Choosing the Day You'll Place Your Representative Order
Let’s take a look at things you want to take into consideration when choosing an order day.
We have a 2 week ordering window for each campaign, you can see when the window for each campaign is on the AvonNow home page by clicking on Campaign Calendar.
The campaign starts on a Wednesday and goes through 2pm P/ 5pm E on the Tuesday 2 weeks later. Any orders billed during that time will count towards your sales for that campaign. You can order from the previous brochure during each campaign as well.
What you want to do is look at that Wednesday to Tuesday 2 weeks later schedule that we have for our campaign and decide when you want to place your order. Some of the things you’ll want to take into consideration are
What day of the week works best for you? Work around your other obligations. Map out your big rocks then look at what day would be a good day for you to finalize and submit your order.
Also look at the other end of that and when is a good day for you to sort and bag up that order and what day or days are best for you to make your deliveries to your customers. Are you seeing your customers at work or a regular activity. Or If you are delivering to customers at their home, what day is the best for you to be doing that.
Once you know which end of the process is more time sensitive, you can use that as your starting point for choosing your order day.
You can find what the typical order turnaround time is for your area by going to Support on AvonNow, then Frequently Asked Questions and then Shippping and Avon’s Distribution Center. Remember the number of days shown is Business days so you’ll need to factor in weekends. Most of the Sunrise Beauty Team is in the Western US so our turn around times are 4-6 business days, or about a week.
You’ll want
to work in a buffer into your schedule for possible shipping delays. Shipping
delays do happen no matter how hard Avon and the shipping companies try to
avoid them. Sometimes weather delays,
broken down trucks or natural disasters or even holidays can slow things
down. If you have an extra day in
between when you expect to receive your order and when you plan to start
delivering you will only have to scramble to get order sorted, not completely
reschedule your deliveries, if your shipment is delayed.
One note about tracking your shipments. For a lot of areas Avon uses a hybrid shipping system where they use a private carrier service to transport the orders from the distribution center in Ohio to a carrier hub closer to your town. Typically UPS or your local delivery company is only in possession of your package for the last day of transit. As a result when you go to track your order the tracking will just show they are waiting for the package, so don’t panic if it’s been a few days and your carrier still doesn’t show an expected delivery date. If your orders are delivered by UPS, be sure to sign up for the free UPS MyChoice program to get alerts about the progress of your packages.
Depending on which is more important for you, the day you place the order or the day you receive the order you can use that as your starting point to choose your order day. Since delivering orders is usually the thing that takes more time and does somewhat need to be worked around your customer’s availability it’s usually that end of the process that determines when you want to order
As an example, I deliver my customer's orders on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so I want to receive my order by Monday so I can sort and bag my orders on Tuesday (and have a buffer day if the order is delayed). Since shipping usually takes 4 business days, once I factor in weekends that puts my order day at the Monday before.
Once you know what day you want to order/deliver then choose whether you’ll order the first week of the campaign or the second week. If a lot of your customers work in the same place, working your orders around their payday can be helpful. Ordering early in the campaign can mean better availability on limited edition items. Ordering at the beginning of the campaign also gives you extra time if you are trying to hit a particular sales goal for that campaign and your regular order was short of that goal, You’ll have time to place an add on order or encourage more online orders to get you to your goal.
You do not have to wait to the last day of the campaign to place your order. I know a lot of representatives, especially those who remember the days when we all had a specific date we had to order on each campaign think that the last day of the campaign is when they have to order but that is the one day of the campaign I don’t recommend choosing as your regular order day. There are so many things that can happen that cause you to be delayed in sending your order such as internet or website outages, any number of household issues that require your attention, you or your kids or your pet may be sick, you had to stay late at work. Whatever it is, if something causes you to miss that 2pm pacific deadline for placing your order it won’t count for the current campaign and that could not only cause you to miss a sales goal for an incentive, it could also cause problems if you have items from the previous campaign on your order since we can only order one campaign back.
One last tip: Tell your customers to get their order to you the day before you want to submit to give yourself time to get things together and help avoid those last minute orders from customers coming in after you have placed your order.
Chris Arnold
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