Over the years, I have encountered many IBOs and they often have a common theme. They trust their upline and in some cases, consider them mentors. Now in a business venture, it might be good to have a mentor or someone to guide you, but in the Amway opportunity, most of the upline mentors make money off those who they mentor. That is a major conflict of interest but IBOs simply fail to see it.
When an IBO sees the plan in a big meeting, the speaker will often be built up as a financial guru, and possibly as an expert on how to succeed in Amway. An IBO may headr something about the trail was already blazed by upline and you just need to follow the trail. Don't re-invent the wheel, just copy what upline did. But as I have said many times before, duplication sounds easy and looks good on paper, but in real life, the vast majority of IBOs run into problems that they simply cannot overcome, such as the bad reputation that the Amway name has in the US.
What is troubling however, is that IBOs are taught to trust upline and do as they say (defacto requirement), but they are also taught that failure is their own shortcomings, even when they do exactly what upline told them. It is also troubling that many uplines will tell their faithful followers that they need to purchase more and more tools (voicemail, cds, seminar tickets). In some cases, an upline may advise their downline to sacrifice basic family needs to buy these tools. Some IBOs were advised to skip meals to buy a cd, or skip paying the mortgage to be able to attend the next big function.
I might also add that as a newer IBO or prospect, you may have heard that "everyone starts at zero", or that it's a level playing field. It is not. As a new IBO, you will likely be in the 100 PV bracket. Since Amway pays out about 31% in bonuses, your upline(s) will split up about 28% in bonuses off your efforts while you get a 3%bonus. That doesn't sound very level to me.
So each IBO should look at things objectively and see if your upline is helping you or simply helping himself by giving you advice that ends up in profit for himself with little or nothing for you.
Keys to Success:
ReplyDelete1. Take full advantage of assistance and training offered by my upline through Professional Development Materials and training, workshops, and conferences;
2. Work hard, especially at prospecting and expanding my business;
3. Constantly review business priorities in order to reduce costs and increase productivity.
This is directly from the IBOAI website:
http://www.iboai.com/Resources-IBOBookkeeping101-UnitedStates.asp#EXHIBIT_1
Chris G;
ReplyDeleteSo what's your point? Do you think we didn't do these thing on steroids? We were experts at everything on your list.
You can do all these things perfectly for years with dogged determination and end up with nothing.
The IBOAI document that keeps getting thrown at us is meaningless b/c it comes from the amway corp. The upline leaders take control of their downlines and get drunk on their power. When they get get absolute power, the are corrupted absolutely.
Until one has attempted to build this business hard core for years, they have no platform from which to judge us as being 'losers.'
actually, he's right. the only thing is that it's not likely to work in amway.
ReplyDelete