Mary Kay Parties With Zero Sales

What happens when you hold a Mary Kay party and you sell nothing…. and a new recruit is watching? Retired NSD Anita Garrett Roe thought that was a good thing and even put together a training document it.

She realized that if you’ve got a new recruit along with you and have zero sales, it doesn’t look too good. After all, everyone said MK products sell themselves!!! The problem is that it is very common to have low sales at a class.

It is very easy to have 3 or 4 women at a Mary Kay skincare class and sell less than $100 retail. Don’t let them fool you with their bogus claims about averages and such. (”Average” in Mary Kay really means “I once sold that much as a class, and I think I could do it again, but I never have, and probably won’t, but I”ll still call it an average because it sounds good.”)

So what do you do when you’ve got a newbie along and your sales are terrible? You tell her you didn’t properly coach the hostess. Then pretend it never happened.  Anita elaborates:

HOW TO SAVE FACE IF YOUR SALES ARE LOW ON AN OBSERVATION CLASS

Try to get her out to see you do one of your own classes.. Tell her, “for my sake, I hope I have a $700 Class, but for YOUR sake, I hope it is ZERO because you’ll learn more…”

Then do the class If the sales are HIGH you say, “Well, we had one for me tonight. Too bad the sales weren’t lower.. then you would have learned more…”

But, if the class was very low in sales, you say, “Tonight we had a class for YOU! There was a reason for this and it was because somehow I FAILED to inspire the hostess enough about what she would get out of this class…hostess coaching is so important, and that is the reason.” (Say this even if you think you DID do a great job on inspiring her. This helps the new consultant feel like there is a reason for everything.)

If you say,”Oh, she was a BAD hostess,” your new consultant is looking at you thinking…”if my fearless leader can’t even make this work, how can I?????” The way you handle it is so important, but never be afraid to take someone along on your classes. It is just good business to have a full datebook and take your new consultants out with YOU on the class instead of doing a class of theirs. If you hold your own classes, you will be “Let them LEARN while YOU earn!”

This is what Mary Kay always taught us. She never did business debuts. She never did tell a new person all they had to do was bake a cake and then she would come over and do everything. She never did say to Directors that this was the way to go.

If you are still doing Business Debuts please stop it. Go back to the way Mary Kay taught, try the above on your next 10 recruits. You will be simply amazed at how much stronger they will be.

Your new recruits should be following these steps: Observe 3 Classes, Attend Orientation where available, Book 8 and hold at least 5 in a two week period of her choice. This will get you strong team members. Do not do her first class for her.

If she asks you to, decline. Say, “Your friends are all going to be there, and if I am there, your friends are going to think you are an amateur. Besides, it is your class and you will be doing the talking. I might make you nervous, so it is better if you just have my phone number handy if you want to call and ask me something…you can do it!”

And, both types will run out of bookings one of these days. Guess which one is only going to sell lipsticks and reorders to her friends? Guess which one knows that the phone is her friend and she can get on the phone again and book some more classes from scratch?

Make your life easy and your unit strong! Take them out with YOU on your classes instead of holding business debuts!!

Do you see the key here? You don’t do ANYTHING that isn’t going to directly earn you money. Debut for a recruit? Nope. Doesn’t pay me. God forbid that we’d just help her out when she’s doing her first class.

6 COMMENTS

  1. Do you know how many hostesses tell their friends, “You don’t have to buy anything. Just come for some fun.” And…they don’t buy anything.

    You can coach your hostess all you want about what she can get for free with orders, but if she just wants a girls’ night out, free stuff won’t inspire her. YOU are her free entertainment. That’s all you are. And…you get to pay for the ‘privilege’ with your time, mileage, hostess gift goodies, giveaways, and section 2 items used.

    26
  2. Sales in the real world: Here is your target market, it’s a specific demographic, age range, income range, geographic range, and maybe even gender. There will be outliers, but those are your core customers. Of that target market, x% will walk into your store in a day looking for your product/service. Here’s how you address those people. (Insert training.) Of the people you talk to, x% will end up purchasing, with an average sale of $y. You can expect your commissions to be about ____. Of course, some months, like November and December, will be much busier with a higher close rate and commission. Other months, like January, will be a bit down. You’ll learn the cycle in your first year, and we’re here to support you through the learning curve.

    Sales in Mary Kay: Bribe your friends with free stuff to get their freeloader friends to come to their house for other free stuff and strongarm them into buying an eyeshadow to cover your gas expenses. Your target market is everyone in the whole world with skin and everyone is dying to buy from you. You’re chasing leads at Target, the grocery store and everywhere else you go because potential customers are all around you! You’ll have a 100% close rate for sales and make gazillions of dollars from sales as a new, untrained consultant. Trust us, we only have your best interests in mind. Now sign here for your $5,000 initial inventory then you’ll have the privilege of shadowing me while I go have a $0 sales party, which is, of course, all my fault because I didn’t properly teach the hostess to cajole her freeloading friends into coughing up money for outdated lipstick. I’m making more money off your inventory order than my sales and won’t show you my garage because it’s bursting at the seams with cakey old product, but we don’t talk about any of that. Only positive thoughts, Pink Bubble, and all that.

    21
  3. This whole thing about Mary Kay parties reflects a common question made by MLM recruiters of their potential recruits – “Do you like to sell?” If the answer is yes, they respond “great, you will love this business”. If they respond no, they respond “great, you will love this business.”

    But hey, I have to say this training document the woman wrote is one way to make a silk purse out of sow’s ear, even if there’s nobody interested in buying the silk purse.

    13
  4. I had some high sales in classes but many 200 classes. My director would say that we have to have $0 classes and that the next one will be better. That is Nonsense. Each class has a high chance of it being $0. Then we’re told if we treat it like a business it will be a business. But this is not an business.

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