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Expand Your Home Parties into a
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It's easy to build up a team of craft party sellers who work for you and earn a commission from their sales, just as the big direct marketing companies like PartyLite and Pampered Chef do.
First up is to recruit suitable candidates for your home based party plan business. Start off slow if you've never done something like this before, by finding just one suitable person.
If you're comfortable working with someone you know who is interested, then go that route, otherwise place a small ad in your local paper looking for someone who's interested in working part-time, and who has possibly had experience with home craft parties or another home based party plan business.
It's not essential that your candidate has sales experience, although that would be an advantage, but at the very least she should have quite a gregarious personality. She definitely needs to identify with and have enthusiasm for your range of products, so that she can get excited about selling them, and get customers excited about buying.
Training her properly is all important. Brief her on all your products, giving her key information such as the benefits associated with buying them ('sell the sizzle, not the sausage') and spend extra time on those items which are your most popular sellers, also making sure she knows the price structures.
From your experiences, brief her on the types of questions people ask at home craft parties, and how best to answer them. Of course, also give her all the marketing tips you use to get new hostesses from parties you are at, and repeat orders from customers who buy at the parties.
Let her accompany you to a home craft party to watch you in action, and introduce her as your assistant rather than as a trainee, it will make her feel more comfortable. Make sure she has a notepad and pen handy so that she can jot down any questions she may want to ask you afterwards, and watch to see if she gets involved at all – this will be a good sign, but it's not necessarily bad if she doesn't.
After your (hopefully highly successful) home craft party, spend some time debriefing with her - go through the party from beginning to end, highlighting points that are specifically relevant, and just generally making sure she 'gets it'.
It might take more home craft parties for your new recruit to be ready to go out on her own, depending on her or on whether or not you feel more comfortable having her tag along more. Obviously, if she's done this kind of thing before, she should definitely be ready after one party with you.
She will probably feel more comfortable doing her own first party with someone she knows as the hostess, which will also give you a great way to expand your customer base! Once she's up and going with her home craft parties, manage her, motivate her, and monitor her results. Some people will do better than others, but as a general rule of thumb, she should be increasing her results at more or less the same rate as you did when you started.
From there, you can go on recruiting and building up your team and your home based party plan business. Good Luck, and Have Fun!
Ben Montaigue runs a website called Craft Business Home which provides free information on the what/why/where/when and how of starting and being successful at your home business with crafts, and also covers other topics relevant to a home based party plan business selling crafts.
This article was written exclusively for craft-selling-parties.com
