Your question implies that you have sponsored enough active affiliates who may benefit from offline training. If you have affiliates from other countries, obviously, you seem to be excluding them in this local training. If this is correct, then your approach has some validity.
It is evident that adequate and practical training is critical to success with SFI. As affiliates, we enjoy a comprehensive, free of costs; self-paced training that covers all the aspects important to run a successful business.
As a sponsor, you are intending to reach out to existing affiliates, members of your team. You aim at providing them with in house, practical, hands-on training. You are targeting people who are already SFI affiliates and you want to help them grow their businesses.
For your project to have an excellent attendance and be successful, you want to make it safe worthwhile and beneficial for them to attend.
By safety, I mean to be exclusively about SFI, and no other agenda. We are SFI Affiliates and team leaders, our communication and interaction with our team members should only be related to SFI. Regardless of the settings, we are still bound by the SFI rules of communication with other members. It would not be appropriate to talk about any other topics, beside SFI, especially not other businesses and certainly not about religion. If affiliates were to attend your training sessions and hear about other subject matters, they would not be safe. Not only it would be a violation of SFI rules, it would also have a negative effect on your business relationships with your team members. The word would spread out and nobody would come to the next training.
To be worthwhile, the training has to have relevant content about issues facing affiliates. Your training program should be based on questions identified in your interactions with your affiliates: questions that arise repeatedly or important aspects of the SFI business development that you know, from experience, will benefit your affiliates. You may want to avoid topics that do not have any bearing on the current problems facing your team members.
To be beneficial, each training topic that you cover should be concluded with meaningful take-away, concrete solutions that can be implemented and that will boost attendants’ SFI business bottom line, in a relatively short time.
To motivate our affiliates, we can organize contests. You should have these contests running at any given time. Your training sessions should be the moments when you recognize the contest winners and hand them out prizes they may have won.
You also will need to give them enough notice allowing them time to make arrangements to attend. As it is exclusively related to SFI, you may want to use the internal communication channels: team mail, stream posts, your leadership page and the Region/Country forum. Outline to your team members the content of the training as well as the expected outcome. Your invitation to these training sessions should clearly show what attendants can expect, how the training is going to benefit them. You should also make them understand that they will have the opportunity to give feed backs and evaluation of the training.
To make it interesting, get some of the team members involved. Give to the most experienced ones an active role. For instance, two or more of the training topics could be introduced by other affiliates of your team. Change the active participants at every training session; make it a rotation. This will give to each team member the opportunity to introduce a topic and have some leadership role.
Make the training sessions and opportunity to “Show and Tell” about SFI and TripleClicks Direct. To be successful in this, you may want to be an SFI LocalPay. You could have SFI marketing aids and products in display. Your SFI team members would have a direct experience that would help them see the quality of the products offered. They would be more eager to sell them. All of you would benefit from this experience.
Finally, make sure you have adequate meeting facilities. The location of the training, the quality of the facility, furniture, all this should provide adequate comfort for attendants be focus on the training.
There are many ways to find such facilities: be a member of your local chamber of commerce. Use restaurants, local libraries have meeting rooms
Agai, plan your meetings well in advance, inform your team members very early to give them time to attend.
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