These days, I have seen increasingly more leaders talking about home party businesses. Which has led me to wonder whether this type of business model is building a comeback. There seems to be a shifting of the winds in the direct selling industry. Over the past several years the trend has been a movement away from hotel meetings and home parties to a 100% online attraction marketing based model. Then something interesting began to take shape about a year ago. I started to hear more and more top internet network marketers touting the significance of offline marketing.particularly within home meetings. Now the interesting thing is that numerous leaders are not promoting traditional home party businesses; however, they are applying the same principles to the building of their particular business.

Typically when we consider “home party businesses”, names like Avon, Scentsy, Mary Kay and Pampered Chef come to mind. That landscape is changing and it’s also changing rapidly. Highly internet savvy corporations like ViSalus, Numis Network and Organo Gold are encouraging their distributors to put quite a lot of focus into hosting regular in home meetings as part of their overall marketing strategy. In fact the center piece of the ViSalus 4 step marketing plan is the in home “Challenge Party. ” The tools and technology are employed to direct prospects toward this in home setting.

What is even more intriguing will be the people you may encounter at these home parties. In recent weeks I’ve heard Cedrick Harris talk about numerous home parties he has led for both himself and his team, even though Cedrick has been a 7 figure internet entrepreneur for years. Even last night I took note of Ray Higdon publishing pictures of his home party setup as he was getting ready to present his company. Again, Ray has been the highest earner in his company for the past two years.

The shift we are seeing in our industry comes primarily from the sustainability for a distributors business. The internet offers incredible leverage that enables a distributor to bring in a lot of people into their business immediately. The Achilles Heel of this process is the retention and duplication within the organization. When you look at the top earners in most any home business, they are not the internet marketers, but they are instead people that actively use the one on one principles of the home party businesses.

The face to face aspect becomes so important, because this is where leaders are truly developed and the business building skills and mindset are implanted in to the DNA of those leaders. So the question becomes: “Can this be done online? ” To a certain degree this kind of interaction can occur on the internet, especially with the conferencing technology available today; however, there are certain abilities like product demonstration, that are best acquired within a live training environment. As a general concept, those who use home parties and other face to face meetings have higher quantities of team sales, greater percentages of duplication and higher retention rates inside their organization.

In the end, the question is not whether online or offline is the greatest. In either setting, you as a distributor must be able to market yourself and generate your own leads. A home party with no one in attendance is as unprofitable as a website with no traffic. The real issue is actually blending the leverage of the internet with the proven success of personal interactions that has already been demonstrated with home party businesses for some time.

The resurgence in home party businesses is due in part to the ability of the small business owner to develop stronger relationships through face to face interactions. Even with those strengths, it is important that anyone looking to market home party businesses, learn the methods and strategies that are most beneficial for developing interpersonal connections with prospects and customers.

Author: ArtyCull

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