Step 1: Organize Your Direct Sales Business in 2015

Posted on January 2, 2015

Everyone makes New Year’s resolutions to be better: lose weight, get organized, etc. Well, I’m going to teach you a few steps over the next couple of weeks that will help you get organized in your Direct Sales Business.

And today is Step #1:

I want you to go buy THREE calendars! THREE? Why 3??

Let me show you 🙂

Here’s the first calendar you need. This is for your personal business. I bought it at Office Depot for like $26 or something. Now, a lot Direct Sales consultants think they need a really fancy calendar with pictures, and pretty colors, and stickers, and labels, and dividers, BIG THICK CLUTTER. Yep. She said it. You do not need a fancy planner. In fact, I came to find it distracting and inconvenient for many reasons.

1) It’s not practical. You shouldn’t go ANYWHERE without your calendar. And I don’t know about you, but most of those fancy planners out there are more like carrying a novel around. I was an EC freak before I went to this system a couple years ago. Now I use this nice, plain, simple, boring, thin, lightweight calendar. And I’ve never been more organized. **You can send the hate mail to my assistant. She gets a kick out of it. LOL! Sorry, not funny (ok, maybe a little!). But seriously, you do NOT need anything but this boring old planner. Let me show you WHY.

Here is the outside of my boring calendar and planner. It’s from At-A-Glance, that’s the name brand of it:

And here is why you need it. You open to the week and all you see is what needs to be done. No fluff, no pretty shiny balls and stickers, or pop up pages, or bling…just WORK. It’s called focus 😉 Now let me show you how you can make this calendar, the ONLY thing you need to keep it together!

So you need a calendar that has the entire week in one page. Or, like a book when it’s opened in the picture above.  It has to have 15 minutes time increments for the whole day. Why? Because you need every last space on it.

I typically work from the time I wake up until around 3pm. After that, I pretty much use the time slots as my “to-do” list.  My errands, my stops, take this here, take that there, get this from grocery, process return for so and so, call so and so, pick up copies from Office Depot, etc.

Why is it so important to have that to do list? Because I can sit down the night before and write out everything I have to do. And if it doesn’t get done that day, I simply transfer it to the next day. It’s nice and neat in a list format. It’s perfect. Uncluttered.

Now how do I time block? I use color coding.

YELLOW: conference calls

ORANGE: office work: making packets, making calls, working on something in the office. Personal Power hour (booking, recruiting, customer care, marketing, hostess coaching)

BLUE: working on my Power Hour for my team (new consultants, trainings, GEN0 connects, rising stars, etc)

PINK: anything that has to with a Thirty-One event: parties, conference, C&C meetings, etc.

GREEN: income producing activity that requires me to leave the house. Examples: particular marketing activities like dropping off lead boxes at businesses, picking up orders, dropping off packets or orders, picking up lead boxes, going to talk to potential fundraisers/schools/businesses.

Now when i look at my day, i know what activities I have to leave for, and what I can get done before I have to leave. It makes it SO easy. I automatically know what I’m doing by the color. I can plan easily.

**If I don’t have something on the calendar and I DO it anyway, I will write it in. And then cross it off. Why? Because I’m weird and I like to see all I accomplished. AND…I only have to worry about my mileage once a week. I can go back through, see everything I did, and add up mileage for the week.

The SECOND calendar you need to get is from the Dollar Tree. 

And this calendar is just a regular sized wall calendar. It needs to be hung up in the kitchen where your entire family has access to it. EVERYONE’S schedule goes on this. Basketball practice, choir concert, husband is going to the range with his buddy, date night, ALL of my Thirty-One events (parties, conference, meetings, etc.)

This way, your family can always have access to what YOU are doing…and YOU always have access to what is going on with the whole family. This is imperative that your family stays in sync with what is going on.

The THIRD calendar you need to get for your business is an EVENT calendar. 

I found something REALLY COOL! Every Direct Seller should always know the special events and holidays going on each month. I post these for my team at the beginning of the month.

BUT, here is a calendar dedicated to just that! It is so important to stay engaged with your customers in be in the “know” to stay on top of planning for things like:

National Teachers Week

Nurses Week

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

and even the goofy ones like National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day

I got mine in the mail and it is PERFECT.

You can view and order yours here: http://www.printonit.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=NDC2015Standard

And here is the description from the website!

Never miss a National Day in 2015 with this great looking, high quality calendar. Impress your family and friends with your knowledge of when National Ice Cream Cone Day is. Or be ready to celebrate Talk Like A Pirate day. Always stay informed with the National Day WALL Calendar.

This calendar will be a 12″ x 12″ (12″ x 24″ when opened) 24 page calendar with artwork on top and calendar on bottom. The artwork on top will be a photo appropriate for the time of year. Many National Days for that month will be depicted in some fashion in the photo. They will be marked with an asterisk so you know what to look for in each photo. This is along the lines of find the hidden items type of artwork. These beautiful saddle stitched calendars will be printed on 100 lb. gloss paper. This is a limited production run so they will only be available until they sell out. 2015 calendars will ship around December 10th in time for the holiday season .

So there you go. Go get your calendars! And get your 2015 started off organized. I cannot live without my personal and family calendar. And I’m very excited to incorporate the event calendar into this year!

HAPPY ORGANIZING!

Melissa Fietsam, Ind. Senior Executive Director at Thirty-One Gifts

www.buymybags.com

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