I Didn’t Sell $11k in One Day
Written by Frosty Rose and Parsons Green
You’re probably tired of hearing us here at Pink Truth harp on about how little money Mary Kay consultants are earning by selling product. Maybe you think we’re exaggerating. Maybe you think women actually are selling $40,000 retail a year, at full price, to earn those gorgeous (spit) diamonds every year. They’re not. And if you don’t believe me, check out this…
Sara Moore is a Mary Kay sales director who maintains the Facebook group “Helping build your virtual business in multiple ways”. Directors share their successes for others to learn from. Let’s talk about what happened to a director friend of hers.
The director friend needed $10,890 retail. She focused on the skin care items that had a 60% discount. She needed $4,731 for this order, and collected $3,705 in cash from customers. She got these sales by sitting on the phone and calling all her customers until it was too late. She told them what her goal ws and how far away she was. She was emotional and several people picked up on that. She didn’t discount any of the skin care items but will send a personal thank you note with a $25 Mary Kay gift card that can be redeemed this quarter.
After all of that, she still came up short.
And I quote, “Let me be clear, I didn’t sell $11,000 in one day.” Thank you for putting it out there in black and white for us. Your director friend, “the real deal,” begged and borrowed from every single contact in her phone, A to Z. She spent an entire day on the phone, until it was too late to call anyone anymore. And she still spent over $1,000 of her own money to purchase an accolade from her “business.” All that work, all that struggle, and the only thing she got was $1,000+ more on her credit card and bragging rights that mean less than nothing outside the pink bubble.
What Sara is telling us without telling us is that this director only sold $29,000 (read: ordered $14,500) the other 364 days of the year. IF she sold all of that at full retail price and IF she didn’t overrun her “Mary Kay recommended expenses” of 10%, she earned $11,600 this year from the sale of products. (Note, she didn’t do either of the things required to do that, no one ever does. But just for the sake of argument and to give her the benefit of the doubt.)
Then, the director (who should know better!) spent over $1,000 on the last day of the seminar year to finish up an artificial contest. So, best case scenario, this woman who is in the tippy top of sellers in Mary Kay earned about $10,000 from product sales this year. Sounds like executive income to me! About like spending all day on the phone begging every single one of my contacts for pity purchases sounds like part time work!
And the best part? It all reset on July 1 and she got to start all over again at zero.
I repeat (inadvertently backed up by Sara herself)… this is not a business. This is not a way to earn extra income. This is a cult that only funds Mary Kay Inc. and a very few at the top of the pyramid. And even the pyramid toppers aren’t earning what they say they are. Step out of the sham and back into real life.
Visit the
Oof. This is where the ledger exposes the lie. All that activity. All the humiliating begging. On the phone pouring her heart out all day.
And when she put her head on her pillow that night, she was $1000 (plus interest) poorer, while believing she achieved something. Mary Kay Corp and her upline all got a bump, but she lost money (and further tarnished her own reputation).
Please, ladies. Keep an accurate business ledger so you can see through the emotion of it all. The hype of MLM is designed to impair your reasoning. This story is proof.
In times like these, your ledger is your best friend. Trust it more than you trust your upline. Unlike your upline, your ledger will never let you down.
I bet those gift cards and thank you notes will never be sent- all because she is too busy starting all over again.
If I ever have a salesperson calling me in tears, voice shaking, begging me to buy so they could reach their “goal”, I might buy something.
But it would be my final purchase from them.
I’d assume they were either drunk or losing it and hang up out of sheer confusion.
She sounds like an addict. Just like I wouldn’t give an alcoholic, a drug addict, or a gambling addict money to indulge in their addiction I’m not giving these Mary Kay addicts any money either.
The kindest thing to do is tell them no.
This is so true. Purchasing from an MLMer only delays the inevitable and gives them false hope that this could work. If NO ONE purchased from them, they would spend less money overall and would be better off in the long run.
Pity purchases do much more harm than good.
Can you Imagine going to Sephora and the staff there is like “I would suggest this Urban Decay pallette. We have sales goal of UD we need to hit by the end of the month, and we’re only $11,000 away. It would really help me out if you bought this brand?” Not talking about what’s in it for the customer, but the sales goal of the company.
I wish I realized how ridiculous this sounded when I was a consultant. Aack. Hopefully it’s at least *slightly* less cringey that I only used this technique for faces/ classes, not sales. But that’s still plenty cringey. When my director would suggest calling people like this, my thought wasn’t “oh my gosh, that sounds ridiculous! What an awful idea.” But it really should have been.
All that…for a “prize” that shows up on your 1099, leaves you with a tax bill, and is worth less than what you charged to your credit card to earn it.
One year, a friend of mine made National Court of Sales. I knew the real story because I watched it happen. She charged about $1,800 wholesale at the end of the year just to finish. It was painful.
Then came Seminar.
There she was, crowned Consultant Queen of Sales at our area awards night, crying tears of joy because she was a Queen. She gave the classic, “If I can do it, you can do it too!” speech while everyone applauded, hugged her, and the National lavished her with praise and attention.
Meanwhile, she missed much of the “life-changing education” because she had to spend hours getting ready for Awards Night. She had to report downstairs early to join the “best of the best,” where they were whisked away in a limo “paid” for by the National. It was all carefully choreographed to make everyone watching think, “This could be me.”
And one of the highlights? She couldn’t stop raving about…the mashed potato bar. A mashed potato bar.
