I heard this phrase on the show "Shark Tank", when the panel of investors all rejected a business owner who was looking for one of the sharks to invest in their business. The business owner kept on insisting that she could make it with the help of the sharks. After answering a bunch of questions, one of the Sharks (Mark Cuban) told the business owner that he was out because without sales, you have no business. Essentially, the prospective business owner had dismal sales numbers and the prospect of making money was unlikely, again, because of the lack of sales thus far.
So honest question for IBOs. What are your sales? I'm not here to debate whether or not IBOs have sales or not. But the IBOs themselves know the answer to that. Are you selling most of your 100 PV per month or are you self-consuming most of that PV yourself? Are your sales primarily to sympathetic family and friends? Or maybe you have zero sales, and your entire PV tally is based on self-consumption? If you are the sole customer of your business, then refer to the title of this post. Without sales, you have no business.
If you have no sales, you have no business. That should resonate with IBOs for obvious reasons. If you break it down even further, do you even have a business or are you simply a participant in a complex product pyramid scheme? Now I'm not talking about whether Amway is legal or not. But a lack of sales to actual customers is usually a red flag when it concerns product pyramid schemes. Are you actively pursuing customers to fuel your business? Or does your upline just fluff it off and advise you to self-consume more products? I say this because it's great for your uplines who get the lion's share of the bonus generated from your consumption of Amway goods and services. The IBO on the bottom gets a paltry sum for their efforts. It's Amway and the higher upline IBOs who get the most benefit from the movement of PV.
Honest question for IBOs. Without actual sales, how do you think you can generate a profit from your Amway business? If your solution is simply to sponsor downline over and over, then you will all suffer net business losses until you generate sufficient sales, or until you finally "go diamond" where you earn decent bonuses from the Amway corporation, and you are then allowed to sell tools and functions to your downline to augment your diamond income. That's where the real money is if I'm not mistaken. So if and when you ever go diamond, you want your faithful downline to move volume regardless of how it gets done, thus, the buy from yourself, or self-consumption accomplishes that for the higher uplines. It really does nothing for the vast majority of downline IBOs.
Therefore, keep in mind that without sales, you have no business. It's really as simple as that.
Since Amway is largely dead in the water here in North America, we have to assume that most of its product sales are in foreign countries, where extended families and socially cohesive groups are stronger than in North America. Therefore Amway dealers have a bigger potential market for "family-and-friend" sales in those foreign places.
ReplyDeleteIt is slowly changing, however. The bad reputation of Amway is now starting to become well known in other nations. This would explain the slow decline of Amway sales figures over the last few years.