Working Smart

Avoid Burnout: Helping
Your Salesforce De-Stress
by Karen Phelps

We all know how rewarding running a direct selling business can be for our consultants. But as with any other career, there can always be times of stress. How do I know this? Because, I've been there myself.

One of the reasons I was so attracted to having my own direct selling business is that I could work around my young family's busy schedule. I believed this was the perfect business for me, and it was.

Since I held three to four parties a week and maintained a top leadership position with my company for 25 years, I speak from experience when I say sometimes life was a breeze and sometimes it was chaos. There were weeks, months and even years when I was so busy and overwhelmed that I sometimes wondered whether having my own business was really worth it. I finally decided I needed to do something to keep my business and my personal life more in balance.

Becoming a direct selling leader was an awakening for me. I thought I could just go merrily along doing the same things I had been doing as a consultant. It never really occurred to me that I was not only going to hold my parties, but I was going to train and mentor my recruits, hold meetings, write newsletters and develop leaders.

My responsibilities seemed endless. There were many times I felt pulled in a hundred directions. My husband and small children needed me to be there for them. I had recruits who needed me. I had hostesses and customers to call, invitations to send, newsletters to write, orders to send in, meetings to prepare for, and on and on and on.

I recall the last few weeks of a trip contest when the clean laundry never made it out of the laundry basket. My reasoning was: At least it was clean; it didn't matter if it was folded and put away.

My Type-A personality wasn't helping me any either. I refused to allow people on my team help with meetings or training, because I was afraid they couldn't do it as well as I could. Finally, a few years into my career, I came to my breaking point. I knew I would have to begin to run my business more efficiently rather than continually letting my business run me. I found ways to make the business work in conjunction with, rather than against, my family's lifestyle.

Here are some simple techniques to share with your salesforce that can help each of them maintain control of their life and their business.

1. Suggest that your consultants set up a real home-based business. This includes a place that they can file paperwork and all the materials that come with the business. Your distributors should consider having a separate phone line dedicated to their business. The voice-mail message should clearly state the office hours. When the office is closed, allow the calls to go to voice mail rather than forcing your consultants to get up from the family meal to answer the phone. When I began implementing this procedure, my husband became much more open to me being in the business. I had finally convinced him that I could go without answering the phone at mealtime, although I have to admit it was really hard for the first month.
2. Encourage your consultants to prioritize. Teach your salesforce to make a list of what's important to them-their daughter's soccer games, date night with their spouse, being available when their children get home from school-and then use the list to determine how to schedule their business hours.
3. Suggest your consultants set standard business hours. Earning a substantial income from a direct selling business takes work. Every consultant and leader needs to identify the days or evenings they will actively hold home parties and stick to that schedule. One of the priorities in training my new consultants was to help them control their calendar and work only when they were scheduled to. Many consultants and leaders are afraid to lose bookings so they wind up scheduling a chain of parties on nights they want to spend with the family. Both the family and the consultant become disgruntled with the situation.
4. Train your consultants to delegate responsibilities. This was a biggie for me. It took me awhile to realize that by allowing others to help me I was paying them the ultimate compliment. I was saying to them, "I believe in you, and I trust you and your input." Once I began to delegate responsibilities for weekly trainings and meetings, my life became easier.
5. Help your consultants simplify training. It sounds obvious, but if training is to be duplicated it needs to be easy to duplicate. Since I was holding three or four parties every week, I began to train more new consultants at my parties. I would often have the new consultant arrive an hour before we had to leave for the party so we could have a short training. I would give her a sheet of everything she needed to watch for at the party and made sure she took a lot of notes. Then we would review after the party and discuss how I booked parties, sold more products and offered the opportunity to others at the party. I also trained my team members to take their new consultants to at least one or two parties with them.
   
   Our weekly trainings were attended by all new consultants and taught by leaders and future leaders. The sooner we included a future leader into the training program the sooner she learned to become a leader. Your leaders' teams will explode when they have easy-to-duplicate trainings and get everyone involved.
6. Encourage your leaders to hold monthly meetings. I scheduled a monthly meeting with my downline leaders, and we used this time to plan our monthly regional meeting. We planned each aspect of the meeting and each individual was made responsible for part of the meeting.
   
   These meetings were so well planned and so much fun the attendance was incredible. Instead of dreading monthly meetings and all the planning that went into them, they became something I looked forward to because I wasn't doing all the work. I could observe the personal growth of my leaders as they participated in the monthly meetings. Holding other leaders accountable for different parts of the meeting also made them want to make sure their team members attended.
7. Help your consultants keep their passion alive. It's easy to "major in the minors" in direct selling, and once that begins to happen burnout may not be behind. I found it really helped me to stay focused on the positives. I developed a list of what I loved about my company and the benefits of my direct selling business. Staying focused on the positive aspects rather than the negatives of the business was my way of keeping a good thing going for 25 years!

Your consultants and leaders can live balanced, profitable, complete and fulfilled lives. All it takes is setting priorities and creating a plan and schedule. Help them take control today! Karen Phelps is a direct selling expert, author and international speaker with 25 years of personal and group success in direct selling.

Karen specializes in helping consultants and leaders reach for the top in their direct selling business with her easy-to-implement, simple, life- and business-changing techniques. For more information visit www.karenphelps.com or e-mail Karen@KarenPhelps.com.

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