Just What Is AVON Leadership?

A Question of Direction

When a new recruit is attracted to begin an AVON business, it is the responsibility of the recruiter to not only sign up a warm body, but to also acquaint the new recruit with the nuances of the business and the
opportunities available within it. Among the things included in the recruiting kit is a brief questionnaire, titled Getting A Great Start with Avon.  It is divided into three parts: time, experience, and interest. There are 18 questions in the form of agree-to statements, given four distinct weights, and it is thought that the preponderance of the weights will provide a guideline towards directing the recruit towards his or her potential Avon career. We will deal with the AVON
leadership hierarchy in this chapter.

* Time - these are the three statements:

"Right now I only (sic) have a little time to invest in Avon." This is a very important statement for the new representative to confront, as a great complaint of "newbies" is that building a business is a time-consuming activity. It is important to advise the new recruit of the kind of time building a substantial business will entail. Now, at the
same time, the Unit Leader should recognize that to this candidate the adventure is new and it is a natural reaction to enter anything new with caution. Here the Unit Leader must be absolutely frank. If you wish to build a minor business, you can no doubt promote some income with five or
10 hours a week. If, on the other hand, you seek this as a significant source of income, it is more than likely to take double that. This needs to be known right up front.

"I plan to work full- or part-time on Avon every campaign." Of course you do. The District Manager and the Unit Leader exist to ensure that an order is submitted every campaign and that the bill for the prior
campaign has been paid. There are actually four unique interests being supported here:

(1) From the company's perspective, an order - irrespective of its size -
represents an ongoing flow of business.

(2) From the District Manager's perspective, the on-time submission of an
order becomes the satisfaction of an evaluation of that manager, to say nothing of the relief from having to chase the money.

(3) From the Unit Leader's perspective, the submission of the order (assuming sufficient size) is a guarantee of income on the next leadership statement. And,

(4) From the Representative's perspective, the association is solidified, the vehicle of obtaining orders from an upcoming campaign - the sales brochures - and the tools for submitting that order - the purchase order - are assured.

   But there is more, and it is the responsibility of the leader to acquaint the prospect with what that "more" actually is. It takes time to work any job, even a part-time job. It takes discipline to get up in the morning and approach the AVON task with at least the same effort it takes
to punch the clock at the local fast food restaurant. It's unfortunate, and no doubt an indictment of the recruiting process, that people step into doing AVON with no idea whatsoever about the kind of time it takes to distribute brochures, make canvassing visits, make cold calls, collect
the orders, prepare the purchase order, receive and check in the product, prepare the invoice, package the product, and arrange the distribution.  Add to that any frustration over difficulties in making delivery or collecting the money, and all of a sudden, the task seems daunting. And
of course, as every long-time AVON representative knows, the activity
literally takes over the place where you live.

   So what do we do? We put in our ads the words no door-to-door selling, as if there were somehow something wrong with the concept of making calls to people who live behind the doors in our neighborhoods. We so fear the anticipated resistance that we soft-pedal anything that might have any
implication of negativity: no door to door; easy work; built-in markets of family and associates. We spread the idea that all you need to do is to drop a book at the doctor's office or a flyer on the bulletin board at the local Laundromat, and the AVON purchasers will simply beat down our
doors looking to buy our product, having money in hand, and carrying a willingness to wait two to three weeks for delivery. Is there any wonder that many of the recruits drop - they thought that building a business would be easy - unlimited returns for minimal effort? I think we, as leadership representatives, have a duty to be brutally honest with them.

   I personally think that it is too easy  to become involved with AVON.  If these folks had to pony up a hundred dollars to get involved, they'd think more realistically about what it takes to do the work and might be more reluctant to so easily throw over the traces. A fee of $10, with which materials are purchased, might be reasonable, but it is a condition
easily thrown over when the new candidate found that he or she had to exert a little effort to get the process started. A fee of that size is but the price of a pizza, after all. A peanut butter sandwich will
satisfy the hunger and compensate the loss of so little a sum. If it were my railroad to run, that $100 would be held in escrow and applied to the new representative's fourth campaign. It is, of course, the company's perspective that the more warm bodies that are attracted raise the
numbers of people who might ultimately stay with the program. My own District Manager describes this as "the spaghetti theory" - throw enough of it at the wall and some of it is certain to stick. The problem lies in
the fact that the company, in seeking to attract more people, has created a leadership structure whose own money is at risk to fuel the phenomenal turnover.

