Episode 21 Transcript

Hey everyone. It’s me Lisa and welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to have my friend, Kerry, from all the things. She does everything. So I’ll let her dig in a little bit about that. But Kerry, can you jump in and just tell the listeners who you are, what you do and all that jazz? Well, first of all, Lisa, thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast. It is always my pleasure to talk to you. We can just like talk for ages and we almost just have to stop ourselves. But anyway, so we will keep our listeners engaged, right? We’re not just gonna keep going. So I am Kerry Bennink. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. Go Vols, go Tennessee volunteers, 100%. Go Big Orange over here. I live with my husband and my two kids. I have a teenage girl. So, I need prayers and a nine year old boy. And we’re on summer break currently. Um, I currently work as an independent contractor, uh, for several different clients, um, here in Knoxville and, um, throughout the United States. And I’ve been with, I actually just started this new iteration of my life. Um, probably in the last year and I’m really enjoying it on top of my direct sales business. So, yeah, that’s just a little bit about me. Mom, mom, vols fan, Pampered Chef rep, Knoxville, busy, all the, all the things. That you would expect from a middle-aged mom. I’m giggling because you’re gonna have like probably a lot of the Canadian listeners confused because… Oh yeah. It’s funny, it’s like you guys talk about like I don’t even know what sport that is and I don’t mean to be ignorant but I just don’t. It’s all the sports. All the sports, okay. University of Tennessee has…football, baseball, right now we’re number one in the country in baseball, basketball, all the things, softball, track, it’s a NCAA school. Yeah, sorry Canada. That’s a, you know what, it’s probably just me. There’s probably Canadians who know all that stuff, but, and my son would probably be sitting here rolling his eyes like, come on mom. And it’s like, yeah, they put sports on and then I just put my headphones on and listen to podcasts. So. Well, sports is almost like its own religion here in East Tennessee. So if you move here, you immediately get indoctrinated into it. So anyway, sorry, Canada or non-sports stands, but. Well, I appreciate the little, little bit of education there. So here you go.

Tell us, how did you get, so you, you have your Pampered Chef business. How did you first get introduced to direct sales and how long? Have you been with Pampered Chef? So let’s, I’m thinking back to the nineties, which some of your listeners may not have even been born then. But back in the nineties, I went to my first Pampered Chef party and my friend Brent, who is a really good friend, decided he loves to cook and so he became a Pampered Chef rep. And in the nineties, my roommate and I at the time hosted a party for him. I had never like been exposed to direct sales, anything like that. And I bought my first pizza stone and the late nineties that PS I still have in my cabinet 20 million years later, however many years it’s been. But, um, my family knows not to touch that pizza stone because it’s perfectly seasoned and it is my precious baby. Um, but anyway, so they’re allowed to use other stones, but not that very first one that’s like almost 30 years old. Um, so let’s, you know, we’re going back to the nineties started then, and I’ve been, I love to cook and I just kept buying products and, um, had been asked by several different people to join the business, um, over that span of time. But it wasn’t, I really didn’t see myself as an in-person salesperson. You know, I’m actually quite introverted and, um, Like extra being an extrovert and being on takes a lot of energy out of me. And so I was like, ah, this is not my thing. Right. So fast forward to 2017 and I’m a stay at home mom. Um, and I’m in a virtual pampered chef party on Facebook. And I was like, huh? It was like, I could do this. I was, I had just had my son, my, well, my son was two or like a little less than two, and I was like, I could totally do this. Like, why couldn’t I just, you know, run a couple of parties, you know, and just, you know, make a little extra money little more and have something for myself because at that time I was feeling very like I had nothing that was mine. I was Ryan’s wife, Maddie’s mom, Evan’s mom. You know, I was my whole identity was related to somebody else. So it’s like I’m ready to have something that’s mine. So I signed up on a whim with a consultant that had kind of I had worked with for many years and I think she fell out of her chair, which I saw that I signed up. But that was so 2017. So I will be actually one month from today, this is recording on May 30th, on June 30th, it will be seven years with Pampered Shuff. So what started and what started as like, hey, let’s just do a little something for myself. Like blew up into this amazing business where I met so many great people, customers, consultants, just people who work in the company. It’s been, I mean, it’s been an amazing experience. Obviously, if I’ve stuck with it for seven years, then it’s been good. So, and I still love the products. I still love the company.

