Do You HAVE to do Parties?

Yes, you need to do shows.

This is coming from someone who doesn’t necessarily love the process of doing shows. That is, I absolutely loathe hostess coaching. Gotta do it, but I’m one of those sellers who wants to tell my hostess exactly what to do, have her do it without question, and then I show up at her door at the assigned time to a room full of excited prospects.

Not happening. But, that’s the topic of another blog. Today, we’re going to talk about why you need to do shows, even if you ALSO take the water to horse by "door to door" work, or other selling efforts.

It’s simple math – shows will almost invariably pay you more per HOUR for the simple reason that you walk into a room of pre-qualified prospects because they accepted the invitation to come to the show. That doesn’t mean they’ll buy, but it does mean you get a chance to see if your product fits their needs. It’s the audience that matters. A bigger group that someone else assembled is GOOD for your business.

Let’s do some math. It won’t be bad, I promise!

Suppose you call around to individual customers, or go visiting offices, or whatever, and collect enough orders to put in a show. For our example, lets say you spend two hours a day for five days one week and you get $500 in orders. I’ll pick a 25% commission rate since that’s common. So, you earn $125 in straight commission. You could also quantify soft costs of mileage, and soft gains of getting hostess benefits if you are allowed. But, to keep it simple, we’re going to use the $125 commission for $500 in sales for 10 hours of work.

That’s $12.50 per hour.

Now, you have a show for that Friday night. Spend half an hour prepping, half driving, two hours at show, half driving home,. That’s 3.5 hours. And you sell $500. So you earn the same $125 for 3.5 hours work or $41.67 per hour.

It’s almost a no brainer, all other things being equal. That is, you may get show leads from both efforts, meet consultants from both efforts, etc. You know from my previous post I’m a believer in working your business outside shows unless you have more than enough leads to suit you.

But, I want to make sure you get the biggest benefit of the show…SOMEONE ELSE does the initial prospecting for you. And prospecting is time consuming, no doubt about it. So, suck it up and do those shows, even if they aren’t your favorite part of the business!

SALES…the Life of the Party Plan

Kimberly Bates, the Better Seller Coach
http://beabetterseller.net/
On twitter, you can follow me @thebetterseller