Field Training For Network Marketing and Party Plan
By Terrel Transtrum, Co-founder, LaunchSmart™
In any business, training and management are key to success, but in direct selling and network marketing companies, they are more than that. Field training and development, referring to the training and development of field representatives and their customers, comprise the fuel mixture that propels your party plan organization forward.
Training and development systems must be tied to specific needs at each phase of a field rep’s lifecycle in your company, beginning with their very first exposure to your company. At the heart of retention is expectations, and therefore at the heart of training must also be expectations—knowing the network marketing field rep’s and / customer’s expectations, what do they need to be able to do (behaviors) to attain their expectations, and what training and development support do they need to be able to perform those behaviors? Effective training is always behavior and performance driven.
In addition to providing the information and imparting the skills that are vital to party plan consultant and network marketing field rep success, proper training and development ensure compliance with sensitive legal imperatives. In states that have enacted business opportunity and multilevel distribution statutes, you are obliged to perform a bona fide supervisory role with your sales organization with respect to the sale and distribution of your products and services.
This article will give you the checklist for creating effective network marketing field training and development systems. You must consider the objectives of party plan field training, the foundation for training systems, the essential topics, the most effective vehicles for delivering training and ongoing development, the tools for evaluating what is working, and some of the best practices that we have observed in our quest to understand how great companies succeed.
Training Checklist & Key Considerations
- Have we developed the success cycle for our company?
- Which mix of training tools will be best for our company?
- Have we identified the channels we will use for delivering training?
- As an organization, do we understand the role of the Internet in recruiting, training and supporting the field?
- Is the distributor manual complete?
- Do our policies and procedures reflect our unique needs and culture?
- Have we created the basic training platforms?
- Manual / guidebook
- Basic training
- Advanced and leadership training
- Product training
- Manuals, Internet, audio, video / DVD
- Have we considered the right mix of “home-grown” training combined with existing training systems that work?
- Do our measures and metrics support an analysis of the effect of training?
- Are training intervals and “on-ramps” well defined based on anticipated market segments (customers, casual builders, career builders, leaders)?
Field Training System
We have been fortunate to work with some of the best companies in the world. Along the way, we created an approach to evaluating and creating or upgrading the field training system for a billion-dollar client. This tool gives the steps that we followed for the assignment that would reach hundreds of thousands of field reps through training. We offer it to you as a guide for creating your company’s own field training systems.
(The content of this article is extracted from ServiceQuest® RetentionSmarts™ Modules. For more information on RetentionSmarts™ training and mentoring systems, contact a member of the LaunchSmart Team.)