DSA Trip Part III: Loose Lips Sail Ships
So as the crowd of attendees at the Direct Selling Association’s annual meeting began to dissipate after the final words were delivered by Maya Angelou (the opening speaker of the event), I marched off to the first of several workshops I would attend over the next two days – feeling energized and ready to take on world! Really, she was that good!! The first seminar was run by 4 direct sales company figureheads and I was immediately awestruck by how willing they were to share information – sometimes specific information – regarding their company’s successes and failures. Never before had I heard about (let alone experienced) companies that are essentially competitive to one another openly sharing not only their mistakes but also the secrets to their success. It was a little bizarre.
As I hopped from meeting to meeting I began to realize that most of the members of the direct sales industry feel a unique bond to one another. Was this because direct selling has had to defend its modern day legitimacy in the wake of unprofessional scams that were once widespread in the industry’s history? Was it because there is almost a collective feeling of us vs. them (meaning direct sales companies vs. all other types of businesses) because our business model is so often misunderstood? Or was it simply a testament to the code of ethics that the DSA dictates and the qualities of the men and woman in the organization who have vowed to uphold and live by those standards? I pondered this notion as I jumped from one session to another – all of which followed the same protocol… open sharing.
Call me an optimist but my impression was that this “retreat” was centered around companies helping other companies. Seriously. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance and just because something worked for one company doesn’t mean it will work for another, but information sure is powerful. A piece from here, an idea from there – the entire event was a treasure trove of information. And I felt like an explorer who had hit the motherload.
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