Work At Home Business Options

Last week I gave a brief overview on what an online Direct Sales Vendor Fair was. This week, I am going to go more in depth and tell you how your home business can benefit by participating in an online vendor fair.

When you participate in a vendor fair, you are exposing your home business to customers and other vendors who you normally wouldn’t have contact with which means you are building a relationship with them during the event.

This relationship can yield you some additional product sales or generate recruit leads for you. However, those product sales and leads might not immediately come for that particular vendor fair. Let me explain…

A few months ago I had a woman contact me via email to ask me about a certain product that I sell. She had crossed paths with me 15 months ago at a online vendor fair and she kept my information for future reference. At the time, she didn’t have the funds available to purchase the $55 item that she wanted and I was happy to give her my information for a future purchase. I haven’t heard from her since and never expected for her to contact me again. However…15 months later, she was now in the position to make the purchase and not only that, she had an additional $85 in items that she wanted. I was more than happy to process her order. About 14 days after processing her order, I got another email from her…this time it was for $45 in items that her mother wanted.

The reason I am sharing this scenerio with you is that often times Direct Sales Consultants get discouraged when they don’t walk away from an online vendor fair with a slew of orders in hand. Building up an online customer base takes a lot of hard work and patience.

Product sales from online vendor fairs for the majority…are a lot less than the average home party sales. However, if you keep exposing your business and keep participating in vendor fairs, you can build a reputation for yourself and your business which will yield product orders when you least expect them.

Another benefit of participating in online vendor fairs is that it gives you practice for when you are doing offline events. Some consultants get very nervous when they stand up and speak in front of a group of people. One way to get comfortable with presenting products and information to others is by doing virtual parties aka vendor fairs.

Furthermore, Participating in online vendor events is a great way to fill-in the open dates on your booking calendar. (your home parties and offline vendor events get top priority, but there is nothing wrong with filling-in the other dates with online virtual parties).

With my personal experience, I didn’t get any orders or leads with the first 2 or 3 online events that I participated in several years ago when I first started. However, as time went on and I got more experienced and online party go’ers and vendor hosts got to know me, they felt more comfortable in doing business with me.

Is it worth your time? In my opinion…it is. With that said, you need to look for the ‘right’ online vendor events to participate in.

Next week I will give you several tips on how to find good online Direct Sales events to participate in.

Happy Selling,

Shelly

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