Naomi Still Needs Help
Written by Parsons Green
Naomi State is a Mary Kay sales director who was featured on the front page in June. She wanted to get back into a Cadillac, but she was not having luck getting people to book with her. This is a recurring theme with Naomi, but she’s not alone. Almost everyone fails in MLM!
She recently posted again in the Directors Group on Facebook. Y’all – Naomi still needs help!
Naomi did ten Facebook parties in June. One had 56 people. She didn’t receive many orders! She asked for help from directors who regularly had Facebook parties with $300 or more in sales.
Casey Evans regularly had $1000 plus parties in 2020-2021 but had 0 in 2022. She’s not had much luck with virtual parties since then.
Chelsea Adkins’s downline Kiersten Housten shares that she invites folks to a 30 minute Zoom. She’s been seeing $60-$250 for each Zoom. She does NOT send samples.
Naomi got very few replies, most of them were from other directors hoping to get tips themselves.
She also posted a question from one of her unit members. How do you get people to reply to your texts? As a director, shouldn’t Naomi have this down to a science?
Jessica Dudley suggests picking up the phone and calling. How often do you answer your phone if you don’t know or don’t want to talk to the caller?
Maryn Eisenhart said it’s all about the scripts. Her director shared some with her and her booking rates went up! If scripts were the answer, wouldn’t everybody be using the same guaranteed ones?
Lisa Michelle likes to follow up with her vendor event leads by text within 24 hours. She includes a picture so people will remember the friendly Mary Kay lady.
Elizabeth Ladd Lee likes to call. She gets 9 bookings out of 15 attempts if she calls. If she texts its about 1 in 15. A customer will listen to a voicemail and be curious and call back. Naomi admits she rarely gets an answer on the phone.
Mindy Cook loves audio messages. She can hear the excitement in your voice and respond with a message herself without having to have a phone conversation. Tracey Carley says to avoid using the work party. Sell it as a Glow Up Appointment. Bring two or three friends with you and you can all create wish lists for people to use to buy your holiday gifts.
Like before, this thread got very little response.
But day by day, Naomi will keep plugging along, hoping for any ray of hope to make this flopportunity work. Can’t she see from the response from other directors that no one is successfully selling this crap? How long will she continue? As the car copay turns………..
Visit the
These overpriced products don’t sell to the general public? Shocking! Its almost as if the only way to really move inventory in MLMs like Mary Kay is to sign up more sales folks…and front-load them!
With the new E Commerce platform starting soon, the countdown clock will begin.
My prediction is the company will move to an affiliate in about 2, maybe 3 years.
The signs are there. So sad to see so many women refusing to SEE it or admit it.
MANY sales directors have taken jobs. Good for them! Commissions haven’t stayed up with the cost of living. Takes more money to afford anything these days!
I pray more of these women will embrace their capabilities and wake up!
Memory unlocked: we had a way of calling people and it going straight to their voicemail so we could be all “oh shoot I missed you but here’s why I’m calling..”
WE HAD TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO TALK TO US. THIS IS A PROBLEM.
Maybe if I had just offered “fast, fun, and fabulous glow up appointments” I would have solved all my problems! The way I’d hold back a laugh if someone said that to me. Cringe.
Memory of mine unlocked, too. Back in my retail daze the chain of stores was under the leadership of the founder’s nephew, who had somewhat less business sense than your average MK sales director. Thus, these asinine initiatives, made up by corporate types who had no idea how things on the sales floor work, kept coming along, mostly in the form of stupid things we had to do.
One holiday season, we were given a script for answering the phone that went something like, “Good [time of day]. Happy holidays. Thank you for calling the [storename and city] [department name]. This is [your name] speaking. What may I assist you with today?” After which you’d be out of breath and the customer would be annoyed, especially if they just wanted an answer to a yes or no question. A lot of folks would just hang up halfway through. And they’d call from corporate to make sure we were doing it.
Fortunately Corporate was very predictable and tended to only call at certain hours and never after about 3 pm, so you could roll the dice and only give the Gettysburg Address when you suspected it was Corporate.
Meanwhile, under this nephew’s leadership, the chain wound up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and the founder actually came out of retirement to get it back under control. Things are going well now, but that only happened after I was long gone. 17 years later I still have nighmares about the place. The coupons. The evil, evil coupons…
Where was I? Oh, yeah.
Scripts and gimmicks can’t save a fundamentally flawed business model. There are no magic words that will make people buy stuff from you. We live in the internet age where people want to click ADD TO CART, pop in their credit card info, and get about their day.
They don’t want to do Zoom calls just to buy makeup. They don’t want to waste time on a party, virtual or meatspace. They don’t want to play phone tag; if they don’t block you outright they’ll just delete your voicemails. People these days only have a limited amount of free time, and they don’t want to waste it on you, period.
Oh, and they certainly don’t want to be condescended to by some snotty, ill-conceived AI character, either. Miss Calculation needs her .exe file deleted.