Well, I love the fact that, and I didn’t know that you basically started after a virtual encounter, which is kind of cool because our topic for today is a little bit about AI because you and I, it’s kind of funny, but we can go back and forth in Facebook Messenger about AI all day long. So I know that you have, I know that you’ve dug into AI as much as I have. So let’s have a little bit of a conversation. I know that you have some great tips that you’re gonna share with the listeners about AI. So I’m just gonna open up the floor to you. Okay, so let’s talk artificial intelligence. And let’s just, first of all, put it out there. This is not Skynet. For those of you who are familiar with the Terminator, who were born in the 80s and 90s, or, you know, who are. I guess not born in the 80s and 90s, but you know what I mean. This is not Skynet. This is a program that has been fed. I’m talking about ChatGPT, but it’s actually all artificial intelligence in general, which you’ve been using artificial intelligence before ChatGPT became available to the general public. You’ve been using AI without even realizing it probably for about the past five to ten years so when you go into Amazon and you have an issue and you’re talking to someone you’re not talking you’re talking to the computer That has been fed responses to give you so you’ve been using AI for a while anytime You have what we call little chat box? That is artificial intelligence so it is nothing to be afraid of. First of all, I’ve heard a lot of people be like, I can’t use that. I don’t know what to do. Well, I encourage you just to dig in. You can get a free chat GPT account. There are also paid options with a little extra bells and whistles to it. But really, if you’re just the basic baseline, direct seller or you know, marketer, you don’t really need the big fancy bells and whistles. I think it’s like $50 a year or $40 a year, whatever it is, but still you can just use the free version to get started. So what artificial intelligence does a program like ChatGPT is it is learning with you first of all. So a word of caution is anything you put into chat GPT, it’s learning. So that’s public domain. So that’s a FYI for those of you who might use this for your business or like don’t put any salary information or personal data that you do not want to be spewed back out. So there’s my word of warning. Like, um, don’t put business sensitive information. Um, if you’re using this for your, your professional job or whatever. So. You know, proprietary information, you know, you just want to leave that out because when you put it in chat BT chat, GPT is learning and it’s going to hold onto that information. So there’s my, there’s my, you know, big tip of the day. Um, but yes Artificial intelligence chat GPT is learning with you. It’s been fed millions of documents, like basically the entire internet. It scours the internet. And when you give it a prompt, it’s going to share with you what it knows. So think about a world’s worth of knowledge being in one repository, which is your chat GPT and you can use it to help you as a tool to help you with your business. So some of the ways you can use it as a direct seller or in marketing or in any kind of business actually is use it for inspiration. You know, like I use it sometimes for inspiration for posts, like posts on social media and it can be as simple as chat.gbt. You can create, you know, hey, create a month’s worth of food holiday posts to post on social media. Tell it to include captions. You want to tell it to put it in a chart, and it will actually make a little chart for you that you can cut and paste. So, and boom in a matter of like two seconds, it’s gonna spit out to you a bunch of ideas for graphics, for not the actual graphics, that’s actually like a whole other level that they’re not quite there yet. But ideas for graphics, captions, it’ll even give you hashtags to use. And boom, you’ve got 30 days of food holidays in the month of June that you can use in your social media posting. Yeah, I love chat GPT and I always start anything that I’m doing in terms of my business, acting as a social media expert. Please provide and I’m Canadian, I always use please and thank you and it’s AI, I always giggle at that. But, you know, please provide at 30 captions and I get very specific, get very specific about what you want. The more…vague that I find that you put the information in, the less the information is going to truly relate to your niche, your ideal customer, your anything like that. So if you want to speak to a specific person, put that information in there. Create a post that speaks to a 35-year-old female who is struggling with mealtime. Get very specific. Look at the response and I know that you have something to say about the response. Like when you get a response from chat GPT, what do you do, Carrie? So I am very passionate about this part of utilizing, um, artificial intelligence tools, because like you even have AI now in Canva and I feel