I was at the DSA Annual Meeting last week.

Congratulations to the DSA on record attendance. It was a terrific celebration of the 100th Anniversary of DSA. Great speakers! Outstanding recognition of the true legends of the industry!

Every year, the event is an incredible opportunity to visit with people from all segments of the industry. From global giants and legends to PRE-start ups, the chance to talk with people that are on the frontlines of the industry is what makes the event so powerful.

I spent some time talking with a husband / wife team that is running a fairly new company. With impressive growth and a solid foundation, they appear to be poised to take a pretty big step toward their growth goals.

One thing struck me — they are very aggressive and willing to try lots of things.

I love that.

BUT….(you knew that was coming)…… I sensed, because they had the skill to execute many different ideas with their internal staff, they are trying too many different initiatives and may be confusing their distributors with an almost “idea-of-the-day” approach.

If there is a single consistent observation from the companies I talk with, it’s their lack of focus.

From marketing ideas to technologies to products, I firmly believe that if you give someone a few logical options, they will often make a good selection. But, if you give them too many options, they will choose “none of the above”. It’s not because they don’t want to make a decision (which product – what training), they simply get confused if the options are too vast.

I recently talked with the executive team from a company that is less than two years old. Even at this early stage, their product mix consisted of several dozen products. Because they are also a product manufacturer, it was very easy to create products — so they did.

Not surprisingly, their growth was not what they had hoped.

In reality, their distributors did not know which product to lead with.

They gave the prospects so many options that they could not make a logical choice – so they often choose “none of the above”.

From my old days working in retail (photography and video), I learned that if I gave the customer any more than three options at a time, they would almost always NOT buy from me. While I was very well trained and understood the products – the customers were overwhelmed with the knowledge and did not know how to process it like I did.

Here’s the real revelation during my time selling photographic equipment — MOST people did not want to understand photography! They wanted to take good pictures.
WOW!!!! That was an enormous shift in how I presented the products. The customers wanted benefits of he product instead of features or technology!

I needed to talk in a language that made them understand how to take good pictures (benefits) and I needed to provide just enough options that they could easily make a logical selection.

I think many direct selling companies are in the same situation as I was back then.
They’ve created lots of great products and built training that will help anyone in the business with almost any aspect of training.
However, the prospect simply wants to know which product(s) to buy and the new distributor wants/needs to know what to do first.
But, we tend to create too many products and provide too much information and the newbie gets overwhelmed.

Why do we do this?

Because we can!

If you’re facing a challenge with your growth and it’s not meeting your expectations, here’s a challenge for you.
Try to put yourself in the position of being “new” to your business. Review your products, marketing tools and training materials and see if the choices and path to success is logical.

Would you be able to make the right decisions?