As a direct sales company owner, team leader or direct sales manager, there are many leadership challenges you will need to overcome to build a successful direct sales business. While these include topics such as recruiting, training, marketing, recognizing your team, prospecting, and a variety of others; this article will provide strategies to assist you with successful direct sales team building.

# 1—Leadership Challenge: Analyze Team Behavior Traits.

The results you gain through adequately supporting your team (advice, training, and goal setting) highly depends upon the individual's behavioral style. Does your team member prefer sales strategies to be broken down systematically? Alternatively, would your team member prefer to create steps herself to accomplish a team goal? Does she thrive by jumping in and figuring it out as she goes? Is she bogged down by details? Does your team as a whole lean into the strengths of each member? These are the questions to ask to ensure that your support strategy compliments your support recipients.

# 2—Leadership Challenge: Prevent Your Team from Running Hot and Cold.

Some team members expend all their energy in bursts, followed by none of their energy in bursts. This is a common and vicious cycle, as the energy crash can negatively affect sales bookings, home parties scheduled, and recruiting results, and ultimately lead to personal discouragement. As a team leader, you can better support your team by creating a higher level of consistency in your team's daily, weekly, and monthly direct sales routines. Coach your team to be self-paced and to recognize and create consistency.

# 3—Leadership Challenge: Keep the Ball Moving Forward.


After holiday home parties and New Year's resolutions begin to fade, your recruits may do the same. Team motivation is one of the most important leadership challenges that each direct sales leader will address. As a strong leader, we must be proactive to keep our team engaged and to encourage them to not only meet, but to also exceed their sales goals. Remember to frequently remind your team to check in with their “WHY.” Why are they doing this? Why are they in this business? Why are they connected to their team? Lastly, keep the business fresh and fun. Humor reduces stress.

# 4—Leadership Challenge: Bingo! Running Effective Team Meetings and Retreats.

Do your team members often leave your team meetings or team conference calls motivated only to become quickly deflated later? Does your direct sales team go home sounding charged up, but post-meeting produce little to no change? What went wrong?

Ultimately, this is a case of goals being too distant and not concrete. The actions were not defined and specific. The problem with a lack of concrete ideas is that it leads to disengaged team members.

Alternatively, is it also possible that you are saying the same message over and over and having a numbing effect?

The team might begin to play what I call, “meeting bingo” based upon what the leader says repeatedly at every meeting. This is not very different from the drinking games played at political speeches, where audience members take a shot or sip when a buzzword is repeated. Similarly, what we get with the repetition of empty buzzwords untethered to a measurable action step is a short-term shot of feeling good and nothing but a hangover the next day!

There is a big difference between saying “increase home party bookings”, “increase sales to meet your monthly goals or to advance in the compensation plan”, and a statement with measurable action and meaning such as, “meet a quarterly goal of 10 new home party bookings and become a Team Leader by April 30th.” As you recite motivating objectives for each meeting, be sure to include a monthly or weekly plan to break down that goal into manageable bites.

In a work relationship, there is always the worry that your information will be betrayed. I don't understand why people in organizations are so political and so difficult to work with. Office politics means you always have the feeling that you'd better watch your back.

It's a hard way to live.

There is another way to work. The basic principles are different, and the outcomes can be completely unique.

If you can move into a work environment where your success is not threatening other people, where the Leadership is attempting to help you because your success is their success, where people who perceive themselves as being beneath you in the organization are not attempting to pull you down but are attempting to get themselves higher, and in the process are helping you do better.

It sounds a bit like a fairyland,, but it is the way that direct sales, Multi Level Marketing (MLM), or Network Marketing works if it's done properly.

When you start with a company that has an MLM style Royalty payment you do so because you like the company, believe in the products but, most importantly, you have someone that you are happy to work with. YOU get to choose who it is you work with.

You will be doing direct sales and speaking with customers and prospects. It's a bit hard to get around the fact that the direct sale industry means you have to sell things. If you want to avoid being involved in sales and speaking with people, then this is not the industry for you. If, on the other hand, you like personal contact, like talking to people, and get pleasure out of seeing people getting benefits from your products, then maybe you should take a good hard look at the direct sales industry.

Many of the big direct sale companies who distribute their products through independent distributors pay a good commission on personal sales. That can be often up to 50% because the company is not carrying the overheads of traditional companies and the company is not paying a retainer or a wage to sales staff. 

