company to lay out its expected sales journey and compare the resulting training and sales feedback with initial assumptions to pinpoint content and training gaps. The steps in the sales journey become a template for “What’s Next” in the representative’s day long after they have complete product knowledge. The same information used to train a rep can be repurposed to support their selling.

Product knowledge training linked to sales success or the setbacks experienced by reps in the field is also a leading indicator of customer issues. Following up on customer conversations with training material related to the engagement keeps the rep focused on learning and providing even more feedback about a product’s perceived value.

Automation leaves managers more time for understanding feedback, rapid, intuitive analysis of sales data, and improved content programming and product development. They can deliver more of what the field needs: Guidance and better resources. A What’s Next-based sales platform managed by a machine learner can experiment with the content delivery process, analyze the impact of small changes on conversion, and translate the findings into new sales journeys, as well as mine feedback for delivery to the product team.

A content platform with machine learning keeps the information stream to the distributor concentrated on what drives sales success for one person and one product, or an entire brand with minimal human oversight.

By making product knowledge the fulcrum of customer engagement, with personalized training for the distributor to help them move to better outcomes, a direct selling company reinforce its one-to-one relationship advantage in the market. Ultimately, the What’s Next design anticipates the customer’s questions, identifying their needs to give the representative greater insight into what drives the sales decision for each prospect.

The question every sales leader must confront is: “Are you confident that your sales team knows everything about your products that the customer will want to know before buying?” The answer at each step is found in laying out what the expected next step toward a close and measuring for success after each engagement.

The 70,000-ft. view of sales results is no longer sufficient in the personalized marketplace; managers must use automation to move along with their salespeople at the edge of the network.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send an email to schedule an interview.

 

Closing A Critical Gap: Marketing and Sales Alignment

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The central role of one-to-one relationships in direct selling places unique demands on marketing and sales leadership. Together they can succeed spectacularly but misalignment reduces conversion rates, wasting valuable investment in lead generation and customer experience.

As sales practices evolve to emphasize pre-conversion communication and trust-building through mobile apps, direct sales companies can leverage their unique human connection with customers for unprecedented advantage over retail and online brands. Historically, however, marketing and sales have competed for resources within network marketing organizations instead of working together to establish and disseminate best practices.

Competition between marketing and sales teams opens a costly divide within a company that limits the ability to develop and share best practices. If marketing messages fail to move the sales process forward, valuable leads are lost. Sales teams in direct selling often rely on their marketing partners for training content, company messaging to distributors and, in many cases, sales collateral designed to convey overarching value propositions which are not communicated consistently during the sales process. Without iron-clad data to prove replicable sales success or that points to where conversions are lost, the quest for change can become futile.

Beyond creating discord in the messages prospects and customers receive, the struggle for dominance within direct selling companies hits the bottom line hard.

Organizations with Strong Marketing and Sales Alignment Outperform Their Peers in Current Metrics. Source: The Aberdeen Group

A lack of alignment between marketing and sales messaging results in 14 percent lower achievement of sales goals annually and lowers customer retention by 11.1 percent, the Aberdeen Group reported in April 2017. When sales and marketing collaborate successfully, Aberdeen Marketing and Sales Effectiveness analyst Andrew Moravick writes, companies “grow revenue at 64 percent greater rate” than poorly aligned organizations.

As retail and online marketers increase spending on personalization in 2018 by 54.2 percent year-over-year, according to technology market research firm IDC, direct sellers need to tighten marketing/sales alignment to keep up with the best brands in the world.

It is time to augment direct selling content and customer relationship management systems with machine learning, often referred to as “Artificial Intelligence.” These tools arm direct-selling distributors with the right content for a specific customer at the most opportune moment in their journey.

Customer-centric, mobile-first context is king

Content rules when it is delivered at the right time. Content without context, like a confusing value proposition, turns off the customer.

Sales has changed, placing a premium on providing pre-sales information based on situational awareness of the customer’s needs. As companies develop huge content libraries necessary to support a rich customer journey, machine intelligence can serve as a context-aware librarian that retrieves the message, video, or collateral needed. The salesperson’s intuition can blend seamlessly with a machine learning platform if the final choice is left to the human in the field.

In addition to targeting the customer’s needs, a next-generation direct selling platform requires awareness of the salesperson’s strengths, product knowledge, and relationship with a prospect. Depending on the level of trust established between representative and customer, different content and messages can save or close a sale.

Marketing and sales leaders should work together using an attribution modelling strategy when starting out with content platforms using machine learning. Harvard Business Review authors Werner Reinartz and Rajkumar Venkatesan write that the attribution modelling approach “allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle, and understand its role in the revenues that ultimately result.”

