My First Job: Avon Calling–The Importance of Building Versus Selling – By Karin Bellantoni

Have you ever asked yourself if there’s a difference between building and selling? I have, at the age of 13 when I landed my first job as an Avon Lady.

I’m sure you’ve heard about Avon, the multinational company that is over 100 years old and sells health and beauty products worldwide. Avon has about 6.5 million representatives and most likely they all started off young.

Imagine a 13-year-old answering the door and talking to an Avon representative who tells her how the startup costs for an Avon business is $10.00 to $15.00 and the return is much much bigger. I was awestruck and wanted my chance at it too.

The first business tips I learned from being an Avon Lady:

Always have your business card with you
Put your contact information on everything so that your customers can get a hold of you easily
Be an ambassador of your products
Everyone in arm’s length of me could be selling for me

Bottom line, I realized it would be good for me to build rather than just sell.

Sales managers build a team, salespeople build a team, entrepreneurs build a team, and so I began to build the team that would sell for me.

My mom who would bring the catalog to work, her bowling team, her tennis friends and anyone else she could brag to that her daughter was selling Avon
My sister and her network of friends and friends’ parents
My babysitting client who worked at the bank and brought the catalog there

I used the art of enrollment and this was what helped me to build instead of only sell.

You are stronger when you work with others, when you leverage your resources and keep the bigger picture in mind instead of focusing on one aspect (in this case only number of sales). You also have a lot more fun working with people that support each other.

Recently, social media has taught me how to build a team globally. The power of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is bringing likeminded people together to collaborate and share. This is extraordinary!

If you can engage your team by building relationships with them and sharing your ideal profile with them, you will succeed at the art of enrollment. Both parties will feel as if what they give or buy is a part of them too, and nothing can compare to that feeling of participation. This is what I learned at age 13 as an Avon rep.

What about you? What did you learn from your first job?

Karin Bellantoni is currently the President of Blueprint SMS (Sales Management Science), where she finds untapped potential in your business-to-business sales process, working with B2B sales teams at all stages in their evolution. Karin is able to see the big picture while facilitating growth by applying structure and scalability. She and her team manage the details from concept through execution. She creates focus on simple scalable processes, procedures and systems that will have a significant and immediate impact on results. Karin Bellantoni is the perfect fusion of timeless fundamentals, cutting edge technology/systems and behavioral psychology.

If you want someone to help you think critically about your business and provide pragmatic solutions, Karin can be reached at Bella@blueprintsms.com; her website is http://blueprintsms.com/.