like it’s in click up AI is just in everything, but anyway, so when you get a response and you’ve asked it for information, it’s going to sound robotic. It is going to sound like, even if you put, make it friendlier, it still has a tinge of a voice of chat, like of a artificial intelligence. And the more you use it, the more you’re gonna be able to identify it. Like I’m easily able to identify now who cuts and pastes exactly what chat GPT has given them. Because these are not words that are normally in their vocabulary and it’s in the voice of the AI. And so I’m like, Oh, that person used AI. Oh, well, good for them. They used AI, but they really should have put it in their own voice. When you’re in business, your voice is important. And you know, your words, your spin on things, like there’s a part that just can’t be replaced by a machine. Yeah. And that part is you. You are the biggest part of your business and you are what people are buying, not, not your social media post. You know, like they’re buying your brand. And when your brand sounds like a computer generated, you know, information, you can tell. So you really just want to use chat like AI, chat GPT, what Canvas spits out to you as inspiration because it’s kind of a shortcut. Well, it is a shortcut. So let’s say you want to create a blog post of top 10 meal ideas for busy moms with young children. You can put that, you know, Hey chat, GPT, create a blog post of 10 ideas for busy moms who have 30 minutes or less in a limited budget and boom, you know, it’s going to pop out those ideas. Now with say with my direct sales company, Pampered Chef or with Lisa’s, with Epicure, we can adapt that. Take that idea, take those ideas. rewrite, you know, rewrite it in our voice and, you know, create a blog post. Because it saved me like scouring recipes and thinking like, you know, frankly, I don’t have a lot of brain power. I’m just going to be honest. Like working, um, basically full time with my business and with children. Um, especially we’re in summertime already, and I’m having to run and pick up people like all over the place all the time. Um, I don’t have much brain power left so I can go to chat GBT and be like, all right, I need to create a blog blog post so I can just go do it and say, you know, do this. I adjust it to my voice and to my products. By the way, with chat GBT or with AI, you can even say give me the top 10 pampered chef recipes for busy moms. You could probably even tell it that. Now it may pop out some really old recipes or things you’re just like, where did that come from? But like that’s, you know, it doesn’t always get it right, but it gets it good enough to what you need. So that is my biggest, most passionate thing about when you utilize AI is to make sure you don’t just cut and paste it. Make it you. I find that AI an scripts, like the old school scripts, are very similar. And scripts often make me cringe because they are fed to many as a resource to just post it and change the little, like, brackets to the person’s name and just carry on that is the exact same thing as AI. It’s like you can tell a script a mile away, you can tell a copy and paste from AI a mile away. So make sure that it sounds like you. It only takes a second to reread it and read it out loud. This is my tip. Read it out loud because if it doesn’t sound natural coming from your mouth, it’s not going to sound natural for somebody to read it and believe it came from you. Yeah, there are words that pop out of chat GBT that I’m like, Huh? I mean, you probably get this too. Yeah. Or culinary. I would never use culinary in my posts. Culinary. Culinary delight. Culinary delight is always comes out of chat GPT. And I’m like, who in the world says culinary delight? Chat GPT does. Chat GPT loves culinary delight. Yeah. And I’m just like, make I’m like, that just doesn’t sound right or I’m missing something. I’ll be like, you know, I’ll cut and paste my paragraph in there. And it’s like, proofread and improve this paragraph. And it’ll shoot something out. Um, that is what I wrote, but it fixes, it fixes it up. Basically it polishes it a little bit. And it doesn’t necessarily add those words, culinary delight, or anything like that in there. But I use it a lot for proofreading. And I’ve created quizzes before for social media. I’ll say create a quiz about, you know, July 4th. Well, sorry, Canada, you know, our independence day. Our July 1st, ours is July 1st. So it’s the same. Okay. Yeah. Canada Day. Yeah. So like Canada day or, you know, hey, come up with a quiz about facts related to Canada day and food, you know, and it’ll come up. I mean, I guess it’s more, I know it’s more of a food holiday and the U S it’s all about like, it’s always about food in the U S but anyway, um, ours is more about booze, you know, well, yeah, which is on brand for both countries. Um, but you guys are much nicer. But yes, you can create a quiz for social. That’s a great, quizzes are great for engaging your people, your audience.

