The Numbers on Recruiting and Ordering
You always wondered what the recruiting and ordering statistics were in Mary Kay. One national broke it down for her area. I’m not sure how much of it we can believe, but it’s at least a starting point.
As you expected, the number aren’t good. Almost everyone fails in MLM, and these numbers reflect the failure. People don’t fail in MLM because they’re lazy or uninformed. They fail because simple math makes it so. It’ a pyramid with huge numbers of women at the bottom. There aren’t enough women to sell to or recruit in order for many of them to be successful.
Here are the numbers the NSD laid out for us:
- 1/3 of your consultants will order an average of $400; 1/3 are thinking about it; 1/3 are on the way out
- Your unit should recruit a minimum of its size (exclusive of personal recruits)
- Company statistics indicate a new recruit will place an initial order of $1,000
- 20% of your unit will generate 80% of your production
- 1% of people are natural leaders; 2% are learned leaders; 97% are followers (it’s okay to be a follower, however, followers seldom become directors)
- 3% of your unit is leaders. Calculate 3% of your unit size. Unit of 30 has less than one leader, a unit of 50 has 1.5 leaders and a unit of 100 has 3 leaders.
- A consultant will recruit 1 out of 5. A director will recruit 1 out of 3. There is one prospective recruit at every class. Using these figures you can always tell a consultant how many classes she is away from her goal. For ex. Red Jacket she needs 15 classes. Car 60 classes.
- With whom do you spend your time? 45% of your time should be spent with your new people. 45% of your time should be spent with key people. 10% of your time should be spent with those on their way out.
It all sounds so cold, doesn’t it? Well they tell you it’s a numbers game and it is. Mary Kay has been in business so long and they know exactly how these numbers shake out. They know how many will win the cruise promotion. They know how many will place an initial inventory order of $1,800 or more. They know exactly how to work this system to benefit corporate the most.
It’s so sad once you know the truth.
Visit the
Lets not forget these numbers:
– On average, 249 people must lose money for each profitable participant
– More than half your team will wash out each year. To grow you need to recruit not only to add but also to replace. To have a 100 strong team at the end of your first year you will have had to recruited over 200
– Cold calling hit rates are about 2%. After you exhaust F+F, that’s what you face. To get 200 recruits you need to approach 10,000 strangers on average
– It is mathematically impossible to average more than one direct downline member per participant in any downline. If one participant has 10 directly under them, that means another 10 must have zero under them in the same downline. There is no way around this
– MLMs make most of their revenue from money spent by the salesforce. Only a fraction of revenue comes from outside customers
– MLMs boast possible geometric growth (recruit 5 who each recruit 5 etc.), but all MLMs grow logarithmically. Look at the year-over-year revenues of any MLM and growth always slows over time…and stops at saturation. No way around this
Its a numbers game alright. And the numbers show MLM is a very poor investment of your time and money.
Can you explain the math of why this is, like I’m 5.:
“It is mathematically impossible to average more than one direct downline member per participant in any downline. If one participant has 10 directly under them, that means another 10 must have zero under them in the same downline. There is no way around this.”
Is it because the growth is logarithmic? Is it because pretty soon you run out of people on the planet to recruit?
Exactly it – it’s logarithmic growth. It’s exponential runaway and after 10-12 levels the people you need to recruit exceeds the number of people on the planet and you will have to beg Elon Musk to take you to Mars so you can hand out goodie bags and warm chat any unfortunate aliens. The hideous lime green eyeshadow MK used to have will finally have a use after all as a foundation for Martians. Even though it was discontinued over a decade ago there’ll be thousands of IBCs and directors with hundreds of them in the garage or basement.
It simpler than that. If everyone in your downline had just one under them, you would need an infinite number of people. Think about it. If you have one direct, who has one direct, who has one direct, etc. That goes to infinity. The “average” number of directs must be less than one. Check out this model which explains this in detail:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiMLM/s/YEJHl0Y1hD
They blow all this hot air around about empowering women and enriching lives, but they don’t care about the women they recruit.
It’s like the coal boom (sometimes literally, with explosive gases and whatnot) here in Northeast PA, which for a long time was the anthracite coal mining capitol of the world. Fortunes were made on the backs of miners, who were paid peanuts to work long hours in horribly dangerous conditions. Some of them were boys as young as 10-12, who had to open doors underground then leap out of the way so they wouldn’t be flattened by loaded coal cars, or had to sit on beams in the coal breakers (where OSHA standards did NOT apply) to pick rocks and other debris out of the coal. Meanwhile, the coal barons only cared about extracting as much coal as possible and flat-out ignored safety regulations and went waaaaay too close to the surface, and under the Susquehanna River, and the whole thing ended in 1959 when the riverbed collapsed and flooded the mines, killing 12 men in the process.
MK doesn’t care about the downlines they exploit any more than the coal companies cared about the miners, though they sure cared cost of repairs; convictions for manslaughter, tax evasion, and antitrust violations, and loss of revenue.
The sooner the river of affiliate breaks on through and floods out the MLM system, the better.
I see it as sharecropping … the founders and top ranks are in the big house on the hill, collecting their share of what the poor folk in the fields are producing. And selling them stuff from the company store.
Even these numbers, bleak as they are, are complete hooey. 1/3 of a unit of 30 ordering $400/month would be $4,000/month. If that were true, no directors would be struggling to meet minimum ordering requirements. Lots of them are, so this math is, like everything else NSDs spew, a total fabrication.
And if 3% of people were going to become directors, Princess Chels et al would have been nationals long ago. Our friend, Eno, from the discussion board, touts her hundreds of gold medals, but where are all of her offspring directors (or even a single one, for that matter)? Things that make you go “hmmm….”
It’s probably more like 1/2 are ordering $225 every 3 months to keep the discount and no more, which would tally with the lack of production (225/3=$75 a month) which works out 5*75 assuming a unit of 10 at $375 a month. Of course this will be boosted by new recruits pressured into star orders – interestingly the highest star level of $3600 is only $400 away from that month’s unit production. Hence why directors are keen to obtain and need the $3600 star order – it solves the production problem at once and they can relax knowing that the unit is likely safe for another 30 days. And then next month it’s back on the hamster wheel of chasing production, an endless Moebius strip that leads to nowhere but the start again. Round and round we go, chasing an elusive chimera that can never be caught up with let alone obtained.
Cleta has been doing this for 40 years! Why isn’t she a NSD yet? By MK rules, she must be lazy.
There was a post here of Cleta being admonished on the day after Christmas by MK herself. MK was NOT happy that Cleta wasn’t recruiting hard enough and sent her a bitchy snotogram on Peptobismol pink paper, which she posted on Facebook in raptures because it came from MKA herself.
Cleta is too busy reproving YouTubers for so-called copyright claims.
“There is one prospective recruit at every class.” But how many actual classes are happening?
MK figures are half a class a month per consultant. That is very few to none at all depending on your community. There are pages on PT of even directors at the tippy top struggling to even book let alone host a party.
“Our friend, Eno…touts her hundreds of gold medals”
Eno recruits in African countries. According to her FB page, one of her “top consultants” just passed away.
This “top consultant” lived in Liberia.