Direct Sales Leadership in 6 Simple Steps

In the direct sales industry, it’s one thing to build a solo business where you’re slinging sales, climbing ranks and collecting accolades left and right. It’s another thing entirely to lead others to do the same, and to experience the same business highs as you. Direct sales leadership is a core skill that will build an organization of individuals who are thriving not only alone, but as a team.

At Chic, we have absolutely fallen in love with the process of motivating other people in the network marketing industry. We live for helping individuals cut their own learning curves in the pursuit of huge growth. We do this by sharing just how we have built multi-million dollar direct sales businesses. So much of this growth has become dependent on how we grew ourselves as direct sales leaders and postured ourselves as the business mentors that we are.

We hope that these 6 tips to becoming a strong direct sales leader will:

allow you to step back and look at your own leadership.
evaluate where you can strengthen your skillset as a leader.
formulate a practical plan for moving forward with your direct sales leadership.

Let’s jump in!

Step 1: Move yourself from doing to teaching.

There comes a critical turning point in the lifespan of every direct sales business where you have to decide to flip a switch. While you’ve proven that you can sell and meet volume goals, and maybe you have even built a team of people, have you proven that you can lead them?

To become a strong direct sales leader, becoming a teacher isn’t optional. Herein lies the key personality trait that divides the good leaders from the great leaders: sure, you can sell really well, but can you teach others how to do it, too?

Here are some things to consider as you strengthen your leadership skills:

What were some things that overwhelmed me when I started my business?
How can I streamline these things for my new business partners?
What can I provide that is easily duplicatable?
What are some key conversations that I can teach my team to have?

Another key point to remember: do not take for granted that everyone will just know how to to sell or work the business like you do. Everyone enters their business with different skill sets, and what you excel in might not be second nature to someone else. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be taught, it means that you as the leader need to do the teaching!

Step 2: Position yourself a business mentor.

This is a vital mindset from the beginning of leading your team: position yourself as a business mentor. You should look at yourself as such and your teammates should be able to look to you as one, too.

What does this look like? It looks like confidence and leading from the outside. You already know how to sell your product, but it’s also showing people that you know how to build a business around selling your product, AND you can teach them to do the same.

Some ways to position yourself as a leader in direct sales and a business mentor:

Give people a peek behind the scenes to know what it’s like to work with you.
Share your goals with your team, no matter how big the team or how small the goal!
Run your own events and business opportunity calls.
Create systems that can be duplicated throughout your downline and team.

Don’t be afraid to share your successes and knowledge AS you’re learning. You don’t have to be seasoned in direct sales to speak life into your business, exude confidence and position yourself as a viable mentor for others. This is one of the things that we teach in our exclusive Direct Sales Leadership Mastermind with Melanie Mitro experience.

Step 3: Work with the right people.

You attract the business partners in your downline by how you position yourself and your business. When you post content that aligns with where you want your business to go, you attract people who are also thinking big and identifying with you from a business perspective.

Look, you can certainly post the fun stuff. You can highlight the trips and the prizes because these truly are great perks to your industry and business. But, if you avoid highlighting what it truly took to earn those shiny gifts, you are missing a key piece of content for attracting the people that you want to work alongside. You may attract people who are interested in a fun hobby, but when they realize the hard work that goes into these prizes, they bail!

Don’t fall into the trap of only posting about your products. You want to be open and honest about the business side, too. Your messaging should include conversations and content around products and how you built a business off of said products, and how you can teach others to do the same.

Step 4: Develop systems and processes that work.

The systems and processes that you develop as you teach your business partners how to grow help you to stand apart as a direct sales leader. You should be able to provide easily duplicatable, step-by-step processes that can be followed by your direct leaders and throughout your downline without you ever having to physically deliver the message.

Not only do systems allow you to free up time, but they help you to scale quicker, too. This is one of the key things that we teach in our Direct Sales Done Right Course through the use of our Income Producing Activity Tracker.

As you develop systems and processes to help your team grow and advance, think about how you personally have developed your own systems for:

Onboarding customers
Onboarding team members
Potential customer flow
Recruitment flow
How/when you train your existing team members
How do you run events and retreats

Keep in mind that while you develop key systems, they should constantly be tweaked and improved as business practices change and evolve.

Step 5: Move people towards a common goal.

The team that moves toward a common goal together also succeeds individually. We have talked with so many leaders who fear sharing their vision with their teammates. They are afraid that their teammates will think that their leadership holds ulterior motives.

We’ll just say this: if your heart and intentions are coming from a pure place, you do not have to fear how your team interprets your goals! You should be sharing your goals for yourself and your team consistently and throughout the year to keep everyone on track and to let them know that you are behind them!

Also, when you share that you have the ability to dream big, you give your teammates permission to dream big as well. Direct sales leadership is at its strongest when you are showing your teammates that you have their best interest at heart and that you want to support them in pursuit of their goals.

Step 6: Make room for delegation.

You may notice a theme in what we share here at Chic, so let’s revisit this thought again: you are not a one woman show. As much as you might want to be, you cannot do it all. Especially when you start to move into higher level leadership spaces! The workload of balancing your customer life, your personal business life, your team business – it all becomes very involved and time consuming. You have to know when to delegate.

We have to recognize that we can’t be all the things all the time in order to work efficiently. You didn’t start a direct sales business to be shackled to your business. Shift your mindset to believe that you DO deserve to hire help in order to enjoy the fruits of your labor! (Plus, with all of those great systems and procedures in place, you won’t have much trouble sliding someone into an admin role!)

We hope that you’re able to start implementing these steps in order to level up your direct sales leadership. You are an incredible leader and you have the potential to grow incredible leaders in your organization.

Direct Sales Leadership Mastermind with Melanie Mitro

If you are a leader who is looking to learn from and network with like-minded leaders, the Chic 6 Month Leadership Mastermind is perfect for you! This is an upper-level leadership mastermind program that consists of two in-depth mastermind calls a month for the course of 6 months.

You also get access to trainings with a specific focus and discussion to help with each skill that is taught, as well as documents and guides that have helped us to exponentially grow our businesses over the last 10 years. In addition, you are invited to a private What’s App chat where you can communicate with Melanie and the other members of the mastermind group on a daily basis!

If you’d love more information about this mastermind, or if you want to see if you are a fit for such a group, check out the information at https://chicinfluencer.com/direct-sales-leadership-mastermind/. Enrollment is now open, but we only have 15 spots available for the July 2022 leadership group! Apply at the link above!

Another service that Chic Influencer provides that goes along perfect with our Direct Sales Leadership Mastermind is our Direct Sales Chic Branding Experience with Katy Ursta which will help you clarify your unique personal branding for direct sales story using the thumbprint marketing method.