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It may be a bit counterintuitive to talk about simplicity when thinking about technology. After all, we hear about digital systems that can store larger amounts of data, with the global datasphere supposed to consist of 8.9 zettabytes by 2024. And we hear much ado about technology meant to distribute more information at speeds that, if realized to their fullest extent, would boggle the mind – as in “blockchain.”
These evolutions are complex in nature– decentralized blockchain infrastructure requires massive investments in technology and personnel – and so talking about them in terms of simplicity would appear off-base. How could such futuristic, cybernetic tech be “simple”?
Yet looking closer at digitalization – if we apply it to direct selling and gig work – it is clear that simplicity of user experience is a major trend in tech. Only in understanding this fact can leaders achieve a better understanding of what such technology can and should enable distributors to accomplish as they participate in the direct selling ecosystem.
Gig Work and Simple Experiences: an Object Lesson
Let’s take gig work as an introductory example. Gig work represents a large share of the economy, with 52% of workers expected to have participated in the gig economy by 2023. Let’s take a look at the factor that enabled modern gig work, technology.
Large companies like Uber and TaskRabbit place the entirety of their workforce experience in a single app with a unified workflow. These apps allow contractors to provide their services in a simple fashion. They’re not complicated – everything happens in one app, from communication to payment, and that’s part of their appeal. The entire experience, end to end, happens right there.
The key is simplicity. If TaskRabbit required taskers to sign up on a separate app, conduct business in one app, and accept payment in still another app, there’s no question that it probably wouldn’t have become as popular as it is. It probably wouldn’t now be owned by IKEA, the popular furniture giant.
Yet that “simple experience” provided by the app doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not simple to deliver a simple experience to taskers. For instance, it was only in 2016, eight years after their initial launch, that TaskRabbit debuted their real-time services app – that’s a lot of R&D.
What can direct selling learn from this example?
Simple Experience, Complex Technology
In order to provide a simple experience for the end user (downline and upline distributors, in the case of direct selling), you have to have complex technology at work behind the scenes. If the technology itself is simple, not smart enough, not built on millions of data points collected from within the industry and analyzed, then the end user won’t be able to do much with it.
This would be a simplistic app, rather than a simple one – think of any subpar app you’ve used that feels like it’s held together with string.
I’ll quote the late Steve Jobs on this: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” Gig companies’ success – in 2021 fully 9% of Americans, nearly 30 million, were involved in gig work – can be largely ascribed to the elegance of the solutions they’re placing right in contractors’ hands. Is the same true for direct selling?
At Rallyware, our research has shown that having sophisticated technology drives real results. (For context, speaking broadly, our platform uses a smart rules and recommendations engine to automatically determine the task, action, or activity that a distributor needs to complete at a certain time to maximize their performance.)
According to our analysts’ internal research, from 142 million smart push notifications sent to distributors’ their mobile devices in 2021, 7.4x more business tasks were completed. With these notifications triggering specific sales activities for specific users – activities that the platform determined to be most useful for them– sales growth was 204%.
To the end user, this occurs simply. As with the best apps, they don’t have to think about how the process works. They get a notification that feels useful and relevant to them; they tap it and complete the associated task. This workflow is seamless, the experience linear. Yet to get to that point requires highly complex and multilayered technology.
What Does Simplicity Help Distributors Do?
Diving a bit deeper, let’s consider what simplicity helps distributors accomplish on a day-to-day basis.
Save Time: When distributors don’t have to juggle multiple apps to get up to speed, they get time back in their day – time they can spend learning product lines and landing sales – along with fewer frustrations and more opportunities for frictionless business building.
Furthermore, when effective technology gets implemented in a smart digital strategy for direct selling, distributors can start achieving their goals faster. Selling and recruiting, selling and making income, buying products at a discount – distributors reach these “points of productivity” sooner because their User Experience, their digital experience, is seamlessly moving them through the onboarding process.
I have to underline again that this is the result of complex technology whirring in the background – rich data analytics, recommendation engines, integrations with external systems. Woven together, these capabilities help the distributor get the right task for them, personally, at the right time.
They don’t have to go searching for tasks to complete; they don’t have to switch between apps and interfaces. The entire process is contained in one platform, which centralizes data in one experience to enrich the distributor’s experience and make sure that each step is as valuable for them as possible.
This is simplicity at work – not in technology, but in end user (that is, distributor) experience. Mere richness of user experience, a broad platform with a surfeit of available tools, this is not the goal of digital technology for direct selling. The goal is that any given system should work intuitively, that all of these parts should be integrated into an easy experience.
Sell More: One of the hallmarks of a truly simple digital experience is that it integrates data from external sources, making each activity and task that distributors receive as up-to-date and as informed by as many metrics as possible. Say, for instance, there’s a system external to your centralized distributor platform which tracks social media engagement. To get a bit technical for a moment, your centralized platform could use data from that system to enrich actions for the distributor, showing them the next steps to enhance their business, driven by that extra influx of data.
The point is that the technology in the background is complex while the experience of the distributor is simple. They see a smart notification, tap on it, and view their next step to maximum productivity. But the technology in the background requires quite a bit of “firepower” and engineering – APIs, algorithms, and so forth, to connect that external data to the centralized platform. The distributor sees none of that, just experiences the sophistication.
Build Teams: Lastly, upline-downline relationships and communications become much faster and more transparent when supported by simplicity.
When uplines have access to real-time data, centralized in one location and easy to view and interpret, they can give relevant advice and share the most useful best practices for specific downlines’ individual situations. Even better, they can do so right away, without having to open another platform.
Of course, once again, the technology in the background is complex, housing chat and messaging functionalities in the same platform that shows live data, and connecting these two parts of the platform together. To get to that point takes a lot of engineering.
That’s the thesis we’re exploring here – simple experience in the foreground (for the distributor), complex process in the background (in the technology). Often the distributor might not even realize quite how much their platform allows them to do, just as we sometimes forget how much our iPhone helps us accomplish.
Digital Simplicity: The Present and Future
When you’re on the market for direct selling technology, one of your central questions for your potential technology partner should be: is the distributor experience simple? Can you show me how simple it is?
Anyone can claim that their technology is innovative and complex, but only market leaders can demonstrate an intuitive, easy-to-follow experience for the distributor herself.
When there’s technology that’s similarly simplified in use but complex in architecture – why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? In Rallyware’s case, 30% of top direct selling companies have embraced simplicity as we deliver it. By ignoring the power of digital simplicity, you’re doing yourself and your field a disservice.
Rallyware delivers digital simplicity that’s made possible by quite sophisticated technology. Like with the iPhone, distributors don’t see the hardware and software in the background; they don’t feel how complex it is to deliver ease. All they see are the effects, how organic it feels to get onboarded, train, and start selling. To learn more about Rallyware and what our platform unlocks for companies and their workforce, request a demonstration from one of our product experts here.
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