Beta Mom In Training

Patent 7,359,871

Lynn Wendyger — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:07:00 GMT

"This unique tool (DITTO) is now patented!", says Karen Bezemek, longtime marketer and champion for DITTO at Quixtar/Amway Global. "This online service is a reason to do business with the company and the IBO vs. another MLM. The features are many and the benefits huge".

If you've had Karen speak to your group on how DITTO can help them manage their business, her enthusiasm is no surprise. She's been sending your input, wish lists, and comments to our Global Web 2.0 team so that DITTO can be made even better.

I've sent all your suggestions on as well. So if you have more ideas, especially in the area of how we can make it easier for you, or your customer, to schedule customer purchases with DITTO, now's the time to comment.

In the meantime, you can look up US Pat. No. 7,359,871 and see the news for yourself.

Baby, You Can Drive That Car

Lynn Wendyger — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:42:00 GMT

Need further proof that I'm a Beta Mom? Just look at the car I drive. It's a minivan. In fact, its three minivans (my husband is one of those rare males who actually prefers a minivan because of the great square feet to mileage ratio). If I was an Alpha Mom, I would have dumped one of these buggies a long time ago for a Lexus or SUV, (past boomer cars of choice). And by now, I'd probably be driving a hybrid (new millennial car of choice).

I have an almost 16-year-old daughter who rejoiced when I sideswiped the oldest van with a light post last year. She thought we'd junk it. Wrong. When my husband, determined to keep the van for her to use once she gets her drivers license, was driving it to the body shop for repairs, it popped an axle. He got that fixed too.

That was the incident that prompted us to buy our third minivan. You never know when that eleven-year-old car is going to go. We flirted with a smaller, more gas efficient model. It was the image of our two kids being trapped together in the back seat that swayed us. Or worse yet, me trapped in the back in order to keep them separated.

So far, my daughter isn't even close to having enough driving hours to get her drivers license, let alone keys to the old van. But when she's ready, I'll tell her, baby, you can drive that car.

Do You Ditto?

Lynn Wendyger — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:49:00 GMT

Ditto use has been growing, and it's easy to see why. It's a great tool for managing your business.

There has been some debate on whether Ditto is customer friendly, and how to make it more so.

In my last post, When is a customer your customer?, I asked whether you use Ditto with your customers, and if so, when do you introduce them to the concept. Bridgett wrote, "After they have ordered two times, I SHOW them (not explain, but show) them Ditto. Do I force them on Ditto? No, but I DO sell the benefits for THEM of this feature."

What do you think about Ditto and customers? Does it meet their needs? Once they are signed up, do they stay on it? How can this tool be used to build and enhance your relationship with your customers?

When is a customer your customer?

Lynn Wendyger — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:32:00 GMT

I have heard several experienced retailing IBOs say that they do not consider someone a customer until they purchase multiple times. Furthermore, they don't tell customers about their Personal Websites or suggest Ditto until a relationship has been established and the customer is loyal to at least one product. Even then, technologies such as Personal Websites and Ditto do not replace the personal touch and personal service.

This makes sense, and sounds similar to many of the comments you have posted.

So what is your marker for when a customer truly becomes a customer? How many purchases? Do you ever suggest Ditto to a customer, and if so, when do you bring it up? Do you have a way of qualifying which customers would be interested in Ditto? Do you give your Personal Website domain to all your customers, or just some of them?

Putting yourself in your customers' shoes, what is it about their experience with you and the products that creates loyalty and trust?

Parents, check out whattheyplay.com

Lynn Wendyger — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:41:00 GMT

You’ve heard me talk about my son’s love of video games before. He currently has a Wii and a DS, subscribes to Nintendo Magazine, and alternates between downloading old standards and trying out the latest stuff. Given his age (12 next month), we’ve restricted his access to only those games suitable for every age (except for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which is rated T for teens 13 and over).

This, we recognize, will soon change as he is increasingly exposed to more mature content at friends homes, and wants access to Teen and higher-rated games himself. How will we be able to differentiate between games, without having to first play them ourselves?

Parents, there is an answer. A recently launched site, www.whattheyplay.com, gives a detailed analysis of the content of video games and virtual worlds.

