What the perfume industry taught me about marketing for the sales force.
In direct selling, your sales force isn’t a trained retail team behind a counter. It’s thousands of independent distributors. And, naturally, they carry doubts: about the product, about the questions a customer might raise, about whether they have a good answer ready when one comes up.
I’d spent 6 years in marketing for direct-selling companies, and by 2016 I was running it for a perfume company in Latin America, about a year into the role. Perfume is thick with folklore. Customers believed price predicted how long a scent lasted, that there was a secret ingredient you could add to make it stronger, that a fragrance behaved the same on everyone. None of it had a simple answer, and most distributors had no confident way to find a trustworthy one. Every myth they couldn’t answer was a small crack in their credibility, and a reason a sale might slip away.
Going to the source
My job was to give the sales force tools to strengthen their independent businesses, and this time the tool we needed was one with the authority to settle the myths circulating in the market.
The fragrances were produced by MANE, the French house founded in 1871 and now one of the largest fragrance and flavour companies in the world, with compositions behind perfumes you would recognise. That pedigree was the point: an answer from MANE carried a weight nothing produced in a marketing office could match. So I flew from Lima to São Paulo to record video content for new distributor resources, covering the business plan and how to run their own events, and on 8 March I visited MANE’s headquarters for a tour and to interview Tania Fazzi, a chemist with more than two decades in perfumery, then leading innovation and development at MANE’s Brazil operation. The video we recorded there became the marketing tool: an answer key for the sales force, in the words of someone who builds fragrances for a living.
What she gave us were straight answers to the questions distributors dreaded. On the secret-ingredient myth she was blunt: “The fixative isn’t a special element. It’s the base notes of the fragrance.” A scent is built in three layers, sorted by how fast each evaporates: top notes you smell first, heart notes that carry its character, and base notes that linger longest. Those base notes are the “fixative.” There is no magic drop you add to make a perfume last.
On how long a scent stays with you, she explained that the answer lives in the composition and concentration, and in how the fragrance meets the wearer’s skin. More fragrance oil lingers longer, which is the difference between a perfume, a cologne and a lighter splash; body warmth and skin chemistry shift it too. And some families are simply more fleeting than others: citrus and green notes are the most volatile, so a bright, fresh scent will always lift and fade faster than a heavier one.
Closing the distance
The video did its job, but the questions kept coming. So by August, at a nationwide event with around 500 distributors, we flew Tania in to interview her again, live on stage.
This time it was a follow-up: the questions the sales force still had, answered in person by the chemist herself. The interview also did something the video couldn’t. It put the producer and the sales force in the same room. The people selling the perfume could see, and question, the scientist who made it. When a distributor asked whether the fragrances they were selling were really the same quality MANE supplies to its renowned international clients, her answer landed harder than any slogan:
Every market gets the same raw materials and the same standards.
The distance between a distributor in Lima and a laboratory in the south of France collapsed into a single conversation, and the partnership felt more real, and more trustworthy, for it. And because the distributors were in the room, living it as it happened, the moment stayed with them long after the event closed. That was the quiet marketing win: proof, in the room, that there were serious people and serious science behind the product.
It taught me something I’ve used ever since. When a sales force is unsure, what steadies them is credible information they can stand behind. That can come in many forms: a brochure that lays out the product detail, a piece of independent research, the testimony of an expert the audience already trusts, or, as in this case, a conversation with the people who actually make the product. What matters is that it’s solid, and that it reaches people through someone they believe. We are emotional creatures, and trust travels on human connection. Get that right, and the doubts take care of themselves.