One thing that I tried to uncover as a new IBO in Amway was what a typical day in the life of an IBO entails. Nobody could really answer me with a straight answer. I got all kinds of roundabout answers and I was told that I needed to listen to standing orders and attend all meetings are functions. That was how I was going to learn how to grow my business an become successful. I used to think what the heck, why can't someone answer such a simple question?
Maybe nobody could answer it because the typical answer is that most IBOs do nothing and quit? Or maybe most IBOs never attend a meeting, never sell a single product and never sponsor a single down line?
I recall being taught to prospect for downline. How to use the curiosity approach and how to go about getting people interested in seeing the plan. It sure seemed as if the emphasis of the Amway teaching was recruiting downline. Isn't Amway a retail based business where selling products should be the key? We weren't told not to sell products but it certainly wasn't a focus of the teaching. Interesting that selling products were an afterthought. Instead we were taught to self consume products, to a point where we qualified for a PV bonus based only on self consumption.
For many people, the typical experience is to attend an endless string of meetings, staying up late to attend teaching sessions and "night owls" and learning which products we can use that were considered "high PV" such as nutrilite vitamins like double x and other products that were considered "core products". The odd thing was that Amway almost seemed like a way of life rather than a actual business. I used to wonder why there were no standing orders of people who made their success by selling a mountain of Amway products.
In a way, the typical Amway experience, in my opinion, is that Amway is very much like a part time job where you pay Amway for the right to sell their products at your time and expense. There's very few actual business principles that are taught and again, the main focus is to get more people into the Amway business, regardless of their (or yours) prospects of actually making a profit.
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It's very hard to sell products on a person-to-person basis if 1) the products are not easily available, and 2) if they are significantly more expensive than store-bought products.
Amway suffers on both accounts. Frequently Amway products have to be "ordered" by the IBO for you, and then delivered, involving delay and extra charges. Who the hell wants to buy toothpaste and vitamins this way, when you can just go to the corner drugstore and get them in a flash? And when the Amway price is way over the top, that's an ever greater disincentive.
Success in selling Amway products is usually limited to small towns and out-of-the-way communities, where there is a lot of local interaction, and people are happy when someone rings their doorbell, even if it's just a salesman. In places like that, person-to-person selling is just another form of socializing, and you can do it profitably.
This is why Amway originally appealed mostly to small-town schmucks living in the boondocks. And still today, Amway has a rural, old-time, crackerbarrel tone to it. The newer MLMs are more sophisticated and urbanized.
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