All right, so we know like you have a lot of knowledge in the direct sales field and business and everything. So I’m just wondering, can you give us one tip that a direct seller should do or could do in 2024 to see success? Well, actually kind of two. Um, but it’s, they’re somewhat interconnected is be your authentic self. I feel like sometimes we put on a different persona or, um, are doing things that are out of our, you know, who we are to, for the sake of a sale. But. You know, how, like going with the mindset of I’m here to help people. I authentically want to help you. That speaks if you believe that, and that’s what your goal is, your customer will feel that. If your customer feels like you are desperate for a sale or a party, they will feel that too. So lead with your authentic self, and just be helpful to people. The other tip is talk to people like a human, which is part of being authentic, you know, like how can you help them? So they’re interested in a pan. Like I need a skillet. Oh, well start asking questions and be curious. Well, what do you use your skillet for? Oh, you’re a single, you’re single. You cook for one. Okay. Well, you don’t need a ginormous like five quart skillet. You need just a small eight inch, you know, let’s, you’re just authentically helping them and they’re gonna feel it and they’re gonna feel special. And that’s what somebody wants in their buying experience when they spend money with you. They want you to be real and helpful and meet their needs. Yeah, and I love that you say that because a lot of people think that, you know, success happens in posts on social media. And 99% of the time the success happens when you actually take that conversation from the post into a private message and you’re chatting with them. So chances are if you’re someone looking in say on an upline or a side sideline that’s having super success with the business, you’re not seeing what is actually making them successful because that is happening in private. So think about that the next time you’re sitting there saying, well, why is this post not generating me the same kind of sales that it’s generating so-and-so? It’s because are you actually taking and having conversations and talking to people? So I love that you said that. Yeah, and something that I have a downline team and something I have repeatedly taught over seven years is that, Social media is just like driving down the interstate with billboards. You pass the billboard, you read the billboard. Does it make you want to go buy something? Not necessarily. Unless it’s a Chick-fil-A and my kids are hungry. You know, but you know what I mean? Like, it’s just people are consuming what’s going to make them stop the scroll. And it’s usually, it’s…nothing really is going to make them stop the scroll. But if you post something engaging and they comment and it opens up an opportunity to have a conversation with them, if you’re asking them a question and you can find out how you can help them. Like the magic happens in online virtually in the PMs and the DMs and the texts and the emails. Because, you know, like I said, in person, you’re driving down an interstate looking at billboards. There’s no interaction. Same thing with social. So the magic happens in person when you’re talking to somebody. Same with virtual. Okay, Carrie. So I ask this to everyone who comes on the podcast. Is there one quote or one piece of advice that you’ve heard over your years that you think that I have always heard that you are in business for yourself, but not in business by yourself. And I’ve taken that with me because it’s so true, but you almost have to kind of make your own community sometimes. Like I hear from a lot of direct sellers that they have a terrible upline or, you know, I have a terrible upline. They don’t do anything. Or, um, Our team doesn’t get together. Well, okay, that’s fine. Just because you’re quote, born into, you know, an upline doesn’t mean that that’s where you have to be fed. Go find your community. And that’s kind of what I took, you know, yeah, you’re in business for yourself and by yourself, but you’re not by yourself. You know, you can go find community, find podcasts, find…Um, like Lisa and I found each other and I’ve learned so much from her. My vice versa. Yep. Yeah. Like learned so, so much. And, but I had to take the initiative to seek it out and there are so many resources out there. Um, in fact, one of the companies I work with is actually one of said resources. Um, and I actually encourage people to get outside of their direct sales company and talk to other direct sellers and see what they’re doing because every business is, it’s baseline the same. You have the same goal to make sales grow, et cetera. But at the end of the day, you all have different ideas. And there’s just so much wealth in being in business with other people and with community. So yeah. For sure. Well, I just want to thank you so much for joining us today, Keri. And I know that the listeners are going to have a lot to take away and I’m sure they’re going to get a couple of chuckles too along the way. But that is us when you put us together in one space. So anyway, so I love you guys. All right, everyone, I’m going to sign off and thank you so much for joining us on another episode of The Other 99%. And we will see you on the next episode. Take care