Are Home Party Businesses Making A Comeback?

Lately, I have seen more and more leaders talking about home party businesses.  Which has led me to wonder whether this type of business model is making a comeback.   There seems to be a shifting of the winds in the direct selling industry.  Over the past several years the trend has been a movement away from hotel meetings and home parties to a 100% online attraction marketing based model.    Then something interesting began to take shape about a year ago.  I started to hear more and more top internet network marketers touting the importance of offline marketing…particularly in home meetings.    Now the interesting thing is that many of these leaders are not promoting traditional home party businesses; however, they are applying the same principles to the building of their particular business.

The Changing Landscape Of Home Party Businesses

Typically when we think of “home party businesses”, names like Avon, Scentsy, Mary Kay and Pampered Chef come to mind.   That landscape is changing and it is changing rapidly.   Highly internet savvy companies like ViSalus, Numis Network and Organo Gold are encouraging their distributors to put a great deal of focus into hosting regular in home meetings as part of their overall marketing plan.   In fact the center piece of the ViSalus 4 step marketing plan is the in home “Challenge Party.”   The tools and technology are used to direct prospects towards this in home setting.

What is even more intriguing are the people you may encounter at these home parties.   In recent weeks I have heard Cedrick Harris talk about a number of home parties he has led for both himself and his team, even though Cedrick has been a 7 figure internet entrepreneur for years.   Even last night I took note of Ray Higdon posting pictures of his home party setup as he was preparing to present his company.  Again, Ray has been the top earner in his company for the past two years.

What Have We Learned From Home Party Businesses?

The shift we are seeing in our industry comes primarily from the sustainability for a distributors business.   The internet offers incredible leverage that allows a distributor to bring in large numbers of people into their business fairly quickly.   The Achilles Heel of this process is the retention and duplication within the organization.   When you look at the top earners in most any network marketing business, they are not the internet marketers, but they are instead those who actively use the face to face principles of the home party businesses.

The face to face aspect becomes so critical, because this is where leaders are truly developed and the business building skills and mindset are implanted into the DNA of those leaders.   So the question becomes:  “Can this be done online?”   To a certain degree this type of interaction can occur online, especially with the conferencing technology available today; however, there are certain skills like product demonstration, that are best acquired in a live training environment.   As a general rule, those who use home parties and other face to face meetings have higher volumes of team sales, greater percentages of duplication and higher retention rates within their organization.

In the end, the question is no whether online or offline is the best.  In either setting, you as a distributor must learn how to market yourself and generate your own leads.   A home party with no one in attendance is just as unprofitable as a website with no traffic.  The real issue is blending the leverage of the internet with the proven success of face to face interactions that has been demonstrated with home party businesses for years.