Uniqueness Versus Duplication in Direct Sales

Anyone who has been involved in direct sales over seven days has heard the term “duplication.”

Duplication has its place, such as form letters, flyers and catalogs, but that’s pretty much where duplication ends.

If you wish to succeed in direct sales, you’re going to need to be unique. If you did only what someone else did and then trained your downline to do exactly the same, pretty soon you’d all be stumbling over one another.

I’d like to give you two examples of stumbling over one another. A woman ran ads in the newspaper. She in turn taught her downline to run ads in newspaper and these women in turn taught their downlines to run ads. All of a sudden there were eight ads for the same company in the help wanted section all saying almost the same thing. What was happening is a prospect would call every phone number until they got an answer. This is tripping all over each other. Ads are great, but use another option. There are daily papers, weekly papers, shoppers, magazines, ezines, display ads on websites, text ads on websites, plug boards and more. Find an area that is not saturated with everyone duplicating the person before them.

One more example I can offer are work at home mom message boards. I do belong to a few. There are probably a hundred out there. What I’ve seen happen is that several distributors from the same company jump to answer questions and place ads on top of each other in the classified section. Message boards are great, but join theme specific boards. I belong to a crochet board. I belong to a scrapbooking board. I belong to a recipe board and I belong to a general parenting board. This gets me away from what everyone else is doing.

Each of us is different. Trying to duplicate someone else can never be successful as we are different from them. Our results will be different. I can talk to strangers all day long and love every second of it. Other people are really not comfortable talking to strangers. Trying to duplicate me would not be enjoyable. I know someone who does three or four home parties every week. That is just not me and I wouldn’t be in direct sales if I had to do those parties.

Direct sales is about sharing the business and products with others. That’s what you’ll duplicate. Where and how you’ll market will be dependent on what you enjoy and what will keep you unique.

Audrey Okaneko has been in direct sales since 1983. She can be reached at audreyoka@cox.net or you can Become a Tupperware Consultant

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