In other words, my son won’t be getting Grand Theft Auto IV anytime soon. Which as of now is just fine with him. Thankfully, he’s still entertained by the antics of a certain Italian plumber.

Spring Break Road Trip, Wired

Lynn Wendyger — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:47:00 GMT

I've been away for a week, doing the spring break thing. We took a road trip to visit family in the Detroit metro area. But road trips of today are distinctly different than road trips of the past where your choices were primarily radio or reading.

Picture this. My husband is jamming to his 30 GB iPod, which he has plugged directly into the van stereo system. My daughter is sitting as far back as she can so that his music selection doesn't drown out her own iPod nano, while she texts to her friends on balmier trips to Florida and South Carolina. My son is playing his Nintendo DS. I'm catching up on DVDs of TV shows I never get to watch. We all live in our own little bubble if we want to. Together, but apart.

It's good we were staying at Grammy & Grampy's house, because if we were in a hotel, it would have been hard finding enough electrical outlets to support using and recharging all our stuff. Three cell phones. One DS. One Wii. Three iPods. One laptop. One DVD player. One digital camera.

I didn't really mind, because we did do a lot of family activities that didn't involve electronics. A tour of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan for our daughter, conducted by our two nieces who are students there. A visit to Canada and Point Pelee, the southernmost point of Canada. And of course, the Detroit Zoo.

If you are getting away this spring, enjoy. And be sure to spend some of your time unplugged.

More on the CSA....and a new report!

Lynn Wendyger — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:00:00 GMT

OK, you’ve told us what is wrong with the CSA and Receipt tool, and you’re right.
But fair is fair, and in order for us to improve, we need to ask you a few more questions.

First, I’d like to mention the newest addition to the CSA. It’s called the Customer Contact Purchase History report, and can be found as a link in the CSA, or in Manage My Business>View Business Reports. This report displays all customer orders that Quixtar knows of, sorted in descending order by the number of days since the customer’s last purchase. The customer’s contact information and purchase history is also displayed.
You can download it as a pdf for easy printing and save for future reference and follow up with customers.

The Customer Contact Purchase Report is not perfect, but it does provide more customer information for you in one place. My view is that the primary reason for any of these tools being less than perfect for an IBO is because the website has been designed with the assumption that customers would create an account and buy from the website themselves. 100% self-serve. That means that the customer profile belongs to them, not the IBO.

In reality, we know that many of your customers do not self-serve. As you said, there will always be some customers who want you to serve them. There are some customers who prefer to go directly to the web themselves, and some customers who might want both. And, there are those customers you may sell something to at a health & beauty event, who you may not see again.

Tell us more about the types of customers you have. How do you deal with each of them? Do you try to evolve them from hi-touch to hi-tech? And even if they do move to hi-tech once they develop trust and loyalty, how do you keep in touch? After all, a customer who never hears from you probably is not very motivated to visit your website.

I know others are doing more formal research to guide us on the development of future customer management tools, but if you haven’t been part of those studies, here’s your chance to let us know.

Laundry, Ultrasimple

Lynn Wendyger — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:01:00 GMT

The comments you have been posting on my last post, How Can We Ultrasimplify the Business?, have been fantastic. Keep the conversation going!

Here is a more personal note about ultrasimplicity. My laundry. As a Beta Mom I need to keep things simple. Cut corners. Find short-cuts. One of the places I cut corners is when I do the laundry.

My secret? I don’t sort my family’s clothes into darks and lights before I wash them. Well at least, not a lot of the time.

I confessed this to some friends the other day at lunch and they looked at me like I was from Mars. Not sort your laundry? Aren’t all your clothes pink by now? That’s how my daughter reacts too. She learned how to do laundry the right way in school.

I have messed up a few times and a few things got pinked. But it is surprising how much you can mix darks and lights and get away with it. Of course, I use SA8 Bioquest in cold or warm water, and All Fabric Bleach when I need to bleach. And I would never put in a new pair of jeans or brightly colored shirt with light colored clothing, not at least until I was sure all the extra dye was washed out.

My view is that clothing is more dye-fast than it was in the past, and this old rule is not as iron-clad as it once was.

Of course, my co-workers in Customer Support and R&D may be cringing as they read this. I’m sure it’s not our official story.

But it works for Beta Mom’s around the world. I know because I saw this same tip in a woman’s magazine just last week. Vindicated.

