How to Grow your Home Based Business to Almost Any Size Recruiting Work From Home Sales Reps...

by Shelly McDermott

Building a home-based-business is difficult by itself, but once you have mastered the concepts and have built an income producing model, you can grow your business, on an almost unlimited basis, through recruiting, and your recruits can work from home. I did it and you can, too.

You must have a reputable business and achievable business model in which others can follow easily. You will be sought after once word of mouth gets around that you have a great work from home program.

Below are some recruiting strategies we have tried in our home based business. I have also listed some other ideas to take into consideration before recruiting starts.

Word of Mouth

Word of Mouth: In the beginning, our company (a custom imprint specialty advertising business) started out with one owner (myself) and three friends that wanted to work from home. I had made a sale at a local high school. The profit on the order was over $2,000. I knew if I could teach others to follow the same approach, and turn in the order to us for funding, printing and delivery, a mini-partnership could be formed. I taught my three friends what to say, who to ask for, and which sales materials to show. In no time, they were up and running. We split the profits based on an agreed upon amount (50/50 split of net profits). For the first year, I was content with about 10 reps working from home part-time like myself. Within three years, over 75 people had signed up. Yes, we had some attrition, others went to work full-time for benefits, and others still just wanted to service only 1-2 accounts a year.

It was a learning experience for us to manage personalities, keep them motivated, overcoming objections, and finding the right office structure. We needed to pace ourselves, and not grow too quickly. The business model was successful because everyone worked at home, we didn't need an office lease, additional insurance, reps got paid when the client paid, and the need for working capital was kept at a manageable level. It was an efficient home based business model that did not require intense amounts of cash.

Using Internet Advertising

Internet Advertising: We placed a few "free ad listings" on the internet. When we were successful in getting a handful of recruits to work from home from out of state, training became a new challenge. I was phone training one-on-one and it was taking up a lot of time. We still have some producing reps from this technique. With so many work atr home opportunities on the internet, people are more leery of work from home opportunities and the response has gone down. Additionally, the "free" ads are not as common. Our home based business has also paid for some ads as an experiment and received no hits. We even placed an ad with a major job posting website and received over 100 resumes and interest, but not one "lead" came to fruition. I think it is because most people attracted to those sites are looking for traditional jobs with set pay.

Local Advertising

Local Advertising: This has been our best approach so far. We placed an ad in local county papers (look for a state publisher association to broker very cheap rates) to read: Local company seeks local reps. Work from home after training. Not MLM. To apply go to (our web address).

This ad allows for people to comfortably browse our website for information about who we are, what we do, and how to register for training if they are interested in joining our company and working from home. From there we would have training sessions at a local restaurant that had a conference room. The room was free of charge, and we did pay for lunch because it was a part of our budget. We would rather pay for food than a room. It was usually a four hour session and everyone got a free sales kit for attending. We signed up and trained 26 reps in 6 weeks. We will not do more recruiting until we can get these reps producing regularly and more sales managers ready. Sales Managers work from home as well.

Once we are in position to handle more growth, our home based business will duplicate our plan from state to state where we are preparing our previous reps to become sales managers. We are also experimenting with advertising for our products so when orders come in we can channel them to the reps and keep them busy. If the order referral comes from us, there is a portion of the ad expensed to the incoming order to offset our marketing budget. Reps are happy to have the leads that are less work.

If your home based business will be hiring work from home sales reps, below are some concepts to consider when recruiting:

• Temperament: Working with others, training, and grooming them for success requires enthusiasm, patience, and a positive attitude. Recruits, even those that work from home, will become evasive and nonproductive if they feel you are hard to work with, demanding, pushy or you have a short fuse. People who want to work from home like to be self-governed. Empower your recruits with knowledge and point them in the right direction. Teach them to own a project, idea, or activity.
  
• Know Your Numbers: In our business it takes recruiting about 10 people to get two that actually become producers. Don't be discouraged if you make a lot of contacts and don't get a lot of success. Some methods of recruiting bring about quicker results. Determine how many recruits you need, and how many recruits you can handle at one time. It is just as easy to train ten at one time as it is one. Group your training and concentrate your recruiting efforts so you are effective at managing your time wisely. Another benefit of group training is it creates a little friendly competition and excitement that cannot be done on a one-on-one basis. Sales people are normally quite competitive, they enjoy and thrive on competition, and that competition will help drive them. Keep your work from home teams competing and communicating by phone and email.
  
• Incentives: Be sure to have an incentives program suitable for your work from home model in place. Everyone likes a little pat on the back, especially if they work from home, and any recognition in front of others will motivate everyone around even more. For example, if a recruit makes 10 contacts in 2 days, they receive a company stapler (something very inexpensive). Be sure to broadcast an email to all the reps who won the challenge. Another one could be a set of free business cards with their first order. We announce monthly 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in sales. First place gets to order products with their name on it to give to clients. We also have a once a year awards night at a major tradeshow for our industry. We provide incentives for the reps to earn the trip two months before. The location is central for reps coming from several states. The tradeshow provides additional training, excitement, and networking.
  
• Organization: Make all information easy to obtain. All businesses should have a training manual. Keep the manual simple, suggestive, and allow room for notes. Use the manual to reference in training. Teach them how to refer to the manual. Have a company website that allows downloading any forms needed for doing the job. You could include any of the following topics: Office personnel, emails, and phone numbers, and titles. How To Make Contacts With Clients. How To Track Clients. How To Fill Out Company Forms. Master Forms. Case Histories. Where to Find Product Information. Flow Charts For Order Processing.
  

Duplicate Yourself

Duplicate Yourself: If you have everyone coming to you for answers, turning in orders, searching information for reports, fixing invoices, paying the bills, you will undermine all your efforts to grow your business. Arrange reps into groups. Have a sales manager over each group. Train staff to be in charge of one area of service (i.e., order processing, billing, claims). Be willing to delegate the work as it comes in. Build your business around an efficient model incorporating the work from home feature, so it can grow with you, not start over with new levels of growth. Have your sales managers, or department managers filter anything before it gets to you. It is good for new recruits to see that everyone is a "team" and plays by the rules. Otherwise, you could get new reps who will want to change everything and create new rules to benefit them. All employees need to understand that even though they work from home and feel very independent, they are part of a well-oiled machine, of which they are part.

Legal Issues

Contract: Make sure you have a contract for them to sign. Some key components are specifying their status as an independent contractor that works from home, when commissions are paid, who is responsible for paying their taxes, who is responsible for safety in their work from environment and the fact that Workman’s Compensation is not available to them as non-regular work from home employees, which information is proprietary, what activities will cause the contract to be canceled, etc.. "Do not compete" clauses are tempting but rarely stand up in court anymore and are costly to pursue. We let our reps know that should they quit, their accounts will be assigned to other reps and we will treat the leaving rep as we would any other competitor. We have also learned to keep valuable information under lock and key to discourage anyone from trying to steal our licensing information, supplier contacts, and other things that make us competitive.

Training

Recruiting can be emotionally exhausting. It can be thrilling to see lives change by others generating an above average income and it can be devastating when friends don't make the best of business partners. Recruiting and managing virtual work from home labor, like all other endeavors, needs to be learned one step at a time, one recruit at a time, polished and refined into an activity that works best in your company culture.

Shelly McDermott is the Owner of Custom Imprint. You can reach her at www.custom-imprint.com or www.greatjobgreatpay.com