The Dolce Mia way:
Always seek direct contact with your end-user
If you have a store account, then you should schedule at least once every few months a special event where you go in, set up a table with samples and product and sell directly to customers. By getting up on stage, as it were, you will build your customer base, inspire the store ownership, train the sales staff, and feel great about what you do. Your basic terms for such an event are that you sell from your inventory, the store gets 10%.
Direct-contact with your consumer is one of the benefits of the Dolce Mia structure, providing you not only a high profit margin but a big warm feeling too. Direct customer contact = smiles.
The Dolce Mia way:
Approach each customer contact with an attitude of giving
What can I do for you today? If you can express this attitude earnestly with every prospective customer, at every point of contact, you will earn a place in their hearts, and from there win their business. Heartfelt business commitments are more enduring than any other kind.
Have you set your business goals for 2013? Just by putting your goals down on paper, you’ll be taking a big step towards success in the new year.
But first, please take a a moment to acknowledge your achievements for last year. I know, for example, that you are a better salesperson for your work with Dolce Mia in 2012, and therefore (in a way I believe to be true) a better person too. We all are, who do things the Dolce Mia way.
And I know too that at least insofar as Dolce Mia is concerned, that you did what you set out to do in 2012. There is a certain courage and need to challenge yourself and engage with life that your work with us proves you have. If you are listening, thinking, learning and working Dolce Mia, you are doing great!
Add to what you did well in 2012 that you were tenacious. All the obstacles of last year are behind you now, and you are with us today, on track for what you set out to do. Congratulations!
Now let me propose some goals for 2012, any and all of which I believe you have the intelligence, the reserves of strength and the sunshiny energy to achieve.
Make an independent income of $1,500 per month from my Dolce Mia business.
Earn $75 an hour for my time in my Dolce Mia business.
Shape my Dolce Mia business into one that is identifiably “me” and is an embodiment and expression of all the wonderful things about me!
To take a step toward your goals, join us for our next conference call. All month long in January, every Thursday we will be discussing topics related to goal-setting, goal-reaching and goal-enjoying.  My goal for you in 2013 is to every day have that great feeling of “I did it, today too!” It’s not as hard as you might think, to get there. Let’s work on it together. I believe in you, and I look forward to having you on my next call.
We fail in our pursuits not because we are incapable but because we lose confidence in ourselves. Thinking back on your life, do you seriously think there is anything you could not have done if you had only persisted at it? There are many good reasons to abandon pursuits or change directions, but “I can’t do it” is not one of them. When you became a Dolce Mia Designer Rep, it was with excitement and conviction — an act of self-assuredness that set you apart from the mass of people who dream but do not act, who suffer their condition and indeed their opinion of themselves but lack the entrepreneurial spark that you have. I believed in you on that day when you made a commitment in your head to build a successful Dolce Mia business. And today I believe in you all the more so because you are that much further along on your way.
I wonder what they call it in the business—that pang of guilt you feel at the moment of making the sale that you just took someone’s money, that what you gave them was not equal in value to what they gave you.
This is what I want you to do right now. Take a bar of our soap, go to the sink, close your eyes and wash your hands, slowly, carefully, paying attention to what you are feeling, what comes to you through your sense of smell, your sense of touch, what comes through the air, the water. What you are feeling in all ways. Try to think of words to describe the sensations you are having. Look beyond “great” and “wonderful” for words whose meaning is immediate and palpable. What images come to mind as you are standing there with your eyes closed, the water turned off, soaping your hands? Try to reach out all your tentacles of sense and draw in more than you would normally–everything the experience offers. What associations do you find yourself making? This listening, gathering, and describing for yourself is what you will use to explain to others why they must fall in love with Dolce Mia.
Poetry is where we turn to explain the ineffable. For the experience of Dolce Mia, that you need to communicate because it is the single greatest selling point, the heart of value, you do need to stretch your vocabulary and use your imagination to paint a picture, as it were, which will make your customer feel what you mean.
Now how could you doubt for even an instant the value of Dolce Mia for anyone! In fact, it is amazing even that one is able to buy these experiences at any price.
This experience of discovery of feeling as if anew, and plentitude of sensation is the source of the adventure I spoke of in chapter 3. In chapter 2, I showed you why people admire you as a Dolce Mia rep for your powers as a personal leader in their own lives, and this is precisely because you show them how to get more out of the lives they already have, which is so much more material and true than promising an enhancement to their lives. And in all this, where it started, and where it stays, you are a friend.
Does fear of interrupting or bothering people hold you back? (Remember lesson 1, you want to make a friend, and lesson 2, you are an admired person.) Most of us go through life hoping that something exciting will suddenly happen. This is not to say we aren’t committed to our routines, serious about our lives, or unhappy really. But at heart we are all up for an adventure, and hoping every minute of the day that one will come along.
This essential truism of the human condition is the reason you should never feel that you are imposing, interrupting, or worse: asking anyone for anything, because from your very first overture of friendship (lesson 1) you have been a person who has startled them out of their daily routine, and they love you and will follow you anywhere (remember lesson 2) on your adventure of discovery.
