How To Get Leads For Direct Sales Without Begging Your Friends

Are you new to direct sales or maybe you’ve hit a wall in your business and want to hit new levels? Well in this post you’ll learn some proven direct sales tips on how to get direct sales leads without having to beg your friends and family.

Should you talk to friends and family about your direct sales business?

Most direct sales companies talk about marketing to your friends and family, which is a great place to start, but they never seem to tell you why. The main reason is that with friends and family there is a built-in know, like, and trust factor already.

All things being equal, most people tend to do business with those that they know like, and trust. This means that your friends and family are usually more likely to at least hear you out about your business, and have a higher ratio of buying from you.

Another reason to start with them is that it’s free to reach out to them, and you can get through your initial learning curve talking to them. However, not everyone is supportive or will join, so it’s a great place to start, but it doesn’t have to end there.

The concept you want to implement is called building through. That means when you do get someone started or you do a presentation with someone, you ask for referrals or move on to their close contacts.

This can be an effective way how to get new direct sales leads as well as keep your sign up ratio very high. Also with this direct sales strategy, you can really expand from any new sale or presentation outside of friends and family.

How to generate direct sales leads after you run out of warm market

Starting with your friends and family can work well in the beginning, plus you can also develop your sales skills early on with your warm market. Another benefit to warm market is that the leads are free, and it doesn’t take much to ask if they are open to checking out your direct sales business and what you sell.

Unfortunately, most people run into a wall after they talked to all of their friends and family and either quit or struggle to make money in their direct sales business. There is a big difference between warm market vs cold market and getting leads.

Without the right strategies diving into cold market to grow your direct sales business can be very difficult. Thankfully attraction marketing makes it much easier to generate leads while marketing your direct sales business.

Active prospecting and reaching out to people to promote your direct sales business is great, but imagine you had people coming to you instead? With attraction marketing, you can build a flow of leads wanting to buy your products and join your sales team. That would be great, wouldn’t it?

Well, that’s what’s possible when you master the following digital marketing strategies and apply them in your direct sales business.

Build your own website to start generating your own direct sales leads

The foundation of generating leads for your direct sales business is a website. Building your own website has a lot of advantages. It can help you establish your personal brand, and can help you attract targeted visitors and leads as well.

If you have a very small budget you may also consider just setting up a landing page with a sales funnel system such as Clickfunnels. With the right sales funnel template and lead magnet you can generate high quality leads that will likely be interested in your products or services. Eventually, as your business grows you’ll likely want to expand to a full website in addition to a sales funnel system or landing page.

The first step of building your website is to decide your tagline. This is who you are and how you help people. Too many direct sales business owners make the mistake of branding their content to their specific company vs themselves.

Your business should be about how your direct sales business or products help people not how great your specific company is. For this reason, it’s often best to brand your website to yourself vs a specific direct sales company.

For example, if your direct sales business was in the health and wellness industry your tagline might be something like, “helping busy people stay fit and healthy with quality nutrition and supplementation”.

Create a lead magnet to get direct sales leads on autopilot

If you want more leads for your direct sales business you need a method of capturing leads. Typically most direct sales reps go right for the sale with prospects before doing any kind of qualification. You often hear things like “sales is a numbers game”, which is true, but wouldn’t you rather get more yeses than nos?

The way to increase your conversion rate and to generate more quality direct sales leads is by creating a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something you give away for free in exchange for a name, email, and even a phone number.

The best way to qualify your leads and to generate them is to give away something relevant to your ideal customers. For example, if you sold weight loss products with your direct sales business, you might give away some type of free weight loss guide. You could also give away a workout plan, or an eating plan, etc. There are a lot of options.

Create a lead magnet that can answer your ideal customer’s top questions, helps them avoid their biggest problems, or that helps them reach their desires faster. When you do this you will not only generate more direct sales leads but they will be far more likely to be interested in your offers than begging your friends or family.

Some easy to create options for lead magnets are an ebook, PDF guide, MP3 download, or a checklist. You can quickly create these with free tools like Google Docs and host them with Google Drive or directly on your website. You also want to use an email autoresponder like Aweber to capture the leads and to build your email list. Check out the video below for a walkthrough on setting this up on your website.

Optimizing your homepage to generate leads for your direct sales business

As you start to build your website the first thing you need to do is to optimize your home page. This is one of the first pages people will check out when they come to your website. If it isn’t optimized people will quickly leave, and it could be costing you leads and sales for your direct sales business.

