Looking for some tips to help you reach your goals in direct sales?

Raise your hand if you've ever been stuck in this cycle: you start off the month ready to make a difference and reach your goals. It's going to be your month. But then the last week of the month sneaks up on you and you check and you're not close to your goals yet. So what do you do? Make a last big push to reach your goals? Or do you decide that there's not enough time left in the month so you'd rather just not stress out about it and start getting ready to hit your next month strong?

There is a disturbingly high number of direct sellers and home-based business owners who opt for the second one.

And as you can imagine, choosing to ignore the end of the month and just start focusing on the next month's goals can hurt your direct sales business.

For one thing, consciously making that decision allows the wrong mindset to set in. Instead of scheduling parties, you ignore things like customer follow up – thinking that you'll just schedule the parties next month. You stop posting in your group or on your page (at least the promotional bit). You stop asking for the sale because you've given yourself permission to stop trying to sell anything.

Well, it's time to stop thinking of the end of the month as a wasteland where goals go to die, and instead step up and start getting out there and trying to reach your goals in direct sales. One week out of a month is still 25% of the month left. And just because you weren't able to get anything moving during the first two or three weeks does not mean that you should give up on that last week.

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Here are some ideas you can use to help you reach your goals in direct sales during the last week of the month.

1. Determine what you still need to reach your goals.

How far behind from your goals are you actually? How many pieces of inventory do you have left to sell? How many parties will it take to sell that? If you perform a strategy check before the month begins, it'll be easier for you to figure out these numbers. And sometimes that's all we need. Being able to define these smaller numbers gives us a roadmap — it's a lot easier to make a plan to schedule three parties than it is to plan to sell $300 worth of inventory.

2. Don't forget the Follow Up

You know how we feel about customer follow up. It's imperative — imperative — to meeting your goals in direct sales. Get yourself a CRM Tool you can trust, and start that follow up. Technically, this should be a routine in your business anyway, so it doesn't even need to be on this list. But it becomes that much more important during the end of the month. Plus, it's amazing just how many home-based business owners will forget this step through the beginning of the month. So many entrepreneurs are always so busy trying to get new customers that they forget to take care of the customers they already have.

3. Throw a Mystery-host EPIC Party

Hopefully, you already know how to build fun and engaging parties… but imagine how much more fun a mystery host party could be? Develop a quick and easy system to allow guests to earn points (don't forget to reward the behavior you want to see more of — comments, post reactions, and party engagement).

Then, at the end of the party, draw a winner (or multiple winners) to split the host rewards. Don't work in direct sales or work for a company that doesn't have host rewards? No problem — you can choose any prize to be given away at the end. It doesn't have to be product, it just needs to be valuable to your clients.

4. Mystery Bags!!

We don't know what it is about mystery bags, but people seem to just love them! Something about not knowing exactly what product you're going to get is exciting and hard to resist. Put together a few different bags of random goodies, make sure to take plenty of photos of the unpackaged products (so your customers will know what they might get), and make it fun!

5. Service-based Follow Up

Yea, we know. We already mentioned follow up. But we felt it was important to list it twice as there are really two angles to look at follow up: helping your customers find something else they would like (a complementary piece that matches something they own, a refill on consumable products, etc), or helping your customers find something else someone else would like: (holiday gifts, upcoming birthdays, Mother's Day, etc).

A lot of home-based business owners will follow up with a customer, ask if there's anything they need, and leave it at that. Is it follow up? Yes, of course it is. But does that necessarily need to be the end of the story? Most people don't even remember about a birthday or holiday coming up until the last minute, or until someone happens to mention it. So, by listing this as a separate piece of follow up, we hope to help you be that reminder.

The end of the month doesn't have to bring with it feelings of dread, regret, or failure. Any one of these five things could be thrown together in no time to help you reach your goals even at the very last minute.

#EmpowerSocial