Fostering the Best Atmosphere to Learn
Party sales are your business, and we all know how important booking parties is to your bottom line. We also know that booking parties can be a lot of work, so it goes to reason that the more successful each party you have is, the better your sales will be. By extension, the better each individual party is, the less parties you’ll need to reach your goals.
How to Create a Hostess
We’ve also discovered that most often, it’s not that a consultant doesn’t see the value in a hostess coaching program, it’s simply that they don’t know how to create one. That’s what we’re here for! We’re going to walk you through our program, so you can replicate it for yourself. It’s important to understand that party hostesses are not usually in direct sales, and they don’t always understand what their role in the party is. They probably know they need to invite their friends but we want to work with the assumption that they don’t know anything else.
The job of the hostess coaching program is to guide them through various steps that will help increase overall engagement, and subsequently, sales. We do have to be cautious too, because we don’t want to overwhelm them. Ideally, we want to find a balance between a little extra work that will ensure success, and making it easy for them to be a hostess. Pro Tip: Take the time to setup a solid program. Once you have it in place, it will be highly repeatable for future hostesses.
Our program consists of a 6-day series of posts, that are either informative or require the hostess to complete a small task. You can easily modify the length of time, depending on how far in advance you book your parties. Day 1 – How to Have an Awesome Party! We want to give our guests an overview of the steps that will ensure they have an awesome party. There are 3 things we are aiming to accomplish:
- We want to Recreate the in-person Experience. When your hostess is deciding who to invite to her party, she should think about who she would invite if she was having the party in her home. Inviting 300 Facebook friends or people she hasn’t talked to in years is impersonal and spammy. Yuck! Have your hostess aim for 30-50 friends for her invite list.
- We want your party to Stand Out! In order to do that, we have to do things differently right from the start. We don’t want to be just another Facebook party that your hostess’ guests simply ignore.
- We want to Send a Personalized Message to each of the guests. Just like we would personally invite people into our homes, we want to do the same online. We want our hostess to leave her guests feeling valued and appreciated, rather than exploited. It’s part of how we achieve the goal of standing out. Let her know that you’ll send her a template she can personalize, so sending messages to her guests is easy!
Pro Tip: Create a short 1-2 minute video of yourself welcoming your hostess, thanking her for her booking and explaining the above information. It gives her a chance to get to know you a little better and keeps the explanation short and sweet! Day 2 – Sending A Personalized Message Even though we’re giving our hostess a few things to do, we want to keep it as easy as possible for her.
Sending her a template message that she can customize is one of the ways we can keep things simple. Here’s what we use: “Hi ___. I’m hosting a <Insert Company Name> party on <Insert Date and Time>, right here on Facebook! It’s a <Insert Theme> theme party that’s going to be really fun! <Company Name> products are amazing and I know you will love them.
It’s an exclusive event, so keep an eye out for the invite!” Pro Tip: Before you send that template to your hostess, fill in as much of the information for her as you can. The easier it is for her, the more likely she is to complete your tasks. Day 3 – Invite Guests to the Group/Event This task can be combined with the Day 2 post, or it can be done on it’s own. Be sure to set the group/event up ahead of time so that you can share the link with your hostess. Pro Tip: If you pre-schedule your posts, do that before your hostess adds her guests so that you if you accidentally ‘publish’ your post, you can fix it without anyone seeing. Day 4 – Ensuring Your Hostess is the Mostess Helping your hostess understand the importance of her role during the party will help ensure the highest engagement and sales possible.
You want to explain that during your Facebook party, it’s very important for her to Like, Comment, Tag, and play along. The guests don’t know you, they know the hostess, so the more engaged your hostess is, the more of her guests will see your content. She is your connection to them! The more she participates, the better the party will be and the more rewards she’ll earn. Check out this post for more hostess engagement tips. Day 5 – The Checkout Process This is one component of hostess coaching that consultants often overlook. Because the checkout process is unique to every company, you don’t want to skip this part. Whether you want your guests to submit their orders to you, or online with a party ID, or through a special link, or on a Google Doc, etc.
it’s important that you explain the process to your hostess. Describing the process to your hostess ahead of time, allows her to help the party guests when they contact her with questions. She’s your right-hand gal in this process, and you want to make sure people don’t run into any trouble when it comes to shopping! Pro Tip: If you have more than one option for checking out, create a flow chart graphic that guests can easily refer to during the party. Provide this graphic to your hostess in your coaching program so she can familiarize herself with it ahead of time.
Day 6 – Share Your Hostess Rewards and Ask for a Wishlist The free goodies are the biggest incentive for hosting a party, so you’re hostess likely already knows there’s some sort of rewards involved. You may have already talked about hostess rewards when you booked the party, but it’s good to share them again now that the party is closer. Pro Tip: Ask your hostess to “send you a wishlist of the products that she is going to earn for free”. By getting her to look through your catalogue and create a list, we get her to do two things. First, she learns more about your products and can answer questions from her friends and second, she discovers what amount her guests need to purchase to earn her the rewards she is after. This encourages her to encourage them to shop in a non-pushy, non-spammy way. Day 7 – Party Day! This portion of your hostess coaching is a chance to tie up any loose ends and provide any information you haven’t yet had a chance to.
This is the place where you can tell your hostess how you’ll communicate with her during the party, when the party will stay open until, and how she will get her hostess rewards, etc. These details can be included in some of your other posts if you want to keep your program shorter. For example, the party close date could be included with the Checkout process, or how you want to communicate could be included on Day 6. Now that you have all the pieces of your program, you simply need to decide how to share them with your hostess. Creating a special hostess group on Facebook is one option that we’ve had good success with. It’s an easy place to schedule posts, and communicate one-on-one. Other options include email, text or YouTube.
Meet your hostesses where they already are! Putting a hostess coaching program together, like anything worthwhile in business, does take some time but once you have it in place, you’ll see that the time it took was well worth the investment. By setting up a hostess coaching program you’ll be able to re-use the same program for every hostess and you’re sure to see the increase in customer engagement and average sales of your parties! Do you use a hostess coaching program? Tell us what other hints and tasks you include that increases the success of your parties.