   So it is the leadership representative's task to fully acquaint the candidate with the rigors of the work ahead - what would be required to do it full time versus several degrees of part time. It is our
responsibility to advise the candidate that if she wishes to achieve a week's income, it will be necessary to expend a week's effort. We should also at this time advise our candidates that success is not
instantaneous, that business does not build linearly, that new businesses take some time to achieve profitability, that advertising is an essential activity - be it brochures or the local newspaper - and that if she is not careful, friends and family can take her to the financial cleaners.

"My dream would be to keep my Avon "store" open 24/7 while still having lots of time for my family and friends." We are, of course, leading up to eRep and having a web site here, often a far-fetched concept for a candidate who doesn't have even a kitchen table, in my experience. My personal experience does not find a great percentage of people who have computers. It will change, of course, but now I'm finding that young people in particular are still sleeping on mattresses on the floor, often
in front of a giant screen television that has cost them a couple months' salary, surrounded by a room full of ear-deafening woofers and tweeters that collectively cost more than the flashy pickup truck in the driveway.


     In any event, the candidate may well have a computer-related interest and should be made aware of the capabilities and limitations of an AVON-related web site. As AVON builds functionality into the eRep
system, this will become easier to sell, I'm certain.

   There may be some other time-related concepts that should be brought to the candidate's attention, as well:

The time - and resources - necessary to involve a spouse or other family members. This is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a good family building activity to involve the children in the distribution of sales literature. It is a good model for developing responsibility. Yet on the
other we often find that a (particularly male) spouse does not take the business seriously and often puts pressure on the representative to "get a real job." It takes separate and concerted effort for the
representative to convince the spouse of the reality of AVON as a bona fide business with a significant potential income stream. The loops are busy with complaints about limitations placed by spouses on business
investment that does not seem to produce instantaneous return. The leadership person has, to my mind, the responsibility to visit with the family and lay out the facts as they are. This goes far beyond showing
the new rep how to fill in the places on a purchase order and where to drop the order on purchase-order-pickup day (by noon, please).

The lost time when product is not delivered as expected. It would be nice if we could depend upon the delivery person to always have the order at the house by 10 a.m. and to receive the entire order that has been
placed. There was a time, and many of us can remember it, when we could set our watch by the postman, who at that time came twice a day. That was also the day of the three-cent stamp. Lots of things have changed since then. Today the word "reliability" carries no reverence, and we have often been willing to substitute "predictability" in its place. The
candidate should learn, and not be required to experience for herself, that the local delivery truck will come on the designated day, sometime between the hours of 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. Now you may not be able to change that. And you may have absolutely no empathy for a delivery truck driver trying to locate a house located in the back yard of yet another house on a side street or down the length of a dirt road that leads out into the desert where it is pitch black when the sun goes down. But the new
representative should be made aware.

The distribution time when items have been backordered. There is nothing more frustrating than to find that something ordered is no longer available (NLA) or has been backordered to a future campaign. You'll note that nothing inexpensive is ever backordered. It's often the forty or
fifty dollar item on which we stand to receive a fat commission. It gets even worse when the top to a garment is NLA and the skirt has been received in the order. If AVON has figured out a way to tie these items together, then it has not been apparent. It gets even more interesting if
a customer has ordered different size combinations to accommodate a disproportionate figure. To have an item backordered to the following campaign is not often an insurmountable problem, but to have it done that way and then to have it pushed back campaign by campaign until the
customer has lost interest or the item has gone out of season is certain to cause frustration to this new candidate. He or she should be advised of these constraints right up front.

The time involved in training. Here I think we make a gigantic mistake.  Because there is no pressure to attend a sales or downline meeting, the attendance is sparse. This means that we put representatives into the field who know little about the product, a little less about sales
techniques, and nothing whatsoever about how to handle customers. Put down Mary Kay, if you will, but attendance at the Monday meeting is required and enforced. We need that same kind of leverage. Absent it, it
falls upon the Unit Leader to perform the necessary training, and if that is being done universally, I'd be surprised. As a Unit Leader I am never asked to submit a training plan for my people. The DM wouldn't necessarily have to ask me - she has attended my meetings and read my
words. And I would be reluctant to add to her already overstressed workload, but I do think that something specific must be done to ensure the necessary training.


Next, we'll examine the Experience Factor