Sunday, January 29, 2012

Leadership Recap

Last week, I attended Stampin' Up!'s Leadership Conference in San Antonio. In short, it was awesome. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more: the conference, touring gorgeous San Antonio, or getting away by myself for 6 days! I think it was a pretty even tie! The first day, we collected our gorgeous Leadership Bags and made some Make & Takes.


As usual, SU! did not disappoint with the bags and yes, the fabric is a sneak peek from the new catalogue!!! I'm pretty picky, but I am in love with this bag! The bottom part is attached by our Neutrals Designer Buttons and can be removed or flipped inside out! How awesome is that?

Look at what else you can you can do with this awesome fabric. I love all the ideas SU! gives us for using their products:


One of our M&T's was a card for Ronald McDonald House. I love this card and have already used this design in one of my classes (and plan on using it some more)!


Another perk of Leadership was watching some of the head people in company tell us about upcoming changes, financials and doing some stamping. Additionally, I was able to take some Leadership-based clases.

The first class I took was on titled "Sharing the Stampin' Up! Opportunity" by Brian Pilling, which was essentially a class to help demonstrators with their recruiting efforts. It was fantastic, and offered a different way of looking at the progress of a relationship between a demonstrator and a new customer / potential recruit. It involves looking at the relationship in a staircase model starting from initiation of a relationship to experimenting, intensifying, integrating and finally bonding (in a romantic relationship, this would be marriage - in a demo-customer relationship, this would be the customer becoming a demo). I loved the ideas I got and how the presentation gave me a new idea on how to approach recruiting.

I also took a class on "Retaining and Engaging Your Downline" by Donna Griffith and fellow Demonstrator Patsy Waggoner. Although most new demonstrators think that getting someone to sign up with Stampin' Up! is the difficult part of being an upline, we all quickly realize that it's the easy part! The hard part is actually retaining your downline and have them sell and recruit themselves. Patsy told us how she has grown and changed her business in the last year and I have to say, this was my favorite class. I was inspired by her. She has completely turned her business around and grown it significantly. For me, her tips on engaging my downline such as sending cards monthly to top sellers/recruiters as well as celebrating their achievements with them really made sense! I've tried doing them in the past and got lazy after 1 or 2 months. But Patsy's results were inspiring and I'm going to give it a good go this time!

I know there wasn't much stamping in this post, but hope you enjoyed hearing about my Leadership experiences. 'Til next time, keep letting stamps bring out your creativity!

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