As a direct sales leader, there’s times when my team has ultimate engagement. Everyone is working. Everyone is cheering each other on. There’s oodles of comments and likes on our team’s Facebook group posts. Energy is at an all-time high. It feels good – you’re in the groove.

… and then, there’s the “other times”.

The times when it feels like pulling teeth to get responses from my teammates. When I make a motivational post and it hardly gets any attention. When I am struggling to find the motivation as a leader to come up with a new sales challenge or a something new and sparkly that the team can latch on to, rally and breathe a little life into their business.

This is direct sales leadership.

It’s cracking the code of what motivates, inspires and encourages the team to get back up and work their business. It’s doing the same day-to-day activities in a different way. Thinking outside the box. It’s being super connected with your team and recognizing when things are off. It’s not easy work. It takes grit.

Here’s the thing. You are not their boss, they don’t work for you, you didn’t hire your team and you can’t force anyone to work their business. However, you CAN love on them, support them, lift them up, encourage them, coach, train and do your best to keep your team engaged in growing their business. While making money and working your business can be enough for some, many others stick around in their direct sales biz because they love their leaders and teammates.

Here’s a few quick simple leadership tips to keep the energy up among your team:

• Give recognition: I’ll be honest here, this one drains me. I’m not a natural cheerleader, but I know how important it is to give shout outs and celebrate every. little. milestone. When I sat down and thought about the culture of my team, recognition is one of the pillars for me. I know how far a simple shout out can go. On our team, we celebrate sales milestones, welcoming new teammates, new teammate accomplishments, stepping out of your comfort zone (like doing your first vendor event or going LIVE).

• Team Challenge: Whenever we have a bit of a lull on our team, we launch a team challenge. This might be a sales challenge, a BINGO challenge, a booking challenge, GO LIVE challenge or a recruiting challenge. Yes, there’s prizes. And, yes – it generates activity by putting a team focus on whatever the challenge might be about. It is a fun way to generate a friendly challenge to get everyone working toward their goal.

• 1:1 Coaching: I offer individual coaching sessions with my team. These sessions are meant for troubleshooting a problem, thinking outside the box, working through an issue.

• Weekly Motivation: Our team shares a few motivating posts each week. Whether it is a simple quote, call to action or tip on something that might help them grow their biz, there’s positive, encouraging, uplifting posts scheduled by our leaders – ultimately, with the goal to motivate!

• Monthly Training: Each month, our team gets together for a Zoom call to see each other’s faces, reflect on the month and plan for the next month. We call it our monthly mastermind. We also do a team training on a topic that we’re getting a lot of questions on. Typically we run the trainings within a facebook group event so we can easily move the training into our team’s Units for quick future reference.

As a leader, when I sense a slump in team sales, these are some of the levers that I know I can pull to boost the energy and excitement on the team. It is also a cue for me that it’s time to push adding new teammates. As long as the team is recruiting, there’s new, fresh energy in the group which keeps the momentum up. It is common to have attrition in direct sales, but with an engaged team – you will be able to minimize that turnover as much as possible.