What's it really like to be a top selling Avon rep?

When I joined Avon in 2002, I needed £50 per month to make up the shortfall in the bills. I had just left a job I hated and had started a new job working in a bank but had taken a 50% pay cut in the process. It seemed worth it to me. We only get one shot at life and waking up happy in a morning, looking forward to the day, was worth more than the sizeable income I had been getting.

I never dreamed that 16 years later, not only would I still be doing Avon, I would be one of the top performing reps in the UK, but here I am, still at it and my income now is more sizeable than it was in the job I left all those years ago. At the time I had been a Financial Consultant with a major Insurance Company and although I liked meeting people and helping them to plan their finances, I did not like the constant pressure to sell them financial products that they may not need. My first contact with Avon was with my own rep who used to come to my door regularly and had done so for a number of years. I thought if she's been doing Avon that long there must be money in it. So I called Avon and asked for more information. What I didn't know at the time was that my representative would have got an introducer bonus just for recommending me. I don't think she's ever forgiven me but we are good friends and still see each other often at Avon events. I was contacted a few days later by Barbara the Area Manager for my area. Barbara was one of the best Area Managers I've ever worked under. I will always remember what she said to me after she signed me up and gave me my books which she put in a pile on my dining room table. "If you go and put a brochure through every letter box and go and collect them a few days later, I cannot guarantee that you will get orders but it is likely that you will. However, I CAN guarantee that if you leave those books sat on your dining room table you won't earn a penny." She was absolutely right. I did as I was asked and a few days later I had orders totalling £125 which at the time qualified me for 25% discount. It still wasn't quite the £50 I needed but I had signed up towards the end of the campaign and only had one week to get as many orders as I could. As the campaigns were 3 weeks long I still had the rest of the month to make up the shortfall.

Now I knew how easy it was to get orders I made sure that next time I went out, once I had collected the books and orders, back in I could put them back out again through other letter boxes. My second order was well in excess of £200 so there was my £50 in 3 weeks so pro-rata over a month I was receiving £75 and this was only my second campaign. The following campaign I was interviewed for another job as a Financial Adviser. This time with a major Bank. I had applied a few months earlier and for some reason had slipped through the system but they had contacted me out of the blue and invited me to reapply. I got that job. So I no longer needed the Avon money. By that time though I was earning over £100 per campaign. Why would I stop? Fast forward to 2009. From being a financial adviser I had got a job as a Commercial Director running a loan scheme for a Housing Association but was still doing Avon on a smallish scale. Then I was dropped a bombshell. I got made redundant. I'd been with the housing association 6 years and I was on a significant salary so got a fairly large redundancy settlement. I was sure I would get another job fairly soon, so I wasn't too worried but I thought I would try to increase the income I was receiving from Avon now I had more time. So I approached the area manager and asked for more territory. I was given 1500 homes and I worked it religiously. I also signed up for Sales Leadership and started building my own team of representatives. It soon became clear that although my Avon earnings had tripled there wasn't enough coming in to pay the bills again. My husband had left me two years earlier and it was just me and my son at home. When we had been together we had taken on a lot of commitments that now needed to be paid with only one income coming in. My income at that point was just my Avon earnings. I needed to do something, and fairly quickly, as that redundancy settlement would not last forever. In 2010 I opened my first store on eBay trading Avon products as a sole trader. That year I shot into the top 50 selling reps in the UK and won my first Avon holiday to Malta which was taken in 2011. 2011 coincided with Avon's 125th anniversary worldwide and their 50th year in the UK. I was invited to the NEC in Birmingham where Avon was holding it World Tour event. I went, along with my daughter who was also a rep at the time, and a group of other reps from around the Manchester area. As a top 50 rep we were placed in the front seats so we had a close up view of the stage where Andrea Jung, Avon's CEO was giving a presentation. It was really exciting especially as I was invited up onto the stage to be presented with a Tiffany bracelet for being number 1 Elite in the UK. I had increased my sales over previous year by 118%. That came as a total surprise and I felt immensely proud of what I had achieved in such a short space of time. The best part of the day though was when Olly Murs came on stage and performed for us. The top 50 all received a signed photo and a CD of his album. The Ding Dong Bazaar Ltd started trading in November 2011. My sole trader business had grown so much that I was approaching the VAT threshold, so in order to buy some more time, on the advice of my accountant, I separated out my door to door and online businesses, and set up my own limited company. Imagine me being a Company Director but that's exactly what I had become.

When Avon launched their online store in 2015 at first I didn't have much success but as I persevered my sales gradually grew. I am now selling between £600 and £1000 per campaign from online orders. I love developing posts for social media and with the recent launch of Avon social it has become much quicker and easier to do so. I am now looking to grow this side of the business more and i'm learning as much as I can about social selling so hopefully in the future I will be able to write some interesting articles on that subject.

I recently won my 7th Avon top 50 holiday and my fiance, Jules, who I met in 2015 and who also joined Avon, won his first. Next month we get married and amongst our guests we have several other top performing Avon reps. Avon hasn't just given us an income us given us a new family. Avon has really changed my life for the better. I wouldn't change my life for the earth. It's exciting, it's challenging and above all its successful.

If you too would like to know how to become a successful at selling Avon contact me and join our team. After all success breeds success. I can be contacted on 07872 176429 or email beautyreponline@yahoo.co.uk