Have you ever thought of asking a trusted friend or acquaintance to come along and critique one of your home parties? It can be really valuable to get some honest feedback on the good and bad points of your presentation. Two events this week got me thinking about this.

Firstly, I participated in a focus group. For two hours I got to give my good, bad and sometimes ugly opinions about one of the local big-box stores. I had many things to praise about their operation, but several ongoing concerns as well. It struck me how useful this information could be to them, assuming they were able to get past the natural desire to get offended at the criticism and instead see it as an opportunity to review their practices. Especially if they heard the same concern from several respondents, it might be time to consider a change.

Secondly, a friend of mine recently attended an in-home party. Upon returning home, she got straight in touch with me to tell me about how awful the presentation was! The company shall remain nameless – however, I will say that it was a cooking demonstration, and leave you to fill in the blanks. The consultant was, to put it nicely, lacking in charisma. She suffers from severe food allergies and as a result hasn’t tasted any of her company’s food products and couldn’t provide feedback on them to the guests. She kept pushing a dish made with chicken broth on a vegetarian, even when it was politely and repeatedly declined. When anyone expressed the slightest interest in any of the products, she jumped on them to ask for a booking. My friend said the consultant seemed simultaneously desperate and disinterested – an odd combination. She ended her rant with a lovely compliment to me: “Now I’ve been to a few of your parties, I know what makes a good one!

I got me thinking: What if the consultant knew how people were really feeling after her presentation? What would she do with that information? Has she ever asked anyone for feedback? Would she go on the defensive, or be able to take a good look at what was working and what wasn’t? Something to internalize and ponder….

In my direct sales career, there are many small incidents that don’t seem worthy of a blog post all their own, yet I’d like to have a record of them for posterity or amusement. So I hereby present a random assortment of recent happenings:

* I have a repeat customer with a shopping compulsion that she hides from her husband. She refused to give me her credit card number over the phone the other night, because her husband was in the vicinity and would overhear her. I can’t imagine keeping secrets like that from my spouse. I feel a bit guilty that I’m somehow enabling her…

* When I do booths at fairs, I often put out some crackers and dip as a way to entice people to stop and check out my display and engage them in conversation. At a recent fair, a Board of Health inspector came along and told me that was illegal and I had to throw it out. I understood his position and happily complied, but I thought it was strange that I’ve done this at 30+ fairs before without anybody ever commenting on it.

* I was unloading my car in the rain before a recent party. I opened my trunk to grab the next round of products, and a cat leaped out! I would have got a shock if I’d been driving home and had suddenly discovered I had a live stowaway souvenir from my hostess…

* At another recent party, the glass screen door slammed behind me as I had my hands full of products, hard enough to knock some tchotchkes off a shelf in the next room. Everyone came running to see if I was OK. Fortunately the damaged teapot and photo frame didn’t appear to be of great monetary or sentimental value, but I felt awful! I am meant to be leaving the hostess with additional items, not breaking them!

Recently I was at a fair when a pair of women approached my booth. They began admiring the products I had on display and chatting in an animated fashion. I quickly gathered that one of the ladies had previously hosted two parties with another consultant with my company. However, that consultant left the company a while ago, and since then the customer had not found another source for the products.

She was excited to find me and began filling out an order form; then, after very little persuasion on my part, she changed her mind and decided to host a party with me instead. I love these repeat hostesses, because they know what the deal is and how hosting works. Typically they have a circle of friends who also like the items and keep asking when the next party is going to be!

It got me thinking about what happens when a consultant quits. Usually when that happens, it’s because they feel they have exhausted their pool of leads. It’s rare to find someone who resigns with a calendar full of bookings! However, even with nothing scheduled, they presumably still have a database of past customers and hostesses. Those people liked the product enough to purchase it or be a hostess in the past (they weren’t all just doing the consultant a favor!). When their source decides to leave the business, are they left high and dry?

A couple of local women who were formerly with my company actually came to me and passed over their customer contact lists when they left the business due to changing circumstances. They sent a message to their customers explaining why they were leaving, and introducing me as the person their customers should now contact for products. I thought this was a very responsible decision, and I felt honored to be chosen (especially as I was not the consultant’s direct upline in either case, but just someone they felt would be reliable and provide good service). If you ever quit your direct sales position, I highly encourage you to “Think of the customers!” and do the same.

This is also a prime example of why you should try to stay in your fellow consultants’ good books. It doesn’t cost anything to be helpful and supportive of others in your wider team or company family, and you never know when they might quit and send business your way!

How many times do you sit down to make calls and you just get people’s voicemails? It can be very frustrating to leave message after message and not connect with a human. It could be customer service calls, or calls to get bookings, or calling leads for your business opportunity. Whatever it is, it can be tough to figure out what to say in that message that is going to make the person want to call you back.

This article by Al Pittampalli entitled “7 tips for leaving great sales voicemails” has some great suggestions. I plan on using it to come up with a script specifically for when I get an answering machine. Then I’m going to hit those phones and see what results I get!

You may recall that I interviewed Party Plan Pat a few months ago on my blog – you can read that interview here if you’re interested. Now she has kindly returned the favor! So head on over to her fantastic site to read Patricia’s interview with me.

Here’s an example of going above and beyond the call of duty in the spirit of memorable, unexpected service to your customers….

I was tallying up the orders after a recent party when I overheard two of the guests talking in the kitchen. Debbie was saying that she had purchased two pieces of a coordinating collection from our company a few years ago, and had then booked her own party with another consultant in order to complete her collection with the third item in the set, the most expensive. However, by the time her party date came around, the product in question had been retired! She was heartbroken, because that was the entire reason she had decided to host her own party.

