Fast Lane to the Top

When Lane Nemeth had her first baby in 1975, only the best toys would do for her tot. Finding them, however, was a challenge. As a day care center director in Martinez, California, Nemeth could order quality developmental and educational toys for the center, but auditors prevented her from ordering them for her daughter. First Nemeth got mad. Then she decided to get even by starting her own company. Since founding Discovery Toys in 1978, her entrepreneurial spirit and selling prowess have turned it into a toy titan with annual sales of $80 million.

Although her success comes from trying to give kids a head start, her strategies can also help salespeople go to the head of the class.

Believe in yourself

With a father who always told her she was capable of great things, Lane Nemeth grew up thinking she could do anything she wanted. In 1977 and 1978 she wanted to start her own company so that she and parents everywhere could find toys designed to facilitate child development and learning. The Discovery Toys dream took shape when her father, a marketing executive, suggested that she sell toys Tupperware style so she could work with parents directly. Nemeth admits that back then she had no idea what challenges lay ahead, but believing in herself gave her the strength to follow her dream and make it come true.

“I had a father who really gave me nonjudgmental love and told me that I was the most wonderful being that ever lived because I was Lane Nemeth. And I grew up with that sense of ‘I can do anything.’ In the ’50s when women were being teachers and nurses, my dad said ‘Why don’t you be an astronaut or president of the United States’ or whatever it was I wanted to be at the time. So I just really grew up thinking I could do whatever I wanted.”

Of course, when Nemeth was trying to get Discovery Toys off the ground in 1978, not everyone shared her optimism. She recalls going to one banker for money to finance the business and having him react with amazement that her husband “allowed” her to work instead of staying home full time to cook, clean and raise her child. But Nemeth doesn’t place any limits on her potential, and she’s not about to let anyone else do it either.

“I just thought, ‘What an idiot!'” she says of her experience with the banker. “You can’t take what somebody else says as your reality. If somebody says they don’t like curly hair and you have curly hair, that’s not your problem, that’s their problem.”

Make the most of your assets

Even if you didn’t have a personal cheerleader growing up, you can still be your own biggest fan and supporter. Think about the traits you have that give you a selling advantage, then ask yourself how effectively you use them. Like Nemeth, you have to be able to give yourself credit for the good qualities you have and work to develop the ones you don’t.

“I really like people a lot,” Nemeth says, relating the characteristics she believes helped make her vision a reality, “and I think I offer people that nonjudgmental sense of whatever they are, that’s okay, and therefore I think they are attracted to me. I have a certain inborn charisma and I’m a good public speaker and that helped. Probably my single most important trait is that once I decide I want to do something, I will not let anything get in my way, and I will accomplish it.”

Able to leap tall boulders in a single bound

As Nemeth has learned, many things worth having don’t come easy. She says life is like having a bunch of boulders thrown down at you from somewhere up above, and that we must learn to tunnel through, go around or climb over them. When she thought Discovery Toys was going bankrupt in 1983, Nemeth found herself faced with a boulder she wasn’t sure she could handle, but true to form, she found a way.

“When I get a setback, the first thing I do is allow myself to feel bad about it. Because to say that you don’t is ridiculous. Then I ask myself, ‘Okay, what are my choices here? I can quit, but where’s that going to leave me? I can try to get up and make a change, or I can just lie in bed and hide.’ Once you look at the alternatives, you realize there aren’t a lot better ones than getting up and fixing things.

“My business has always felt very much like a child to me, so in this particular case,” Nemeth says of the bankruptcy near-miss in 1983, “I thought, ‘Well, if my daughter were in intensive care, would I be lying in bed denying that she was ill or would I be at her bedside talking, helping her visualize, praying, doing whatever I could do to make her better?”

That question made it clear to Nemeth what she had to do, and after taking one night to sleep on her thoughts, she got on her feet the next morning to help get her company back on solid ground.

Serious about selling

Many Discovery Toys end users are still in diapers, but whether your products are for babies or baby boomers, selling is still the name of the game. According to Nemeth, the traits that make a great Discovery Toys salesperson can help ensure sales success in any company or industry. Appreciation of customer needs, pride in the product, listening skills and problem-solving ability top the list.

“You have to listen to what the other person needs. It’s not about what you need. I always tell people if they are afraid to ask somebody to buy our toys it’s because they are thinking, ‘Are you going to say no to me?’ when they should be thinking ‘I have something that I believe can help you, are you interested?’ It’s not about your needs, it’s about their needs. You have to find out who your prospects are, what their needs are, what makes them tick and if you have something that can benefit them.”

Good listening, Nemeth says, can help you find the answers to those questions. The better you listen, the better you will understand your buyers, what they want and how they want to be sold. She also cites problem solving as an essential selling skill. When salespeople know how to solve problems, they take control of their future by finding their own way around obstacles instead of depending on other people to show them each move to make.

“One thing I learned as a preschool teacher that I use to this day is that I can’t solve your problem, only you can. I may have a product or a solution, but you have to decide that you want it. When my salespeople have a problem, I have to find out what their issue is and help them identify that issue and decide how they want to solve it. I can’t solve it for them.”

Ask what the future holds for Lane Nemeth, and the answer is “whatever she wants.” Even with 20 years of sales success behind her, she still can’t imagine being content enough with her accomplishments to stop now. For her, each new Discovery Toys catalog “is so much more exciting than the last one” and holds new opportunities to help children – and her company – grow and develop. Like her salespeople, she’s driven by a passion for what she does. “That’s our unique point of difference in the multilevel marketing industry,” she says.

“People join us first because they say, ‘I want to change the world. I want to change my family. I want to change a child.’ That’s what drives me. That’s what gets me up in the morning.”