Direct Selling Deep Dive: How Performance Enablement Platforms Target KPIs

In 2024, much of direct selling is in trouble. According to analysis from Direct Selling News, only 40% of the Top 100 direct sellers actually grew YoY in 2023. The year was a struggle even for some of the leading players in the industry, who saw their profit margins fall, even those employing direct sales software. The question is whether it was the right software.  

Yet there are direct selling enterprises that use distributor experience technology to help drive growth through KPIs like retention, adoption, compliance, and business building. Where technologies of the past provided linear experiences that were meant to “engage” and “train” distributors, today’s most cutting edge platforms go several steps further. They use key innovations like robotics, automation, and AI to target company-specific KPIs in real-time using activities in the flow of work.

Let’s explore more.

Evolutions in Direct Sales Software: Performance Enablement Tech

We’ve covered distributor experience technology in the form of Performance Enablement Platforms before. Essentially, such technology centralizes the distributor’s day in one platform, making it easy to be productive and generate sales in a streamlined manner. (As Direct Selling News pointed out in a recent study, generating income and sales within the first month is a key factor in distributor retention.)

Not only that, this direct sales software also asks the distributor to define her goals and then assigns her event-triggered activities, tasks, and to-dos based on those goals and her progress toward them. 

Download our PEP whitepaper to see in-depth precisely what a Performance Enablement Platform is.

However, there is still another element to this productivity and performance formula, which has proven so successful in getting distributors “to market” (i.e., generating sales) quickly. And that is the capability of this technology to modulate the business-building recommendations triggered for the distributor according to corporate KPIs. 

Clearly, corporate needs shift and transform. One quarter a direct seller might need to prioritize distributor retention as their top KPI, while another quarter the same direct seller might want to prioritize cart size. These most critical metrics shift and flow with the swiftness and dynamism of the market – and though corporate HQ sales and operations leaders might be able to change corporate strategy, how do they implement that strategy in the field? How do you – as a direct selling leader – ensure that the field’s behaviors change as circumstances require, without a huge lag in time?

High-Tech PEPs and KPI Targeting

Take Rallyware as an example of distributor experience technology in this vein. Rallyware has business rules and a recommendations engine that transforms the distributor’s experience based on – among other factors – the corporate demands of the moment in the most relevant and engaging way for the distributor. 

This technology gets powered by integrations, internal behavioral data, external sales performance data, large-scale data patterns, and other sources of information to determine the distributor’s journey as it unfolds.

Part of that journey is the enterprise’s current needs, which combine with the autonomous technology itself and data about the distributor’s decisions, goals, and behaviors, to ensure the delivery of the right business-building activities for corporate KPIs.

Let’s imagine that Jenna is a distributor for a major direct seller, YouSystem. After a solid-but-not-great business quarter, YouSystem really needs to emphasize customer retention and repeat customers, as well as recruiting. These are their major KPIs at the moment. Now, her direct sales software will change Jenna’s daily recommended activities in order to underscore selling to past customers and recruiting new distributors to the organization. 

For instance, Jenna herself – as an individual distributor with uplines and downlines – has multiple conditions in place at once:

• Her goal is to sell $250 worth of products per week.
• Also part of her goals is the enrollment of at least 3 downlines per month.      
• She is 75% of the way to her weekly sales goal and 66% of the way to her monthly enrollment goal.  
• She is an active user of her company’s Performance Enablement Platform, Rallyware, logging in at least once per day on average.

At the same time, the direct seller for which Jenna is a distributor sees the following quarterly business trends:

• One-time purchases of their recently developed eye makeup line; need for repeat customers.
• Decreased distributor retention over time.
• Shrinkage of average order size across all products.

Thus, the direct sales software calibrates the activities that Jenna receives based on these and other inputs – the latter being corporate KPIs.

So she might receive push notifications suggesting that she send X customer a YouTube video about the company’s new makeup line. She might see an increase in notifications about her proximity to sales gamification elements like badges and awards, increasing engagement.

The platform might send her sales aids for increasing order size while recommending nurture to-dos for her prospecting. 

Direct Sales Software That Drives Profitability, Not Just Knowledge

What is clear is this, that the platform combines Jenna’s own past behaviors and present progress toward her goals with the company’s immediate KPIs. All with the aim of furthering both sides of the equation, the distributor’s experience and the company’s revenues. 

Such is the power of direct sales software that combines external sales performance and internal behavioral data, company metrics and preferences, user goals and choices, with automation and AI to create the most personalized experience possible. 

“Personalized,” you might say, for the needs of both the company and the individual distributor.  
To learn more about how Rallyware drives the distributor’s experience to target corporate KPIs, request a demo of our Performance Enablement Platform today.