The company only pays on production,, so it can be generous in paying a profit share to you for each product you sell. If you are good at what you do, then this sort of company structure can be very lucrative.

The other aspect of this sort of business is that strong interpersonal relationships are formed. As you build your own skills, you are encouraged to put together a team of your own. You learn what to do, and you teach it to your people. 

Once they establish the skills,, then they can make some money for themselves and gather other people to work with them. Each member of your team will be helped to build their own teams, and so it goes, until you have a giant network of people you are working with all round the world.

Obviously, this is a good way to make money,, but it goes deeper than that. You hear the “old timers” talking, and see in films, about how people who have been serving overseas together in the armed forces form deep friendships. They can be out of contact for years and then, when they meet again, the time falls away and the experiences are as fresh as if they happened yesterday.

I have pondered on this. My belief is that this is a part of a life-changing experience.

When there is something that happens in your life that brings fundamental change and takes your life in an entirely new direction, then you do not forget it. The people who go through the experience with you will always be special to you.

In the direct sales industry you can take someone who is trapped in a job, hating the work, frustrated with life in general, and show them new ideas, give them new hope. You can offer an opportunity for them to take control of their lives and to be free to choose the life they dream to live. If you work with them through this time, then profound bonds will be formed that can last for the rest of your lives.

Working in this manner can make you a lot of money. That's great. It can also make you many friends, people who have improved their lives immensely and who will always remember that you helped them to get started, and you helped them when it all new and confusing.

Direct sales is a method of business you,, but it can be about lifestyle and people and living a life that you enjoy.

To find the sort of people you can expect to share great experiences with, and who have shown good leadership skills in building their own and their team businesses, simply search for people who have successfully been running their Direct Sales business for ten years or more. Because if they have been successful, and their team has stuck by them for all these years, they must be doing something right!

Throughout my coaching programs, I stress the importance of keeping your team members involved. Building a team means you keep recruits responsive, engaged, and energetic about the business.

Above all, this principle is the most important aspect to a successful business. Even more significant, I believe, than recruiting.

Why?

You can recruit thousands of team members. You can spend all day, every day recruiting. But if those members lose interest and quit, then you are spending your time in vain.

I encourage you to recruit with the end goal of supporting your team. And this goes for as many people you sign up (small or large numbers).

Leadership Development: Host Live Team Trainings

There is a certain level of fear when you realize you have just sponsored a team member. Now it is up to you to teach them how to be successful. In fact, this fear is what keeps many people from being successful in their business. 

They refuse to learn how to train other team members. I have heard the excuse, “How can I teach someone when I am not successful yet myself?” The best response I give? Get over the fear. Every leader once started exactly where you are now! Leaders had to step up into a role they may not have been comfortable with at that moment.

Leaders look to build a performance driven, direct sales team that delivers results. Plain and simple.

The only way to achieve this goal is to start hosting live team trainings every week. It is not enough to send your recruits to the weekly company call, or to send them to their back office. They need you! There are some wonderful (and free) live video services that you can use to host your own live trainings. I encourage you to get online today and find a service that suits your needs.

Training your team will be a giant factor in developing your leadership skills.

Once you achieve a weekly training schedule, I encourage you to teach you up-and-coming leaders. Teaching your down line leaders to train will prove invaluable to your whole organization.

Here is an example of a problem that live trainings will solve:

You have just sponsored a person onto your team. But, they were mistaken and thought they could 'get rich' by signing up and not working. Live trainings teach them how to work without forcing them to do anything more than “show up”.

Your basic responsibility as team leader is to support individual team members. A one-on-one relationship recognizes and encourages good performance. Its principal objectives are improving well-being, resolving problems, and developing the team member.

Your end goal is to have a personal relationship with each team member. But not to become so overwhelmed that you have no time left to keep building your personal business.

Solution:

Weekly live trainings. As the leader, you must be available to have training for at least a half hour every week. This will include question and answer time. Every week, your team will recognize that you are there to support them. The team grows when new members can join the training and support already in place.

As the leader (at ANY level) you have a responsibility to assist and develop team members. Remember, first you are a trainer and teacher. As a leader, counseling your team members is necessary to keep them motivated and expanding.

Leadership Development: Maintain a strong personal business, a large team, and still enjoy life!

Being the leader of your team is going to come with some adjustments on your part.

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