Leadership can begin by identifying a single target customer persona, then mapping out their ideal customer journey and the rules for handling each critical engagement expected to move the sale forward. This exercise compels marketing and sales leaders to talk about the customer-salesperson relationship based on a mutual understanding of the company’s customer persona, the target’s needs, and established product value propositions.

The extra ingredient that transforms this work into an alignment tool is the use of measurable events within the marketing engagement and sales journey to establish accountability for each team.

Growing measurable best practices

A high degree of humility is required in the face of real-time reporting. Feedback from the field shines a light on critical content marketing gaps, as well as a faulty sales strategy. Organizations can use machine learning-augmented content platforms to move from annual or semi-annual content development and sales planning to a quarterly or faster pace to optimize their sales processes.

At first, the mapped process represents a collective but untested agreement. With the help of a machine learning algorithm that applies the rules to find, contextualize, and deliver marketing content that supports the sales process. Real-world feedback generated by salespeople in the field will tease out multiple customer journeys. After that a fine-grained range of personae can be addressed with targeted content, expanding the addressable market without high incremental content production costs.

When designing a target customer journey, the teams can start with an inventory of existing content and map it to key conversion points in the sales process to establish accountability for message consistency. Sales leaders can be confident that poor content targeting assumptions during the planning stage will be clearly visible in the resulting metrics while marketers will be able to point out how content is misused in the field. These trade-offs can energize the entire company.

The attribution modelling strategy also gives leadership the ability to assess how marketing investments impact revenue generation. Simple rules for attribution can be used by a machine learning algorithm to adjust messaging cadence, the order in which content is presented at key touchpoints in the customer journey. As distributors add their feedback about customer interest and objections through a mobile app, the algorithm can be enriched to deliver insights that drive an organizational emotional intelligence unprecedented in sales.

Prior to cloud-based big data services, the initial rules and data generated by executing the rules would have required predictive analysis to be useful, but a machine learning algorithm can accelerate and simplify the process for management.

Customer feedback drives rapid organizational optimization

As distributors choose different messages and adjust the language they use when communicating through a machine learning-enabled content platform, the algorithm watches and propagates the what works best to improve outcomes across the entire organization, from headquarters to the field. By testing relentlessly variations in the order content is presented, suggesting new text through email, SMS, and social interactions, sales and marketing leaders assisted by a machine learning platform can evolve best practices informed by actual distributor decisions.

Moreover, poor sales performers in need of more training, specific types of coaching or improved product knowledge will be identified more easily than in direct selling’s largely manual sales reporting process. An investment in content targeting exposes the opportunity to improve individual distributors’ sales skills, as well as enrollee retention and sales conversion rates.

Sales and marketing alignment grows revenue overall and keeps customers buying. The Aberdeen Group reported that “Best-in-Class” companies, which see consistent year-over-year reductions in the length of their sales cycles and improvement in company sales quota achievements, “have complete or strong marketing and sales alignment, compared to just 45 [percent] of All Others.”

Direct selling companies that embrace machine learning platforms must be prepared to iterate based on the discoveries of weaknesses in their initial, idealized process. The rewards are numerous, from lower training costs and higher distributor retention rates, growing revenue and long-term customer engagement.

As data accumulates, each customer engagement, in email, in-person, online, broadcast, and the phone is revealed to be more, or less, important than leadership expected. Content and messaging gaps will become obvious because conversion rate changes are immediately reported by the system.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.

Onboarding: Turning Training Into First Sales

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Direct-selling organizations have some advantages over traditional sales organizations during employee onboarding. Instead of being locked into a Human Resources-defined schedule, direct-sellers start people off in the field with experienced sponsors who collaborate daily. They can start to deliver training in many geographic locations every day.

Each direct-selling advantage also comes at a cost, especially as software and content delivery become central to onboarding. The lack of an established training program reduces consistency, which results in less effective communication of the brand and sales messaging, leading to poor conversion rates at a critical phase in the new employee’s experience.

If a sponsor fails to perform their training role, making the new distributor familiar with and committed to the company’s mission, the recruit is likely to leave within weeks of enrollment. A novice direct-selling representative, like 73 percent of employees who are brought onboard through a Human-Resources directed program, wants to start with an orientation to the company’s mission and policies. Early comprehensive orientation is essential to a new recruit’s sense of confidence.

