Where Is Direct Selling Actually Heading? Here’s What Happened When We Asked a Room Full of Executives

Want to know where the industry is actually heading?

At the end of August, we hosted the Exigo Data Summit in Deer Valley and Park City, co-hosted with PayQuicker. It’s a private, closed-door day for finance, operations, and leadership executives, and this year’s room was no exception.

Here’s how the day went:

• A peer roundtable over lunch at Montage Deer Valley
• An exclusive look at Exigo’s proprietary industry benchmarks
• A 70-mph run down the 2002 Olympic bobsled track

What We Talked About

The session was built on years of anonymized transaction data from Exigo’s enterprise client base, tracking real trends rather than survey guesses. Here’s the ground the room covered:

• Where direct selling actually stands right now, and how that compares to what most executives assume
• Why perception in the room didn’t line up with the actual trends, and what it costs a company to plan around assumption instead of current data
• The real difference between an activation problem and a retention problem, and why most companies are pointing their efforts at the wrong one
• Why the largest companies in the industry seem to be pulling away from everyone else, and the leading theories the room debated for it
• What leading indicators the room wants tracked next, instead of relying on lagging revenue data that’s already months old by the time it’s useful

Why We’re Doing This

Direct selling runs on something no dataset can fully capture: trust between a distributor and their customer, between a leader and their team. That belief in human connection is part of why we do this work in the first place, and it’s exactly why we don’t think this industry should have to navigate its own health on guesswork and stale headlines.

Direct selling executives largely compare their performance to publicly traded companies, for a simple reason: those are the only revenue figures required to be public. But the public set is small, skewed toward the very largest players, and often built on different products and different compensation models than the company doing the comparing.

That comparison came up repeatedly in the room. Attendees described manually tracking a handful of public companies and their published margins as their main benchmarking tool, even while acknowledging those figures typically run a year or two out of date and rarely reflect how a private, mid-market direct seller is actually built. The appetite for something more current and specific was clear.

That gap, current data covering private companies at real scale, segmented by business model and compensation plan type, is exactly what a 20 to 30-minute session built on Exigo’s dataset set out to close.

Who Was in the Room

We keep the guest list small and deliberately mixed: finance, operations, and leadership executives from across direct selling, alongside the Exigo and PayQuicker teams who built the analysis. It’s a roundtable, not a pitch. No vendor booths, no sales floor.

The reaction in the room was the clearest signal of the day. People walked in with real uncertainty about where the industry actually stands right now, and left with a much sharper picture.

Want In Next Time?

We run this a few times a year, and seats go to people who ask before the room fills.