- Harry Day -
A few years ago I attended a Direct Sale activity, one of those where you create a team of people that trust the product and therefore they start suggesting it to others.
The product was coffee with Reishi (Ganoderma Lucidum), a coffee that once I started drinking it, I never had stomach acidity from coffee anymore.
Many people were much happy with these products and I started created a small team of 10-20 people selling the products with Ganoderma.
Source: Author. Me while holding a training for salesman of the Company, in Verona, Italy.
Products was top-notch quality and the only scepticism from people was the fact that was instant coffee while in Italy there is the “coffee machine” or the “Espresso at the Café”.
Still, a lot of volumes were made here.
One guy that joined my team, he was a friend from the University and tried to subvert the guidelines that the Company gave us to sell and involve other people into the business. He wanted to make it more complicated, more autonomous, creating skilled people. The company always suggested to keep the sale process “stupid-simple” as there was nothing to complicate. We were selling a healthier coffee, with a great supplement inside and a great quality of coffee.
Simple as that.
Source: Author. Me during an incentive trip that the Company offered to us that performed some production parameters. 9 years an 15 kilograms ago
But he wanted to do his own education to the people from the team educating them for a one-to-one sale process that was not the case.
We were simply supposed to drink our coffee make other people taste it and suggest to change coffee brand for one or two months to check eventual benefits.
The key-word was “duplication”, so we had to transmit duplicatable attitudes, actions and so on, as our team was looking at us and “downlines” are always copying what their leader is doing.
So we had to be “product of the product”, meaning to consume the products to know their tastes and see if any beneficial result could occur to us.
Then, we had to keep the process very simple, to educate our team to stay simple and so on.
Source: Author. A night with Cashflow Club, a group that started soon after me dropping the Direct Sale activity. Sometimes, closing doors lead to bigger openings.
He decided not to follow the guidelines and since I felt some bad voices in the rest of my team, I suggested him to be little bit more humble and follow the guidelines from team-leaders with volumes up to hundreds of thousands dollars per month of selling volume. He did not accept it and since then, I have never heard from him anymore. Neither for that business nor for any other thing I even tried to reach him out.
Probably it was something that had to go that way. The only regret is that I could be more polite and less arrogant while saying some things. I think I lost a potential good friend because I took the correct position but with bad manners.