Direct-selling organizations that have continued to rely on manual training tools and sales reporting leave management detached from individual training outcomes, unable to respond to gaps in the onboarding process with new content and process refinements. The result is an industry-wide distributor retention rate that trails the economy as a whole. Meanwhile, retail and brand marketing companies are rapidly adopting digital training tools, raising the stakes for direct-selling brands that want to remain competitive in the age of personalization.

According to Training Magazine, 22 percent of companies increased onboarding spending in 2017 while 17 percent added to ongoing product knowledge training expenditures. The same survey also found that sales onboarding using online tools was embraced by 91 percent of sales organizations last year, compared to 80 percent in 2016. Sales managers using platform technologies are tuning into each challenge faced by new reps and tracking how new hires perform overall to optimize their training programs.

Paper- and sponsor-based training don’t deliver the feedback required to continually improve onboarding outcomes. With emerging sales and personalization platforms direct-selling companies can transform sales training into sales activity, not hypothetical presentations and sales exercises, from the first day a distributor joins.

Onboarding First Action: Sell

Recruiting is expensive. Attrition steals valuable sponsor-distributor time that could be spent on revenue-generating selling. Quantum Workplace estimates that the cost of recruiting a new employee averaged $4,129 in 2017. For direct sales organizations, a lost recruit is a tax on the sponsor and the company. The fastest-growing sales networks focus new, often impatient, distributors on selling activities from Day One to reduce attrition.

The new distributor who makes a sale in the first two weeks is likely is likely to stay engaged with the company for six years, while almost all their recruitment cohort will depart the program within five years because of lack of success. Success breeds confidence in the program. Direct selling companies have 90 days to ensure their overall return on recruiting investments, they must engage with new distributors through mobile-first tools that maximize feedback and personalize training.

Sponsor-distributors also need tools to help engage, train, and retain new enrollees. Every moment spent on non-selling activity during that time is potentially wasted, so sponsors don’t have time to watch over each recruit’s shoulder to ensure they follow the training process. Platform-based software using machine-learning can step in to support sponsors during the onboarding process, offering the trainee supportive messages and video to address day-to-day process issues. Mobile tools connect sponsors to recruits based on data-driven insights about enrollees’ progress against goals, ensuring they receive human support when it is most needed. This augmented human training approach can extend systematic training for months, exceeding the Society of Human Resource Management’s recommended three-month minimum.

Blending real sales activity with content and sponsor messaging that reinforces company values and policies is an antidote to the high attrition rates in direct selling. The experience of selling a product can turn a doubtful recruit into a long-term contributor. Because most sales reps fail to follow-up with prospects more than once, rather than the five to six times engagements required to close a sale, early training must reinforce the importance of daily sales activity. Those actions and the conversions produced will sell the enrollee on the importance of following the company sales process.

The keystone of early sales success is consistent personalized training delivered in real-world sales tools.

Sandy, Utah-based LifeVantage provides new distributors free iPhone or Android apps that begin onboarding at enrollment, including real sales actions they can take on Day One. Serving a customized stream of video training combined with tasks such as entering contacts and sending outreach messages, the LifeVantage App encourages new distributors to take steps that help speed initial sales. The LifeVantage app alerts distributors immediately when a prospect responds to a message or media shared, an important factor in converting sales. The Harvard Business Review reports that sales follow-ups within an hour of an expression of interest are seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation that moves the prospect toward a closing.

Constant Improvement

Today’s economy exacts a harsh toll on companies that fail to adapt. Younger workers are more inclined than previous generations to move on from organizations that cannot demonstrate a commitment to their success. Because it takes as long as eight months for employees to achieve their full productivity, “technology can save onboarding from itself” by extending training at scale, as Robert Ferrazzi, CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2015.

No company can afford to have an informal and unmeasured onboarding program. The rise of new technology platforms lets managers, marketers, and data scientists look into their onboarding process to understand where it works and where it falls down.

The combination of onboarding and real sales activity creates previously unimaginable incentives for the new recruit to concentrate on their training. Tools like the LifeVantage App provide actionable feedback about the new distributor’s progress. Smart salespeople know what to do with actionable information, they will use it to sell.

See You In San Diego

Gig Economy Group and LifeVantage will be presenting at the upcoming Direct Selling Association 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, June 17 through 19. We look forward to meeting you at the event, where our team will be exploring critical questions about the future of direct selling. Schedule a demo or reach out to meet and talk at our suite during the event.

We would also appreciate your joining our blog team for a discussion at the event about the challenges facing the industry. We will be writing about direct-selling in the weeks before DSA 2018 and would like to include your thoughts in our reports. Send email to schedule an interview.