Don’t Want Your Parties to Cancel? Get Insurance.

This is a great time of year for bookings, 
except when you get a party booking cancellation!
Here’s are some tried and true tips to avoid the dreaded cancellation:
1. Take notice if during your coaching follow up calls that attendance looks slim. Suggest co-hostessing with a friend. Sometimes having two people host a party will bring in enough sales and attendance so that both hostesses can benefit.
2. Encourage outside orders: have the hostess take orders from who can’t attend.  The hostess can send catalogs to her family and friends out of the area, or refer them to your personal website. This way, the day of the party, she might have a few hundred dollars in sales and will be less likely to cancel.
3. Talk with your hostess during coaching, have her make a wish list about the products she wants. Talk with her about the products on her list. This way she is working toward earning those products. Sometimes it’s more motivating than a specific goal.
4. Attendance boosters: offer your hostess a special gift for each five people she has coming. Most can get at least 5 to attend, this way, it can sometimes motivate a hostess to contact a few extra people to have ten guests instead of only eight.
OK, so you’ve done your hostess coaching, and they still want to cancel. Now what?
Important! When they phone to cancel, ask them what date they would like to reschedule to. Most hostesses won’t suggest a new date unless asked, so ask! 
Even better? Suggest a couple dates: “I have blank night open or blank night next month…”
If they don’t want to reschedule, try to find out why. Maybe it is a problem you can fix. Most cancellations are a timing issue, so it’s important to ask and then suggest a new date right away.
Give yourself cancellation insurance: 
1. As soon as you get a cancellation, get on the phone to some other prospects you have, a previous hostesses or customer,  and try to get a new booking asap. This is especially important if you don’t have another party booked for a while. The longer you go without doing a party, the more impossible it seems that you’ll ever get a booking again.
2. You already have the date booked, so hold your own party on the date of the cancellation. Just invite your own circle of friends and have one anyway. Have fun with it! Make it a “theme party”, like maybe a game night, bingo night, Holiday party, come-as-you-are party, be creative! Even with regulars, they love to get together and you can be the glue to make it happen. If you get sales, great! What’s better, you will get more leads and possibly more parties.
—Rina Valan
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