The Social Selling Sisterhood Podcast Episode 99- Reasonable Biz Expectations

This blog was transcribed using AI.

Yeah hi friend, welcome to the social selling sisterhood podcast. I am Lindsay Dellinger and I have many titles, high school spanish, teacher, dog mom, world traveler and direct seller, I empower women to run your direct sales business is the right way so you can earn the money, you deserve to live the life of your dreams and travel the world. Now we got that out of the way, let's get started. Hello, hello, welcome back to the social selling sisterhood podcast. I am Lindsay Dollinger, I am your host and I'm so excited to be here but today friend, super quickly before we get started if you would scroll down and click to leave me a five star review or rating and then leave me just like literally that one sentence review, I will love you forever and it allows me to be able to keep doing these podcasts because guys, I have been showing up consistently twice a week and giving you value for a year that is a lot of free value. So please please please give me some love and um give me a rating and review, take a screenshot and share this out in your instagram and facebook stories tagged me and I will give you a re share and I appreciate the love. Um okay so um today's episode is literally gonna be super quick, you know this tip thursday car episode um and it is inspired as I am driving to the post office to send out some samples, some customer appreciation gifts, um fulfilling a couple random orders and I'm able to fulfill for my house and I just got me thinking because not only today being my shipping day but also and I've been a couple of leaders chats and some people have been bringing up lately that you know they're feeling really overwhelmed and chats and how do you respond to all the messages and all the things. So that is why today's episode is titled or at least I think it's going to be titled this because that's what I'm thinking. It's going to be titled but that you my friend are not amazon prime right? So I feel like we live in this day and age where we expect everything to the instant instant gratification. We expect you know free two day shipping or one day shipping or heck if you're in a big city, I think they even do like the one hour delivery for things nowadays. Um we get door dash, we get Uber eats, we get our groceries delivered to us. We have so many of these conveniences but I just want to remind you as a small business as a start up as a direct seller, social cellar network market or whatever you consider yourself, you are not expected to provide that kind of service. Now I just want to clarify, I do think you should provide excellent customer service but I think it is above your realm to be expected that you ship things out immediately that you respond to a message immediately. You know there is no such thing as an emergency with your product unless you're like a doctor and your product is plastic surgery or something like that. Some kind of service. Um unless it's some kind of a medical emergency, literally there should not be an emergency with your product. So I want to give you permission if you have not given the permission to yourself yet that it is okay for you to have set business hours, you get to decide what those are going to be. You get to have set times where you respond to your customers to your team and you get to have set times during the week where you fulfill orders and samples, et cetera. Um And this is one of the things that has really allowed me to build my business while also working full time and being able to do all the things, being able to have that freedom that we all so much crave is by being really um not only transparent but really allowing myself that grace that I'm going to go to the post office once this week. So if you are requiring an order um or something that I cannot ship out conveniently from my house and just know I will definitely get that to you when I go to the post office on Wednesday. So if you're ordering for me on a thursday, then you're not gonna get your order tomorrow right. Um You're welcome to come and pick it up from my house if you like, I have porch pickup blah blah blah, but you know, decide what that's gonna be maybe for you, it's twice a week, maybe you have a shipping service which I had back in the day when I was involved in a clothing MLM. Um I had to like, it was literally not doable without having a service with stamps dot com or pirate ship or whatever. Um Nowadays I don't I don't need that service um and also my label maker is not working, so that is why I am heading do the post office, which isn't a bad thing because I don't I guess I probably don't share that this austin on my podcast, but like I live in the middle of nowhere, like it is at least 15-20 minutes to get to any sort of a convenience store and I don't even mean like a nice whole foods or something like that. Like the closest whole foods is I think 45 minutes from my house. So like I have to be intentional about going to the post office, which is what I'm doing right now. But it also means I knew that I was passing by the recycling ben place where I can drop off stuff and I have been collecting boxes that I've been getting things shipped to me for probably about a month and I before school get started, I really wanted to take all those to the recycling so I'm like perfect I'm killing two birds with one stone. Um I'm also driving to meet some of my team for dinner at a local mexican restaurant so like I'm taking a little bit of time planning out my route and I know I'm gonna ship stuff today. I'm going to drop off the things that the recycling bin yada yada yada. Okay. Um So I really want to encourage you to do the same sort of deal. If you know that you work late on monday Wednesday friday then maybe your shipping days are Tuesday thursday um Or maybe you know that you need Tuesday a night that you're not working late too right out your thank you notes to send out your little customer appreciation samples whatever that might be and then you're going to ship them out on a thursday so you get to decide as ceo as businesswoman as owner of your business. Um exactly what you are doing as far as I'm just using shipping as an example but it can literally be what night are you gonna do team trainings and. No and I did this when my team was growing extremely fast. Um You know I had office hours so if my team wanted to troubleshoot something they knew that they could definitely hop on office hours and get some of that time and hear what other people's questions were or things like that. Um And then if there was something a little bit more one on one that they couldn't get answered at office hours then they absolutely could Um you know message me one on one but they also knew they might not get a response back or a very detailed response back um for at least 24-48 hours. So but if they wanted that our time of me devoted to them coaching them through things, sharing ideas, all of that thing, they knew that that was available on thursday at eight p.m. And so they needed to make it a priority just like I did to set that time um you know a side of my schedule, they needed to make it a priority to show up at that time. So don't be afraid to do those sorts of things because not only is it going to save your sanity but it's also going to show your team, hey this is really doable for me. I can also build this size business that Lindsay has because she still has time to do all the things she doesn't, she's not attached to her phone all the time and I did have seasons where I, I was and I'll tell you what happened, I got burned out really, really quickly and the burnout Israel the struggle is real and you do not need to be tied to your phone for your business to boom and I will even argue if you are then you're not doing your business justice. You're not giving your leaders justice your upcoming leaders justice because you're not allowing them to step in to that leadership potential by you know, looking up things themselves, going to your back office and finding the answer themselves, going to youtube, going to google. Um you know when I started several of my different businesses, I've started, I either didn't have a supportive up line or I didn't have anyone to turn to. So guess what? There's this amazing amazing thing we have called Youtube and called google and called Pinterest and called your back office if you were in direct sales Where you can find the answers to literally like 99 9% of your questions. So allowing your team and even you know, forcing yourself to step into that power of I have the answers in my fingertips. I just need to take a little bit of ownership and do that. It can be something extremely powerful for your business. So remember friend, you do not have to respond to everything right away. Um I do believe in good, like I said, customer service and good communication and responding when you can do things, responding within 12 to 24 hours I think is probably a pretty common courtesy. Um and if you're available to and it's a quick answer or whatever or let people know, hey I saw your message. Um I'm at work right now and I'll get back to you tonight when I'm working at seven p.m. I do that definitely. Um You know you don't have to avoid things but also know you know when you're at work, when you're at your teaching job when you're doing X. Y. Z. It is okay to be clear with people and let them know hey I'm at work right now um You know I'll get back with you whenever or thanks so much for your order. My shipping day is friday so I will get these out to you on friday when I ship everything out that transparency unless it's something that someone needs like for a vacation or for an event. Um No one's going to say anything about that they're going to actually appreciate and respect you as a business owner for letting them know those details. Alright friend I hope you found this really really helpful um and I hope that you are able to start enacting some of these boundaries in your business to make your business truly the business that you want and you love and you show up for every day. Have a good one. Bye bye.