Having overheard all this from the next room, I then eased myself into the conversation and inquired as to the name of the item she coveted. I recalled the name from a catalog a few years ago. I explained that I have a network of other consultants I am in contact with, who share leads, ideas and requests from discontinued products. I asked if she would like me to try and track down the item in question, and she agreed.

I posted the request and within 24 hours, a trusted fellow consultant replied that she had one available. An agreed-upon sum of money changed hands between the customer and the other consultant – I earned nothing from this arrangement, except goodwill. Today we received a thank you email from Debbie:

“I received it today. It looks great. I’m one happy customer. Thank you both so much.”

What lessons can be learned from this experience?
* It pays to keep your ears open.
* Develop connections with others in your company that you can call on for assistance and pool resources with.
* You can completely change a customer’s attitude towards your company with one interaction.
* Word of mouth recommendations and a positive mental association between your name and good service can be worth far more than money.

• Wait until our fourth communication to tell me it’s an outdoor event.
• Organize a pointless in-person planning meeting for vendors.
• As the organizer, turn up late to said meeting.
• Make us switch rooms three times for this meeting.
• Have us drive 20 minutes each way for this meeting, only to be told the set-up time and the inclement weather plan – both of which could have easily been communicated by email.

Let’s hope the actual event goes better than the planning has! Suffice it to say, my expectations are low…

Have you ever tracked where your parties come from? It can be a worthwhile exercise and can help you refine the best places to concentrate your marketing efforts. I believe it is Karen Phelps’s site where I first read about the idea of tracking your parties to see how long each chain lasts.

For example, I met Annie at a fair I did at the hospital where she works one Spring. At the fair itself I didn’t sell much, and I had to waste a lot of time and energy dealing with a bounced check from a customer – so when I thought about the event afterwards, it left a sour taste in my mouth. But Annie booked a party, and from that original contact I ended up with 9 other parties and thousands of dollars’ worth of sales…all from people I never would have met if I hadn’t booked Annie.

Or there’s the more recent example of Caroline – I set up my display in a restaurant foyer for their “girls’ night out”. Caroline took my card, and called me a few days later to order a small item. Even though the order wasn’t large, I tried to provide extraordinary customer service, going out of my way to deliver the item (and probably canceling out my commission in the process!) However, Caroline was impressed and told several friends. Three of them then contacted me about the business opportunity, and I’m working with them now, and Caroline wants to have a party in her swanky new city apartment, introducing me to a whole new clientele.

So if you’re feeling like you are stuck in a rut or can’t break out of your circle to get any bookings, remember: it might be that next call or one single contact you make at a playground, mall or fair that turns your fortunes around!

Direct sales is always touted as one of those businesses where you control the schedule and the hours. That’s true to a degree, in that I could avoid scheduling any parties this weekend so that my husband and I could get away together for a much-needed romantic break. However, I am not in control of people who don’t call me back when they say they will! As a result, my weekend was interrupted by my work more than I care to mention, and my poor husband is a very long-suffering guy.

I had a party last week which the hostess promised to close by Thursday – I heard from her at lunchtime with a question, and then not for the rest of the day, despite me leaving two messages. For reasons outside my control, this party HAD to be entered by Friday. That is how I found myself leaving messages from my cellphone while driving on an out-of-state turnpike, and logging on from a distant Starbucks to check if she had emailed me. As they day went on and I hadn’t heard from her, my stress level mounted. I was going to have a lot of annoyed customers if this party didn’t get closed.

Eventually the necessary phone call came, just as I was heading out to dinner with my husband. He patiently sat there in the parking lot which I scribbled down the hostess’ order on a scrap of paper, hoping I was hearing her correctly over the background noise. But she didn’t have her credit card number on her, so I was still missing one significant piece of information and needed to connect with her one more time that night. We ate our dinner and returned to our hotel room, where all thoughts of a relaxing evening watching a movie together went out the window. Instead my husband watched the baseball game on TV while I frantically typed in her order, dealt with a customer check made out to the wrong person, and generally got more and more stressed.

Finally it got to 11pm, my husband was fully-clothed but snoring on the bed, and this woman was still not answering her phone despite many messages. I had to make the executive decision to put her order on my own credit card in order to get the party into the system. I hate doing that, but not doing so would have resulted in many angry customers not receiving their products on time. She called me apologetically the next day, and promised to send me a check. I’m grateful that the money arrived in today’s mail, and thankful that my trust in her was not misplaced. Still, it was unnecessary drama I could have done without.

During the weekend I also had to handle impatient leads requesting more information, past hostesses querying things about their deliveries, and several team members with what they perceived as business crises. I had to deal with so many phone calls and emails, it was crazy. Maybe I should have ignored them all? But my conscientious streak makes it impossible to ignore requests for help, even on a romantic getaway. I might need an intervention! “Hello, my name is The Traveling Saleswoman and I’m addicted to providing exemplary customer service, even at the cost of my personal life and sanity.”

Without me even realizing it, the one year anniversary of the creation of this blog passed on Monday. Looking back, it’s been an interesting year of ups and downs – quite literally, when I look at the peaks and valleys on my statistics graph! I am glad that it seems to have made people laugh, and hopefully made you think as well. I’m happy with the friendships that have resulted from this blog and my promotion of it on Twitter.

I just want to take a moment to address the most common question that I’m asked – namely, “Which company do you work for?” Writing here has been very therapeutic for me, allowing me a forum to express my true feelings that would not be possible if I were writing under my real identity. My intention is not to increase my personal sales or recruiting through this avenue. Suffice it to say that I have other methods of doing that under my real name that are proving to be most effective! But I love having a venue in which I can vent, whine, complain and roll my eyes without it coming back to haunt me! So if I have my way, I plan to conceal the Traveling Saleswoman’s true identity for quite some time.

In conclusion, I would like to leave you with this warning, courtesy of Planet Mom t-shirts: