Direct sales move from a moonlighting gig to main income for many El PasoansBy Dan Huff
"Direct sales” – the person-to-person approach to selling outside the confines of a store is currently generating more than $30.4 billion and involves an estimated 14 million Americans – many of them women – according to the national Direct Sales Association.
Here in El Paso, the business of direct selling accommodates many different styles and approaches.
Lee Ann Peacock, for example, takes a laid-back approach to selling Mary Kay Cosmetics. Her Mary Kay work doesn’t interfere with her full-time job, which is selling the services of PDX Printing of El Paso.
Peacock sees her sales for Mary Kay not so much as a business, but as a way to stay in touch with friends and acquaintances.
“I’ve made friends through Mary Kay that I would have otherwise never crossed paths with in life,” she says. “One of my very best friends that I’ve ever had in my entire life was somebody I met at a Mary Kay training event.”
A natural saleswoman, Peacock says she love to make people happy. “And that’s why I really enjoy sales – it doesn’t matter what the sale is.”
Occasionally, she adds, her full-time sales job co-mingles with her Mary Kay sales.
“I have a couple of customers here at work,” Peacock says. “They can say they need this and this, and I can drag it in the next morning, I pretty much have it all, because I keep a good inventory.”
While she once sold the cosmetics full-time and made a good living at it, Peacock adds that even though her professional life has moved in another direction Mary Kay customers have come to count on her, and she doesn’t like to let them down.
In order to do direct sales as a full-time job, she observes, “You really have to be focused, and organization helps – and organized is something people can learn to be. They can also learn to be focused.”
One El Pasoan in direct sales who seems highly focused is Carol Stripling, well known as a private piano instructor and as a music teacher for babies to kindergartners for 19 years at First Presbyterian Christian Preschool. She had been working with Kindermusik International, a music publisher, since 1989, and when the company branched into direct sales two and a half years ago. Stripling followed along.
Because she had always admired the quality of the products, she said she found herself calling all of her Kindermusik friends to “get them going” in the new direct-sales business.
“I never realized what direct sales was about,” she said. “I just assumed it was ‘pushy’ time,” just pushing products. But that’s not what it is at all – it’s really a service industry. It’s people helping people.”
Today, as one of the company’s “advanced unit leaders,” Stripling oversees a nationwide cadre of 170 to 180 women selling more than 100 different products, a job she says would be impossible without today’s Internet connections.
She’s also a vendor of Kindermusik products for five school districts in the El Paso region.
All of her direct sales duties take 15-20 hours a week, Stripling estimates, including the time it takes to arrange for product shows in her “consultant’s” homes. Consultants average $100 a night, and the commission for the 1,000 managers at Stripling’s level is 25 percent on all sales, she noted, adding direct sales offers a deeper satisfaction than the money.
“Sales is communicating,” Stripling says. ”Sales is one on one. As a soloist, when I sing for my churches, I’m really selling the message of hope and joy. So really everybody does sales. We’re all born into this world crying, we’re asking for help right away. People always have needs, people always have wants, and what I love about this direct sales industry is that you can sit down with people and you can have time, you can hear what their goals are, what their visions are. And what I love about the industry is the sky is the limit. I had no idea. If you had asked me four years ago if I was ever going to be doing parties, I would have laughed in your face.”
Another Lee Ann – Lee Ann Gevertz, who oversees a Pampered Chef sales force of about 60 in the El Paso region – says there’s often an additional incentive in direct sales.
“Usually every month there’s some type of incentive behind the scenes for us,” Gevertz said. “It could be free products, or extra trip points. And we always have a big incentive trip over a year-long earning period, and those trips are fabulous. For example, we went on a seven-day Caribbean cruise, and all we paid for was our parking at the airport and anything that we bought on the island. We had a $500 shipboard credit. You can’t beat that.”
Nor, she added, can you beat the fact that direct sales is great for women. Gevertz has been doing it for a dozen years now.
“One of the things that appealed to me was that I was able to schedule the shows when I could do them and still be able to go to the kids’ events and time off and vacations,” she said, adding it’s a line of work that allows her to be a lot more flexible in the use of her time than her previous job as a computer analyst for the gas company.
She left the gas company in 1992 and never looked back.
“I’ve learned that we are the cause for our success and our failure,” Gevertz says. “Direct sales is not something that I dreamed of doing when I was a little girl, or even a big girl in college. I think most people think they should work for other people and have a “real job.” But, you know, my house is pretty real, my car is pretty real and my business is pretty nice.”
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