The Amazon Effect And What Your Direct Selling Company Needs To Do About It
Posted by naxumadmin / November 30, 2017
So have you bought anything on Amazon lately? If you’re like me and the majority of your customers, Amazon has become the go-to place online as the retail gateway to buy and share products with others.
Whether it’s their free shipping prime program, customer reviews, aggregated vendors for pricing, or customer service, there is no denying that this online giant has set the gold standard for what retail looks like online in today’s marketplace.
People find products they like and naturally share them with one another on Amazon. The buying behavior is so simple that folks order from their phones on a whim recommendation.
So the question is, what are you and your direct sales company going to do about it?
You’ve probably already fielded questions about:
- ‘Does this product really do what you say it will do?’
- ‘Why do we have to pay for shipping in today’s day and age?’
- ‘If I have trouble what’s your return policy?’
- ‘Isn’t this product the same as XYZ on Amazon for half the cost?’
These are all questions consumers have today, because of how they’ve been sold in an Amazon world. They have a plethora of competing products to choose from, they have reviews to make them peer feel good about the results, they have a Prime membership for free shipping, and they have stellar customer service they can trust.
So why should someone purchase from you on your website? Why should they change their buying behavior, buy from someone that does not have 11,345 peer reviews, someone who charges for shipping, someone who’s customer services I’ll have to hope is stellar?
The answer comes in the buying experience and that is where direct selling is the answer.
I would make the strong argument today that if you are not going to be a product manufacturer and just sell your wares direct on Amazon, then by God you should be a Direct Selling or MLM Company!
Why? Because there is a certain magic that only direct sales and MLM has.
It’s the volunteer army, the community, the consultants, that change the buying behavior to make it ‘worth it’
Whether your representatives are using groups on Facebook with pre-written content to engage their friends in a 30-day weightloss challenge together or they are enjoying a makeup party in a host’s home, the direct selling industry brings that human touch and group buying behavior that Amazon can never deliver on.
So what is the answer today?
Whether you primarily build online or offline, Social Media becomes key to that ‘community’ feeling all your prospects and customers have.
At Naxum, we exist to share ‘Technology To Unleash The Magical Power Of Referral Marketing’
What we’ve found in our time with clients over the last 17+ years is that today more then ever, it’s become the company’s(not the representatives) responsibility to create a platform for the representatives to perform all 5 parts of the business.
Traditional the company would be in charge of receiving money, paying commissions, and shipping product out on time and the representatives would be responsible for sharing, presenting, enrolling, elevating new people, and have those folks duplicate a set process.
We call these S.P.E.E.D.
Today the company must take the responsibility of providing the platform for all five of these representative activities.
When they do, magic happens.
Example:
Company A desires to create massive momentum in the space, so not only do they have an operations team, because of the world we all live in today they hire a content team internally as well and set up a platform to make that work.
For Sharing:
They provide done-for-you content for the members to share, whether that is in the form of images, videos, or blog posts for their members. No need to have members ‘learn’ how to blog, just give them the content on a corporate platform and have them tap and share from their phones. Same with images and video content today.
For Presenting:
Create a compelling video that invites people to purchase your product and become apart of the experience, enjoying what your company has created.
Set this up in a way where the representatives can get a notification each time someone watches it, so no matter if you’re online or offline, the representative can still follow up with a personal touch.
For Enrolling:
Make it simple for representatives to present the business opportunity. For decades this has been broken in many companies sales processes.
Current webinar technology and conference call technology has not allowed the company or top leaders to track ‘who invited who’ so there is normally no real close or call to action at the end of a group closing presentation.
Prospects hear something like ‘get back with the person who invited you to enroll’ and that just plain does not convert. This has all changed in recent years.
Today, companies like Naxum develop private label live stream channel’s online, so corporate leaders and to field champions can host company sponsored live streams on behalf of the entire company each week(or day) and actually close business.
These systems track ‘who invited who’ to the sessions and allow for the company to gather signups from all the low-hanging fruit. Of course, members still followup afterward, but the low hanging fruit has already joined the community!
For Elevating:
Have a basic certification program that every new representative can finish in their first hour of the business.
This may look like 30 minutes of videos broken up into 3-5 minute chunks with little homework assignments to accompany them.
Regardless, at the end of this training, expectations should be set, and every new representative will have taken a 5-10 question compliance quiz inviting them to build on the right path.
For Duplication:
Get involved! Not only will reports and followup tools allow the members to thrive, have the company host weekly inspirational live streams(this community is ALIVE) and regular fast-start training.
Make the field dependent on the company system and not an independent field leaders system. This way when a field leader leaves or decides to retire for a month of vacation, your business does not feel that impact.
Next Steps:
For more on real case studies of what adapting an S.P.E.E.D. process would look like, create a free demo account at www.naxum.com and book a time to meet with our staff. We would be glad to serve you with a free discovery session of a relevant discussion of real tactics you can deploy to make your vision a reality today!
To view our live stream on the topic above visit: https://www.facebook.com/naxumsystems/videos/1858508824387719/