Have you ever met a salesperson whom you could not take your eyes off of—of whom you just felt, wow? Such people are as compelling as twenty-four caret gold, inspiring not simply admiration but awe. They emanate sincerity, subtlety and interpersonal wisdom; beyond seeming simply accomplished, they strike you as great people too.
Getting unstuck requires not that you redouble your efforts but that you find an easier, more comfortable way. Like water running across the ground, you let barriers be and simply fill into another path. In Chapter 1 of this series, I encouraged you to look at your work as essentially making friends. When you add to friend-making the act of asking people for their business, then you become not just a friendly person but this compelling salesperson I’ve described above, precisely because you are combining the personal with the professional. Realize that asking for the sale won’t detract from the impression you make on others but will enhance it; as long as you start from the position of a friend, you will feel you are on an easier path to success in your business, and you will enjoy the admiration that is your due.
As a Dolce Mia Designer Rep, you are already this person whom people admire. You can’t help it, because the warmth, the style, the sophistication, the careful attention thoroughly and inextricably saturate the Dolce Mia line and the Dolce Mia Designer Rep practice, and everything flows from this.
Think of finding customers as making friends. Although you may not consider yourself outgoing enough to just go up and grab someone and say, Let’s be friends. Or maybe it has been a while since you needed to make the effort to do so. You can do it, and not only is it the key to your business but it is also profoundly gratifying–always good for an inner Yes!
It is as simple as that. Make a new friend. Do so with sincerity, loyalty and a manifest ability to listen. This is something you’ve done before. To get a new customer, make a new friend, but this time (what is new and different and critical and part of the reason why you are a success, and why people admire you for what you do) you will be the leader in the relationship, and from the very beginning. You are the one who decides it’s time to be friends. Then you take the lead and guide with clear intention, declaring your intention so you don’t feel that you are hiding it. “You are going to fall in love with this line!” you say. “And this is how it’s going to begin. Close your eyes and smell this and tell me what you think. Let’s find your favorite fragrance from Dolce Mia!”
Did you know you can use our liquid soap as hair shine? It is so gentle and nourishing that used every few days it can complement your Dolce Mia shampoo/conditioner combination like a final polish, taking your hair to a lustrous new level, at least that’s what some of our sales reps say. Try it!
The experience of using our products yourself is so very important to your ability to sell. For new reps I say, go home, close your eyes, and use each of our products. It’s the best “studying” you can do. Not kidding, close your eyes and focus on what you are feeling. Then express what you feel to your customers, you will find them falling in love right along side you.
We are so fortunate to have Chloe Merrit working with us at our Costco Roadshows. Chloe is a recent business school graduate and has lots of experience in sales. She also now has a lot of experience selling Dolce Mia. She sent some tips for Dolce Mia @ Costco Reps, that I think is very insightful. While what you are doing is very different from Costco Roadshows, the same principals apply. Here’s what she said (notes from me are in parenthesis):
Engaging clients and making sales is the most important function of Dolce Mia Reps. However, getting the product in a customer’s basket is only half the battle. How do you know they won’t return it? Or even worse, send it back at the register before even getting it home? (And even when they do get it home, you want to be sure they use it so that you will get continued re-orders.) You must do everything you can to actively avoid the occurrence of returns and “take-backs,” otherwise you have wasted yours, and the customers, time.
Do you walk the customer though the experience they’re going to have once they get their Dolce Mia home? I always emphasize how excited I am for a customer to get their product home and use it! Dolce Mia reps should shoot to make 90-100% “sales success” rates, meaning if you thought you sold 25 packages, Costco will report the same numbers at the end of the day. What are your selling points that make the customer feel good about spending money and want to take the product home and keep it, and probably buy more online or at another event?
Remember that Dolce Mia products offer an immense amount of pleasure (and yes, I use the word pleasure) to the user everyday. Because the product is highly concentrated, and we offer amazing quantity options, each 12oz bottle is at least a month supply of product, if not two months. Have you ever noticed how many expensive creams come in bite size containers for exorbitant prices?
If you have succeeded in establishing a personal relationship (i.e. introducing yourself, being a real person) with your customer, then they will feel obligated to you to actually get the product home, and guilty if they return it at the register. This of course it not enough to avoid returns and take-backs, they must also love the product. But sometimes people don’t know they are going to love the product until they get it home and get to use it everyday –if they ditch it at the register then you are denying them that amazing experience.
Some Examples of Closing Lines to Keep the Sale
“Isn’t it great to buy a bath and beauty product actually made in California?”
“You know that the Becoming Independent, a program that employs the disabled, does some of the finishing work on the product.”
“It’s going to feel so good everyday”
“It was so nice talking to you, I am so excited you got some Dolce Mia to take home”
So what other techniques –things reps can say or do during the selling process -to avoid returns, take-backs, and make each customer a repeat buyer?
Your job, as the sales person, is to make your customer feel great. You are halfway there with your uxorious bath and beauty products, now make them feel great about themselves!
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