Culture & Manipulation

Pam Shaw on Money, Recruiting, & Manipulation (Part 2)

The second part of the notes from a  conference call with Mary Kay national sales director Pam Shaw.

Where I want to go next with you, connecting to the Shaw Time Advantage, is a growth focus and to give you five critical areas that count. It’s called, it’s a growth focus, growth, growth.

The five critical areas that count:

1. New Consultants added per month – 10 plus. Mary Kay herself said, If you add five to your unit a month, you’re maintaining. If you add ten a month, you’re growing. Less than ten you will not grow, you will decline.

Start at the very beginning of the month to add new people.

So 10 or more a month, 10 or more a month that you want to add, but when you get a bigger number like 15 or 20 a number that – well here’s where you stop with your number when your heart goes [tapping]. When your heart does that, that’s your number. That’s the number that you can, that makes your blood surge, that makes your face flush, that make you go oh my God how I am going to do that? You’ve got to get your arms around that number for you and then continually increase your number.

I remember when I set my number at 50 and I was like, oh my gosh 50, 50 how do I get 50 and I was focusing on getting 50 on 50 and before I know it, do you know that Gloria Mayfield Banks had added 200 unit members to her unit for one month. Make me crazy. Here’s why you want to be able to get in the position of success because the more you succeed and achieve, the more you are around other people who succeed and achieve and stretch your thinking.

And so when I had set my number at 50 and Gloria did 200, what did that do to my number? Did it make me throw my hands up in the air and go, oh I can never do it? No it didn’t do that at all. What it sharpened me to say was, she has stretched the mark one more time, so now 50 is achievable. So new Consultants added per month, never below 10, 10 or higher; what is your number? Alright?

As a Sales Director, you do have complete control. If you did nothing else and there are lots of things you that you could let go of, but focus on adding 10 new people to your unit every month. If you did just that and then focused on getting those 10, moving them as far as you could. There are Power Starts. If you do business debuts, their pearl enhancer, working through with getting them to red jacket and getting them to Star, you know if you worked as far as you could with all 10 of them you’d probably move 5 of them forward, one two three or four good steps of those things that I just mentioned.

If you did nothing else but that, you would have a growing, thriving, competitive Cadillac unit; if you consistently did that over and over. So this is a critical area and it’s my number one critical area. Never add fewer than 10 per month and totally take responsibility for making sure that 10 or more come in.

2. What is your initial average order? What do your people come in with? What do your new Consultants order when they come in? The Company’s average order is around a thousand per new Consultant. And the way you find your own average order is how many February new Consultants did you bring in, and combined how much was their initial order. So you take that total amount of production, divide it by the number of people that you brought in, and now you have an average order.

If you brought in ten new people and you had ten thousand from new production, your average order is a thousand. It’s right on queue. Okay. If it’s higher than that – good. If it’s lower than that – whoa. What are you saying to your new people about their initial order? How are you talking to them about the ability and the privilege of having inventory on shelf? What are they listening to? What do you say?

The second question is what is the caliber person that you’re bringing in? Are you bringing in some people that have resource, and again nobody died and left me in charge to say you’re in, you’re not, you’re in, you’re not. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But if you are looking at this from a business perspective you have to ask those kinds of questions.

3. The third critical area – the total new for your year. Year-long – how many new Consultant’s Beauty Agreements have you added year long and how many of them were qualified.

What would be the number that you could get your arms around? A hundred or more agreements with forty or more qualified. Well if you do a hundred agreements and you divide it out by 12 months, that’s only eight point three agreements a month. How many new recruits am I asking you to add a month? Ten. So if you added ten or more a month, that would be a hundred and twenty. So forty or more qualified.

4. It’s the percentage of new people ordering. My goal as a Sales Director was always to make sure that I had 50 percent or more of my base unit ordering – not number of orders, but ordering people – and never under 30 percent. Never under a third. If under a third of your unit is ordering every month what that says is that you do not have a consistency – a Consistency Club, or a focus on consistency, that people could be embezzling their Mary Kay monies. They may not be investing appropriately. So you want to make sure and look for this because it would be a place for you to put emphasis or even an ongoing promotion like the Consistency Club promotion if you had fewer than 50 percent ordering or no fewer than 33 percent.

5. Percentage of your new Consultants ordering. Again you want at least 50% of your new Consultants ordering (A + 1). No fewer than 33 percent. You have to make sure that either (a) you’ve got an urgency in your own orientation how you’re explaining inventory or looking at the quality of people that you’re bringing in, and being intentional about elevating both your skill and people who have resources.

And so those are the top five critical growth areas that are going to count.

The best way to succeed long term is to create 12 even months.

14 COMMENTS

  1. Well alrighty then => Pam wanats you to bring in no fewer than 10 New people a month (#1) , that would be at least 120 New people a year (#3), Fleece them properly — That is encourage as much inventory as you can, but make sure they are qualified at the very least. But by all means, increase the amount of inventory ordered – so that you have a high and consistent amount of inventory (#2). Make sure that at least 1/3 – that’s 33% to 50% of your new people, new consultants are ordering – emphasize the urgency of inventory…. but FOCUS on those new people ordering. (#4 and #5).

    Basically get as many new people as you can, fleece them fast and fleece them fierce. Because let’s face it, if you want to grow, appear successful and have a consistency about your own bonuses, commiissions and you want to count your own pay-check for the month, you have to exploit the new crop of credit cards at your disposal before they know what hits them.

    Basically – Money First, Money Last, Money Always and don’t forget to have a sense of urgency and top it all off with some contest, challenge, gift or other. Nice People (said sarcastically).