How can we “ultrasimplify” the business?

Lynn Wendyger — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:37:00 GMT

In my previous post, Do You Wii?, I asked for ideas on how to simplify the business.

After all, the brilliance of the Wii is that features were subtracted, not added.

And as Forrester Research, Inc. reported, “ultrasimplicity”, or eliminating features to better meet the needs of customers, is one of the five disruptive customer experience strategies used by companies to change the status quo in their industries.

Here are some examples of your comments:

* The personalized websites need a simplistic adjustment. Instead of having 4 different web addresses, simplify into one address. --Josh

* Excellent transformation topic! Wii, iPOD are great testimonials on SIMPLICITY. I believe our Ribbon program is very close to this stage of "ultrasimplicity”.

--Sivaram

As Sivaram said, this is great transformation topic. So tell us more. In your business, where would less be more?

Do You Wii?

Lynn Wendyger — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:45:00 GMT

As in the Wii gaming system, by Nintendo. This is the first gaming system that I can actually use (to the great amusement of my eleven year old son). And for good reason. Nintendo developed this system for everyone. People in senior citizen homes are using it for group exercise. Physical therapists are using it with their patients to help them rehabilitate. An article in UX (the user experience magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association) quotes Kenrichiro Ashida, one of the Wii designers:

“The amount of user input in the process was “unparalleled.” After all, our previous controllers..…have evolved by adding features. With the Wii Remote, however, we didn’t just add, but subtracted as well.”

Simplicity. Not only did Nintendo do extensive user research, they actually made everything about the game simpler. I really appreciate that. I could never effectively handle all those buttons and joysticks on the other games my kids have had over the years.

According to Forrester Research, Inc., “ultrasimplicity”, or stripping away features to better meet the needs of customers, is one of the five disruptive customer experience strategies used by companies to change the status quo in their industries.

In the spirit of simplicity, what ideas do you have that could simplify the business? What could we do to make the Quixtar-Amway Global experience more like playing the Wii?

Do You CSA?

Lynn Wendyger — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:44:00 GMT

Meaning, do you track your customers using the Customer Sales Activity Tool, also known as the CSA?

The CSA, originally developed to allow you to record customer sales from inventory, was user-tested by a group of IBOs. They told us what worked and what didn’t work, and from there improvements and enhancements have been made. It’s still not perfect, but it does have some bells and whistles you may be interested in, even if you don't sell from inventory.

Here are a few:

• You can view all your customer orders in one place, whether placed through Quixtar, your Personal Website, or reported on the CSA
• You can search for or sort your customer orders by customer name or date. This makes it easier to follow-up with your customers on re-orders
• You can see the total retail profit, PV, and BV for your customer sales for that month and the previous 11 months.
• You can create professional looking receipts for your customers

What has your experience with the CSA been like? Is it easy to use, or not so easy?
What did you use it for?

And in a related set of questions, how often do you sell to a customer from out of inventory? When you do, how do customers like to pay you? By cash or check?

Technology should make our lives easier. We need your input to insure that online tools like the CSA help you be more efficient and productive in your business.

So if you haven’t used it yet, check out the CSA. It’s in the Manage Your Business section of Quixtar.com.

Top Five Convenience Foods

Lynn Wendyger — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:24:00 GMT

Gregory's peanut butter and jelly post in The Rocktucky Chef got me thinking about Beta Mom kitchen survival tips. Here are my top five convenience foods, which owe a lot to the wonders of Food Technology.

5. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Staple of school lunches and quick fix for any meal at home.

4. Pasta and pasta sauce from a jar. My Italian grandmother and mother, who both simmered homemade sauce from home-canned tomatoes for hours,would not approve. But it works for us.

3. Bagged vegetables. Be it salad, baby-cut carrots, or steam-in-the-microwave frozen vegetables, these are essentials. I must confess I throw away almost as many salad bags as we eat, but at least I was able to get rid of my salad spinner.

2. Frozen soy "meatless" products. Soy hamburger, soy & vegetable burgers, soy sausage patties and soy "chicken" nuggets. These come in extremely handy for quick tacos, chili, and other various and sundry meals.