Then came the crocodile tears as she walked across the stage, waving like she’d just won an Olympic gold medal instead of a title she’d essentially financed herself.
That was my breaking point.
I’d already had doubts about Mary Kay, but Seminar pulled back the curtain. I finally saw the fakery, the emotional manipulation, and the bait-and-switch for what it was. It reminded me of Dr. Terminus from Pete’s Dragon—all smoke, mirrors, big promises, and a flashy show designed to separate people from their money.
I wasn’t buying it anymore.
They probably weren’t even good mashed potatoes 😣 Creating FOMO for worthless things is what MK does best. Thanks for sharing that story. It really shows what a sham the whole thing is.
Having worked in hospitality, my guess is those legendary mashed potatoes came straight from a box. 😂 And there’s probably a reason the room is lit with dramatic purple and pink uplighting instead of bright white lights—you can’t scrutinize what’s on your plate. Pretty fitting, actually. Mary Kay has always been better at creating an atmosphere than delivering substance.
They keep raving about the mashed potatoes! What do they put in them? Crack?
Let’s have some crack potatoes, y’all!
Crack potatoes laced with pink dreams.
Did you ever notice how the MK people giving speeches at Seminar always have the same story about “We were still $x away from our goal, but at the last minute God came through.” Or, “at the last minute my amazing unit found a way”.
I was thinking: wait, what did you actually do to sell that much? How can I replicate that? I realize now that the answer is directors put it on their credit card or “dialed for dollars” to consultants and consultants bought products they don’t need.
What a great business.
They frame the last minute rush as a miracle from god. First off, I’m an atheist so magical thinking doesn’t impress me. Second, it tells me is their “business” was struggling for an entire year and there’s a problem that isn’t getting properly addressed. Since the speaker isn’t presenting it in a way to honestly playboy out and be properly addressed I can only conclude they’re incompetent and/or have an ugly ulterior motive.
*honestly be laid out
No Mary Kay centerfolds, please.
Wow! Plus the fact that all of her customers now won’t need to purchase for a while to help her make her sales quota the next month! My former senior director maintains a pretty average sized unit. She is always top 5 in unit sales and recruiting. Since she lost me (i was one of her directors) 4 years ago, she has had 2 new directors. Only 1 is still a director. She currently only has 1 red jacket (i think it’s her 3rd time as a red). What does this say about running a Mary Kay business???? #1 you have to recruit to survive #2 people dont stay active #3 you have to constantly warm chat everyone. Umm no thank you!!
Having worked in hospitality, my guess is those legendary mashed potatoes came straight from a box. 😂 And there’s probably a reason the room is lit with dramatic purple and pink uplighting instead of bright white lights—you can’t scrutinize what’s on your plate. Pretty fitting, actually. Mary Kay has always been better at creating an atmosphere than delivering substance.
I loathe instant mashed potatoes. I was traumatized by them as a kid, and I can smell them across the room. I chef friend bet me $100 that he could make boxed mashed potatoes in a way that I would never know they came from a box. Within seconds of the container’s lid coming off, I could tell they were instant/boxed potatoes. I became $100 richer that day.
Having said that, I made darn good mashed potatoes, with the perfect amount of lumps to them.
It’s the fact that you have to start back over from zero that gets me. If you don’t reach the goal, there’s no reward for your effort and money. And it’s even worse for those lower down the pyramid, because they get nothing regardless of what their upline achieves. It’s a really stupid game.
Imagine missing “Princess Court of Sales” by “10 orders.” You get nothing. Your hard work means nothing. It’s July 1 and it all resets to zero.
It’s your director and national (who are NOT your friends) that are taking your money to the bank, absorbing your DIQ recruits in to their unit, and laughing about it behind your back.
What a miserable, useless, humiliating grind.
Yes … there are no rolling averages, no year-on-year comparisons, and no retrospective analysis of what worked and what didn’t.
It’s like they get zapped with those lights from Men in Black, or have been roofied
I’m endlessly fascinated by the mashed potato obsession especially since they are the easiest thing to cook, even using real potatoes. My mom used to make something called Potatoes Royale where you’d add stuff like chives and cheddar cheese and sour cream, put in a casserole, top with breadcrumbs or cornflake crumbs and stick it in the oven until browned. I might be off on the ingredients but it was tasty.
I can remember a Mary Kay consultant “friend” telling me her story how she made the court of sales. Her director called her up on June 30 and told her she was only $4,000 retail ( a $2,000 wholesale + tax and shipping) away from queen’s court and that she should just order and finish, she would sell it later. So, she ordered. A few months later my friend was in DiQ, she became a director. Less than a year after her debut, she had quit Mary Kay all together, gave up her unit and car and sent back whatever inventory she could, Apparently her husband had had enough of Mary Kay charges on their cards and gave her an ultimatum so to speak. She chose her marriage and family, but unfortunately many choose the cult and continue the lies of buying their way to recognition. No one that I know of has ever proven they sold $40,000 retail product and no one ever will.
Woman not far from me was Ruby Seminar Queen of Something years ago. Flew the family to Dallas, had pics of her sitting on the throne, holding flowers, family members on stage in the photo, etc.
It wasn’t long before she lost her offspring SDs, Cadillac, and unit. She started her own marketing business. She is still an IBC today, but doesn’t advertise MK on her social media.
Being “Queen” turned out to be meaningless.