Workshops

In November, Suzanne Clark, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest association in the United States for businesses and associations, said, “The FTC is waging war on American business. We are ready and fighting back.” During the ensuing months, the Chamber pushed back against various FTC approaches directly to the Commission and Congress, including zombie votes, the rulemaking process, and multiple attempts to expand their regulatory reach. A senior executive from the Chamber will detail their efforts in continuing to protect American businesses and ensure a stable regulatory climate.

The top online marketplaces in the world, including Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay, sold $2.7 trillion in 2020, or 62% of global web sales that year. Despite the promise of unfettered access to customers, the reality is that most sellers struggle with unprecedented and unauthorized rogue resellers who drive down pricing, increase channel competition and conflict, impact the customer experience, and harm brand equity. During this session our panel of experts will explore:

• The channel war that is at work and the forces fueling its development
• Recommendations for revising product policies, procedures, and agreements to differentiate products from those sold by unauthorized parties
• How company management can protect and complement these efforts

Plexus Worldwide is a top 30 direct sales company with more than 350,000 brand ambassadors. Rapid sales growth has caused the company to take a hard look at its order fulfillment operations to ensure scalability. This session will review current strategies to scale and improve back-end fulfillment capabilities, including warehouse network expansion to speed delivery, cut parcel costs, and reduce risk; warehouse automation to increase throughput by 20–30% while reducing labor; and tight inventory management to ensure immediate, accurate traceability of products by specific lot. Presenters will discuss the rationale and results for each strategy, including an ROI analysis on facility automation.

Customer and distributor retention is a pain point for any direct selling company. Learn the best practices you should be leveraging to improve retention and reactivate inactive customers. Discover new automated intelligence technology that supports your field with behavior-driven prompts, reminders, and tasks to support customers and team members.  

We’ve assembled woman leaders to discuss how they’ve weathered the storms to come out ahead and continue long-term growth despite ongoing global challenges. They’ll share critical concepts that helped them succeed within the channel. Hear how they have tackled the ongoing crises from COVID and social movements to rising inflation. Learn where they have seen extraordinary growth opportunities and what they have done to create innovative approaches that maintain a growth trajectory. They’ll share how they see the future of our industry for women—both on the corporate and field side—and how they are adjusting, and their companies are evolving, creating multi-year planning and story/positioning to ensure they stay relevant and grow.

Our ability to gather, travel, and meet face-to-face was abruptly interrupted. We were all forced to pivot at lightspeed to virtual conventions and meetings. These virtual events’ success was surprising: participation doubled in many cases and was up to ten times higher than traditional in-person. Virtual conversations were productive and exciting, and companies’ and salesforce participants’ cost savings were significant. While there is a rush to get back to the business of in-person, face-to-face events, we don’t want to leave behind the positive aspects of virtual meetings.

Join this session to learn how to incorporate virtual attendees and speakers to enhance your participation and meeting experience without jeopardizing the in-person format. Our speakers will address questions such as how to budget for virtual technology, price registration fees for virtual versus in-person attendees, delight your virtual and in-person audiences without negatively impacting either, and incorporate new trends and technologies.