  2. “If under a third of your unit is ordering every month what that says is that you do not have a consistency – a Consistency Club, or a focus on consistency, that people could be embezzling their Mary Kay monies.”

    Gah!!! It is NOT embezzling to try to actually use some money from your meager sales to pay some bills. Otherwise, why do it?!?

    • Your “Mary Kay” money? Mary Kay didn’t give you that money.

      Embezzling means you’re stealing money that someone else entrusted to you. Mary Kay didn’t entrust that money to you. YOU were the source of your Mary Kay money. It came from your personal credit card / savings / cash on hand / mother / sales (if you had any).

      Your “Mary Kay money” NEVER belonged to Mary Kay. It was yours to begin with, and it’s still yours to do with as you please, guilt-free. So go ahead and pay that credit card bill. Put the money back into your personal savings account. Take your mother out to dinner. You can not embezzle from yourself.

      Pam Shaw is lying to you.

      • I absolutely despise that “embezzling” accusation. I recall Kaybots parroting that when they appear on this site to berate us, as if there was any basis in reality for what they’re saying – heck there’s not even any basis in the dictionary!

        Am I embezzling when my J.O.B gives me a paycheck? Should I really be giving that money back to my employer, so it can be used to make more product, do more stuff, whatever it takes to generate more customers? I think not.

  3. “Less than ten you will not grow, you will decline.”

    Now see, here is where you start to understand that they already KNOW they are selling you a fraud.

    Really doesn’t take a graduate degree to see clearly here. If you need 5 to stay dead level, you are losing 5 every month. If less than ten every month leads to decline, then, the fall out rate grows greater as months progress, for the entire team.

    Any why would this result in decline instead of growing skill, success, profitability? Because IT DOESN’T WORK for the recruit. She is tricked into continuing for a few months to a year, trying to re-create her start up success, when her family and friends bought some items to “help” her…they were INVESTED in HER, NOT Mary Kay. And going forward into her “cold” market, no such investment will exist. And IF you are still around after this scenario, you will be encouraged to go for “the real money” which is in recruiting, and you will be pushed up the career path in an effort to TRY AND PAY DOWN YOUR MOUNTAIN OF GROWING DEBT.

    It will make sense to you. And they know it. And you will tell yourself that success is sure POSSIBLE…(isn’t it?) I mean…the next recruit COULD be a “superstar”…right? And who are you to pre-judge people? Why YOU don’t know who will be successful. even if you weren’t…right?? Cause you can always do MORE, right?

    If Mary Kay Cosmetics consultants did have good businesses selling product they wouldn’t be recruiting. Rare consultants will adopt this strategy, because they are wired for sales. The masses will not. But Mary Kay isn’t looking for the “sales type”…remember?

  4. If this is a business plan from a ‘business woman’, I’m Betty White.
    If a REAL business woman, one who went to a university got an MBA or perhaps a woman running a catering business, lumber yard, etc, saw this ‘business plan’, what would they think about it? There’s no market analysis, discussion of the product, advertising or anything to do with ACTUAL BUSINESS. Putting this daunting diatribe out as a business plan is an INSULT to REAL BUSINESS WOMEN! Knock it off, Pam. You’re making us collectively look bad!

    • Well, well, well! Gal friends, does this not prove the pyramid nature of Mary Kay and all MLMs. Ya gotta recruit, recruit, recruit and then fleece them to the limit of their credit cards.

      I remember directors talking about “qualified” consultants as the most important think. If you were recruiting gals who just wanted to sell like crazy, that’s not good enough. Ya gotta get gals that are rich enough to buy a big store. Those poor gals are OK, but if they can’t afford to be front loaded, then what good are they? Ya need lots of cash cows! These worker bees that order a lot are t he basis of your business. What a scummy scheme. Do they believe their own lies?

    • ” running a catering business, lumber yard, etc,….no advertising or anything to do with ACTUAL BUSINESS.”

      Advertising?? But, but, that would be UNFAIR to all the other people who run catering businesses and lumber yards!

      • *snort* YES! And all must be ‘fair’, right? AGAIN, for a company that supposedly ’empowers women’, things must be ‘fair’. As if women couldn’t COMPETE with each other as providers of goods in REAL markets do! There’s that 1960’s mentality again! In MK Land, nice girls don’t compete, wear dresses and don’t question authority. Oh, and no drinking and smoking either.
        As women, haven’t we been working AGAINST that kind of mindset since…oh I don’t know, CENTURIES?

  5. That entire piece is proof positive that Mary Kay (just like every other MLM out there) is a pyramid scheme, for it was all about recruiting new people! Only toward the end was the purchase of a product even mentioned! Gah!
    And ’embezzlement’? seriously? What business courses has this twit brain taken? Any?
    Why dont regulators look at this sort ot of clap trap and see it for what it really is, a product based pyramid scheme?

  6. Not one word about selling in either of these posts from Mrs. Shaw. Not one word. It’s all about recruiting and ordering.

  7. How are you talking to them about the ability and the privilege of having inventory on shelf?

    PRIVILEGE of having inventory?

  8. The concept of ‘pulling’ inventory always got to me. Now I can pull a tooth, or pull your leg, but whatever you do, don’t let Uncle Mario talk you into pulling his finger.

    I can pull the wool over your eyes, pull up stakes, or pull with the best of them, but I would never endeavor to pull inventory.

    I can pull forward when parking my car, or pull up short on a work project. I can do pull-ups. My mom now wears Pull-Ups. I can pull up my pants and zip them in the front vs. on the side like a girly-man.

    I pull up records all day at work.

    You get the drift. Pulling inventory from some ill-informed new bot would ruin my sleep.

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