Now you don’t need to have professional photos or to pay a high-end designer to create a quality home page, but that certainly helps. The main thing is that you need your message to be on point to keep potential customers interested in your business. This starts with your tagline and then moves into highlighting what makes your business unique and better than the competition.

Likely you aren’t the only person in the world promoting the direct sales business you decided to work with. This means that at first glance, your business is the exact same as anyone else’s. This is why you need to brand yourself not just your direct sales business you are working with.

People want to work with people, not faceless companies. Click To Tweet

Another aspect you want to include on your home page is your process. People want to know what they are signing up for and if you can break down your process it makes it easier to understand exactly what you do. See an example of what that looks like on my homepage below.

You also want to include testimonials and reviews of your business as well. Most people want to work with a company that has proven results. Including reviews and testimonials from happy customers can help build authority for your business. When you have authority and credibility it helps improve conversions of direct sales leads from your website.

Direct sales tips: Generate leads for a direct sales business through content marketing

The next thing you need in your marketing plan is a content marketing strategy. Content marketing is ideal for generating leads for a direct sales business because it can work to get direct sales leads 24/7. Once you create a piece of content it can continue to drive traffic to your website even while you sleep!

The basics of content marketing are that you should create content that solves your target market’s problems, answers their common questions, or helps them reach a result they want faster. The next aspect of using content marketing to build your direct sales business on social media is to build your audience, engage your audience, and then sell to your audience.

The beauty of a direct sales business is you can go directly to your customer. The great thing about content marketing is instead of having to hunt down potential customers, they come right to you. This makes getting leads for your direct sales business much easier.

The content you create also helps you build trust, rapport, and credibility with potential customers.

People do business with those they know, like, and trust. Click To Tweet

A content marketing system helps you turn a cold market prospect into a qualified lead. In fact, this can even lead to you getting sales and sign-ups without even talking to someone first.

Optimize your website for SEO to attract new direct sales leads

As you create content on your website you not only need it to be value-based but it also must be relevant to what people are searching for. Often you’ll have valuable information that you can share with your audience, but it isn’t phrased in a way that your ideal customers are actually searching for.

If your content isn’t phrased in a way that is SEO friendly, people won’t find your content. The goal is to create ongoing content that will drive traffic to your website forever, but if you neglect the proper keyword research before making content it won’t perform as well as it could.

For example, if you created content that answered your ideal customer’s top questions and optimized it for SEO you could potentially attract hundreds of visitors daily that fit your ideal customer profile. By adding an opt-in form to generate leads on these content pages you could translate that targeted traffic into dozens of pre-qualified leads every day.

It’s much easier to talk to pre-qualified leads about your direct sales business compared to cold calling or begging your friends and family to join your business.

Check out the SEO secrets infographic below to learn some of the best SEO optimization tips you can implement in your content marketing strategy.

How to get leads for direct sales through video marketing

Video marketing is another crucial strategy to generate leads for your direct sales business. Video marketing is a form of evergreen content just like blogging. This means you can create video content during your off prospecting hours and then it can generate direct sales leads 24/7.

If you aren’t sure how to structure your videos there is a simple 4 step formula you can follow. I first learned this formula from a guy Mark Harbert and the formula is intro, question, content, call to action.

Your intro is stating who you are and what you do, such as, “Hey this is Mike from CoachMikeMacDonald.com and we help people generate traffic, leads, and sales for their business with digital marketing.”

Then ask a question that speaks to your target market’s problems. In my case, it would be something like, “Do you struggle with generating leads with Instagram?” After that, you simply answer the question you asked with your content. Which is providing value.

Finally, end your video with a call to action, which is just telling people to do something. For example, I could say, “To learn more about Instagram Marketing for your business, and the system I used to get over 30,000 followers, check out my free Instagram Masterclass in the description below this video.”

By following this format of content for promoting your direct sales business, you will be generating quality leads passively with video marketing.

Set up a Google My Business page to attract local leads for your direct sales business

If you are looking to promote your direct sales business locally having a Google My Business page can work great to generate more direct sales leads. A Google My Business page is like an online storefront for your direct sales business. When your Google My Business page is fully optimized it can help you rank well in Google Maps and can help you generate targeted direct sales leads.

