One of the things that attracts many IBOs to the Amway opportunity is the idea that they can work part time, 2-5 years and gain a "shortcut" to ongoing and voluminous wealth. Many of the prospects don't have the kind of income or resources that they would like, so the possibility of a shortcut to these trappings sounds like a good idea. They sign up and get started, and then the realities of the business sets in.
100 PV, is the defacto minimum quota for business building IBOs. It costs about $300 to purchase 100 PV worth of products. How many young and single people or couples for that matter, use and/or need $300 worth of household products each month? How many of these same people can actually afford to expend that much cash on household products? The pitch is to change where you shop but how many people were buying these kinds of good prior to Amway? My guess is none. I know I purchased many items, including vitamins, and I didn't need or use before Amway. But my desire to be teachable and to be an example to my downline kept me buying the goods and trying to pawn off some stuff on friends and relatives to lessen my PV burden.I also found that getting people to see the plan was no easy task. While my business was growing, it took more and more effort to recruit downline and I can see where many IBOs would reach the saturation point where there simply aren't any more viable recruits and they might need to resort to cold contacting in order to generate potential prospects. This is probably why there are stories of IBOs stalking people in bookstores, malls and supermarkets. Even when people saw the plan, there wasn't a high percentage of new people signing up. It is why building and maintaining a business is a nearly impossible task, and it is why I believe there aren't people who retire, walk away from their Amway businesses and enjoy six figure residual incomes for life.
The more likely scenario is an IBO signing up, buy and using the products and tools and slowly but surely build up debt. There are countless stories of ex IBOs who got fired up, started building the business and fouond that in a relatively short period of time, found themselves in thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in debt. All the while upline was encouraging them to buy more tools and attend more function, even when they were not profitable. In my opinion, this is confirmation that uplines care more about their tools profits that they do about downline success. I sat in functions where upline would teach about reducing debt, but in the same breath, say it was okay to go deeper in debt if it was to purchase more tools. Self-serving advice.
It is why I believe this opportunity, along with the tools system, will nearly guarantee IBO failure. It is sad, but it is also a reality.
The difficulty in recruiting new IBOs into your Amway down-line has become so critical now that a new business has developed on-line. Enterprising persons are now offering to teach you (for a large fee) how to generate leads for possible recruitment into your Amway business. These persons candidly admit that making up a huge list of your family, friends, colleagues, and casual acquaintances is a complete waste of time, and never really works.
ReplyDeleteWhat you need, they say, is a method of advertising the Amway opportunity in such a way as to get interested individuals to contact YOU, and to ask you about the business. This would lead to a greater chance of successful recruitment, since it avoids the cold-contact, hard-sell approach that is a turn-off for most people.
Does this help? Maybe, to some extent. The real problem is Amway's utterly rotten reputation, which already has turned off so many people that those who contact you will most likely be utterly naive and ignorant types. However, it's probably people like that whom you want for the Amway racket. "Dopes without hopes," as one Amway big pin has put it.
Keep in mind that those guys offering to teach you how to "generate hot leads" for Amway are solely interested in making money off you. The fact that they exist at all is evidence that Amway recruitment is in free fall.