1. And my all time top favorite is .....eggs. I'm talking Eggbeaters, those liquid nonfat eggs that are perfect for omeletes and baking, and the peeled, hard-boiled eggs that I found at my grocers last year. Now, if I every really want to make deviled eggs for a party, I can. No more excuses.

Do you have any favorite convenience foods and kitchen survival tips? Please share! Beta Moms like me can use your advice.

New Online Courses, Beta Mom Approved

Lynn Wendyger — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Two new courses launched this week on Quixtar University. The first, Artistry Purse-to-Purse Selling, walks you through the purse-to-purse selling technique that was first introduced in the Artistry Sales Kit. The beauty of this technique is that anyone can do it with any experiential product, even a new IBO who has never sold before. As the course says, its easy to move products from your purse to your customer (or from your briefcase, gymbag, etc.). Personally, I'd recommend a new IBO take this course before the general selling skills courses. It's that easy.

The second course, mentioned by my friend and coworker Susan Julien-Willson in her blog Sales Speak, is the How to Sell Ribbon course. This is another great course that takes the fear out of selling. After all, everyone gives gifts, so everyone is a potential Ribbon customer.

While working on this course, I got so excited about the time I could save by giving Ribbon gift collections for the holidays, I purchased nine of them. I had four of them mailed to out-of- town relatives. And I received great feedback. My son's teacher had never seen anything like Ribbon, and really appreciated picking out her own gift. I have to say that Ribbon is tailor-made for a Beta Mom like me. No shopping, no wrapping. And it was also a lot easier carting gifts to Grandma's house on Christmas Day.

Easy selling. Easy gifting. Two course from Training to you, Beta Mom approved.

So Easy a Caveman Can Do It

Lynn Wendyger — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:24:00 GMT

Last year I was part of a research session where IBOs talked about selling products to baby boomer customers. One young man in his twenties said that he needed a website that was so easy to use even a caveman can do it, because we all know that baby boomers aren't good at technology. Everyone laughed, including the baby boomers in the group. But he had a point.

I've been watching my husband evolve from an only use the computer for occasional research kind of guy to a full-blown networking admin kind of guy with his own server, back up systems, and arsenal of spyware, virus, and family-friendly filter software. What might come naturally to a twenty-something has taken my husband stacks of dummies books and hours to learn. We have Window XP for Dummies, Windows XP Quick Reference for Dummies, Cleaning Windows XP for Dummies, and Windows X Hacks and Mods (whatever those are), just to name a few. We also own Networking for Dummies, iPod for Dummies, Media Center for Dummies, and an array of non-dummy branded books.

My husband took over my daughter's iPod, spending hours on eMusic and iTunes. (You can guess what he got from Santa). And he developed some new friends. I might as well set a plate for dinner for Mike from Geeksquad.

So, can you teach a caveman new tricks? Sure. But the million dollar question is, can you do it in a time efficient and intuititve way?

At Quixtar University, we strive to make your online learning experiences as easy as possible. We know we don't always achieve that goal. Let us know your ideas for how we can make the online learning experience "so easy a caveman can do it".

Facebook Faceoff

Lynn Wendyger — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:08:00 GMT

Should we or shouldn’t we? Allow my daughter to set up a Facebook, that is.

According to her, this can make or break her high school social career.

My safety and security minded husband is worried about predators and hackers.

I’m worried about the number of hours she could potentially spend using the site.

In her sophomore year with a tough load of classes, she doesn’t need any more electronic distractions.

My husband has given our daughter guidelines she needs to follow. Things like not posting a photo of herself on the home page and not using her last name. And of course, restricting access to only people she knows.

In order to research how this all works, I created my own Facebook account. After all, Facebook's new motto is, “it’s not just students” anymore. Every day, their COO said, they have more people over 25 entering Facebook than any other demographic.

This interesting fact had escaped the notice of my two college-aged nieces, who didn't believe I could sign up because I wasn't a student. When I assured them it was possible, they were horrified. "That's just wrong, Aunt Lynn", they said. I guess I won't be asking them to be my friend online anytime soon.

So, do you let your pre-teens or teens join social networking sites? If yes, do you give them ground rules? Do you look at their site?

Do you belong to a social networking site like Facebook or My Space yourself? If yes, do you use it primarily for your personal or business life? Or both intertwined? What do you get there that you can’t get anywhere else?