Now one thing I would recommend is that you have your business name be something that has relevance to your niche and what you do vs calling your business the name of your direct sales company. For example, you shouldn’t call your business “Avon seller”, or “Mary Kay distributor” as Google may not approve a business name like that. Instead, choose a name with something like, “(Your Name) beauty and makeup consultant”, or “(Your Name) skincare and makeup consultant”.

Not only do those names better describe what you do and how you help people, but they also brand you and not the specific company you promote. I hope you are with your direct sales business for the long haul, but things change. Companies can go out of business, or you may just no longer be passionate about a specific company.

If you brand a specific company instead of yourself, you may have to start all over with your website and marketing in the future. Check out the picture below of a search I did for a direct sales skincare company where I found an example of where a person had branded the company vs themselves and the company went out of business. (The person’s name and contact info has been removed for privacy purposes.)

Run Facebook ads to generate leads for your direct sales business

Running Facebook ads for a small business like a direct sales business can be extremely profitable and cost-effective. Typically when you start a direct sales business you are doing so to make extra money part-time around a full-time job.

If that’s the case you likely don’t have a very large budget to invest back into your business right away. This is a great reason to use Facebook advertising to promote your direct sales business. With the lead magnet you created earlier you can even promote that with Facebook ads.

If you don’t have a lot of time to wait for organic marketing strategies to kick in, and you do have some extra cash, you can invest that into Facebook ads and start to generate targeted leads quickly.

There is a simple 3 step strategy to follow to generate direct sales leads with Facebook ads. Check out the video below for a more detailed explanation.

1. Ask a question that highlights a pain point your lead magnet or offer can solve.
2. Share the benefits of your offer or lead magnet and how it will solve the problem you addressed in step 1. 
3. Use a call to action driving traffic to your offer or landing page where people can download your lead magnet. 

Run Google Ads or PPC ads to get direct sales leads without having to talk to friends or family

Another paid advertising strategy you can use to promote your direct sales business is with Google Ads or PPC advertising. The big difference between using Google Ads or PPC advertising and Facebook advertising is that Google Ads can be more expensive, and it is based on search intent instead of using interest targeting.

Search intent means what is the thought process behind keywords that people use in search engines. For example, if someone searched for “workout guide” they are probably looking to either get fit, improve their strength, or to lose weight. If you sold nutrition and weight loss supplements in your direct sales business, “workout guide” could be a great keyword to target with ads.

This term could be very valuable to produce highly targeted traffic to see your offers and lead magnets, but it comes at a price. Everyone who chooses to advertise on Google can target the same search terms as you. This means that if the keyword performs well it could be expensive to advertise and get clicks from it.

If your back end product and conversion rate are high enough it can still be profitable, but if you are just getting started and don’t know what you are doing it could eat through your budget very quickly. For this reason, I would suggest either hiring a digital marketing agency to run paid ads for you or wait until you can afford to lose some money going through your advertising learning curve.

Regardless of when you jump into paid advertising, it can be an effective way to generate direct sales leads without relying on your friends and family.

Conclusion

Talking to friends and family about your direct sales business can be a great place to start, but you don’t need to rely on them to be successful. The benefits to friends and family are that it is free, you can get through your learning curve, and you already have built-in trust with these prospects. The big downside is that it can be awkward and these potential leads are not targeted or prequalified.

You might get lucky and have some friends and family that join your direct sales business and become huge successes in your organization. However, the reality is that most likely you will simply build through your warm market contacts to find new leaders in your organization.

In addition to working with your friends and family as leads, you can also generate highly targeted direct sales leads with digital marketing. Start by getting your own website or sales funnel system and offer a congruent lead magnet for your direct sales business.

This way the leads you generate will be pre-qualified, and will likely be easier to convert than a warm market contact who has no interest in your direct sales business. Once you have a lead magnet and offer in place, the next step is to promote it. You can do this with a variety of marketing strategies like content marketing, video marketing, blogging, SEO, and more.

Once your marketing strategies are converting you can increase your lead generation quickly by using paid advertising. By re-investing back into your direct sales business with paid ads you can scale your business even faster. Use these tips and you’ll be generating more direct sales leads in no time!

Did This Blog Help You? If so I would greatly appreciate if you could comment below and share on Facebook

Mike MacDonald

Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald

Email: [email protected]

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P.S. If you don’t have a systematic approach to lead generation, aren’t getting daily leads, or could use more sales in your business, check out this free lead generation training. 

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