Tag Archives: self-help

How to gamify the recruiting process (and keep yourself in the game)

Sponsoring or recruiting new members to your direct sales team is the way to grow your business.

But many consultants find it hard to follow up with people who’ve shown an interest.

I certainly found it hard in the beginning!

I struggled with this for a while. I wanted to build my team and expand my business. I tried to make progress fast but procrastinated when I had leads. I found it hard to get a “no.” I didn’t make many follow-up calls and didn’t grow my team very much.

Sound familiar?

At some point, I decided I had to get better at following up. The way I did, it was to ‘gamify’ the process. I turned following up into a game with prizes. Who doesn’t like prizes?

How you can learn to enjoy follow-ups in your direct sales biz

First, I switched my focus from worrying about the results to my actions instead.

I started by rewarding myself with $2 in a spending jar for each follow-up phone call, regardless of the outcome. My goal was to get myself moving, overcome procrastination, and reward myself for the doing, not the result.

Once I made enough calls and earned a nice amount of $2 coins, I treated myself and my husband to a night out at the movies. We enjoyed a fabulous night at the Gold Class cinema because I had finally started making regular follow-up calls.

This first step, focusing on the actions and rewarding these actions, massively changed my attitude toward making these follow-up phone calls.

As a result, I started to make lots of calls. So when I happened to reward myself two weeks in a row with a cinema evening, my husband suggested I think of a cheaper reward.

I then moved on to jelly beans as I love jelly beans. I had a jar sitting on my desk, but I could only have one when I made a follow-up phone call.

I had to end that reward when I decided to clean up my eating habits.

So then, my teaching background came in handy, and I made myself a star chart. I put stars on a chart for every call I made, and I promised myself a nice treat when I filled up the chart! And that worked very well for me.

As you can see, I tried a few different reward systems, and they all worked.

Make recruiting easier by making it into a game. Free worksheet for #DirectSellers and #PartyPlan reps. Grab it now >>

I quickly overcame my fear of follow-up calls, overcame that procrastination, and learned to enjoy every call for its own sake.

Don’t get me wrong. I still got lots of “no’s,” but I also started to recruit more than I had before just because I made the calls!

Of course, now that I was making more calls, I was getting more practice. And just by making more follow-up calls, I got better at it. So my success rate improved, and I noticed that I was getting fewer “no’s” to get each “yes.”

And all I did to achieve this was to gamify my follow-up process. As a result, I enjoyed my rewards and learned to enjoy the process.
This is why I want to encourage you to gamify your recruiting actions.

To help you with this, I’ve created a handy printable worksheet that you can use to encourage yourself to make those follow-up calls, which will lead to more practice and, eventually, a higher success rate.

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Worksheet notes

Set yourself mini rewards for every ten calls you make. When you’ve earned five mini rewards, you have filled the sheet and can treat yourself to a bigger reward. Remember, the results do not matter – you get a reward for doing so you learn to love the process!

However, it’s still helpful to track your numbers. You’ll see that as you make more calls, you’ll get fewer “no’s” for each “yes.” Seeing such improvement is incredibly motivating.

Not to mention, once you know what your average number of “no’s” is per “yes,” you will become more motivated to make the next call to get closer to that “yes”!

Mini rewards could include indulging in a sumptuous bubble bath, watching a movie, or catching up with friends. Those things that you don’t usually take time to do but that you enjoy doing.

Once you fill out the worksheet, you can treat yourself to something bigger. Perhaps a dinner out, new clothes or shoes, champagne and chocolate, something for your home office, whatever motivates you.

It’s important to celebrate your efforts and your growth in your business. We tend to make it all about results, but to get the results, we need to put in the work, develop, and get better. Then the results will come.

I’d like to hear what you’re rewarding yourself with and how you’re going with the worksheet. Leave a comment below. Let’s build a stockpile of reward ideas!

Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly

How to beat perfectionism and learn to accept "good enough".

If you find it hard to complete things because they are “not good enough” yet, then you’re letting ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good’.

What I mean is that sometimes we have this idea of what something should be like, the perfect, and we are striving to reach it.

But you never will, because perfection is impossible.

I want you to give yourself permission, right now, to not be perfect. None of us are perfect and none of us ever achieve perfection. And that’s OK.

And this idea of perfection and reaching perfection is holding people back, it’s incredibly paralyzing but if something isn’t perfect than that automatically means you’ll have failed.

You are Good enough

What you need is to adopt an attitude of “good enough” or even “bad but finished”. That way there’s so much more scope to be successful and there’ll be less fear of failure.

If your business Facebook page isn’t perfect, that’s fine, as long as it’s good enough.

If your emails aren’t perfect, that’s okay as long as they’re good enough and you get your message out.

Your exercise routine probably isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t matter as long as you get yourself moving regularly it’s good enough.

Buying a new car is fraught with decisions and for many people causes anxiety. But you don’t need to find the perfect car! You just need to find one that is good enough for your purposes.

Pareto Principle

Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle? It’s also known as the 80-20 rule which states that it usually takes 20 percent of the time to complete 80 percent of a task. However, to complete the last 20 percent of the task, it takes 80 percent of the effort.

So at 80 percent completion, can you perhaps declare it “good enough”? What else do you need to do to finish right now? Knowing that that last 20 percent takes 80 percent of the effort and that perfection is impossible, it makes no sense to continue working away at something that is already good enough.

Experience the freedom of doing it badly

Perfection is especially detrimental to creativity. Let me give you a quick experience of this. Grab a piece of paper and a pen. I want you to come up with 5 great ideas for booking games. They must be new ideas, creative, and innovative, and perfect. You have 5 minutes….start now!

Do you have any ideas yet?

Okay. Grab a new piece of paper and write down 5 bad ideas for sponsoring people in your organisation. Just 5 ridiculously bad recruiting ideas. You have 5 minutes again….go now!

Do you have ideas now?

What happened? If you’re like most people, you had a lot more ideas in the second activity because you gave yourself permission to come up with any and all ideas. Most people find it easier and more fun than the first activity, where you were looking for great ideas. Trying to be great or perfect stifles creativity. It paralyzes you.

Now what would happen if you actually put on a timer for ten minutes, wrote down every bad idea for sponsoring games, recruiting seeds, conversation starters, etc. that you could think of? I think you’ll you would write down plenty of bad ideas and some good enough ideas that could actually work.

Letting go of perfection is freeing.

Stop perfectionism from holding you back from direct sales success.

Giving yourself permission to do it “badly” lets you get on with the job and get things done. And by getting things done you keep the momentum going.

So how do you ensure that what you do is actually good enough? By focusing on the process. Try to make the process better, don’t focus too much on the end result. For example, by making your parties and events more enjoyable for you, for the host and for the guests, you will increase sales, bookings and recruiting leads.

By doing the process well, the result will be better. So that’s where you want to focus your improvements, not on the end result.

Because focusing too much on the end result makes you needy, locks you up, takes the joy out of the process and leads to perfectionism.

And perfection is the enemy of good and the enemy of done.