Maximize Mary Kay Orders
Written by Raisinberry
Everything in Mary Kay is set up to maximize team and unit ordering. It doesn’t matter to corporate if a single product is sold to a bona fide customer, although those sales do help perpetuate the con. Once a consultant orders product, Mary Kay Inc. has made their profit. This is why everything focuses on ordering, and the company has perfected the methods used to get consultants and directors to order as much as possible.
Take for example, going on target or “winning” a car. You need $23,000 in wholesale production ($18,000 of that must be from your team), and 16 personal recruits. The production each month must be at least $5,000, and you have up to 4 months to complete the requirements.
Except the person you recruit in the first month will drop off by the fourth month if she doesn’t order again to stay “active.” Who selected 4 months as the magic qualification period? So you are building to 16 and you need $23,000 wholesale from everybody (which is $46,000 RETAIL if it had ANYTHING to do with selling!!).
Month 1 – 5 active and let’s suppose $5,750 in orders. You now have 3 months to add 11 recruits and $17,250 wholesale.
Month 2 – You add 3 consultants who each order $1,000. You still have to order $2,000 yourself to meet the minimum monthly requirement of $5,000. You now have 8 active consultants, so you still need 8 more.
Month 3 – You recruit one emerald star ($3,600) one $600, and one $225. Yes that is how they label you… by what order you came in with. You have to order at least $575 to meet the monthly minimum. You now have 11 active consultants, so you still need 5.
Month 4 – The 5 who were active in the first month won’t count unless they order again. You also have to recruit 5 new ones. And you still need $7,250 in orders if none of the recruits has re-ordered since you started this process. (And it is very common for someone to NOT re-order, since she’s already panicked about how much she has spent on inventory that is just sitting there.)
THIS is how the pressure and the manipulation is placed on the consultant… to finish and look good for her team and the Unit by becoming a car driver… a thing the director tells her is prestigious and helps in her further recruitment efforts.
So she works all month… she adds 4 members… who total $5,800 in production… Has ANYONE SOLD ANYTHING??? Sure the On Target Consultant has, but she’s given a lot away too to try and get people to meet with her or book with her. She’s on the HUNT. She doesn’t need real sales, she needs to get in front of recruit-able women!
So she needs thousands of production to finish, and 5 went inactive so she has to get them to order again or recruit new people to replace them. She begins her calls of desperation (dialing for dollars!), asking the recruits who are inactive to order and become active. Anything anyone orders is that much less that the on-target woman has to order herself.
NOBODY in these scenarios needs any more product! They are ordering to “help” her. And it is this dysfunctional relationship of financial abuse that Mary Kay thrives on! By “enmeshing” women together in so called teams, they become responsible for whether the National wins her trip, the director gets her Caddy, the Unit goes “on stage” or qualifies for some luncheon, etc, etc.
What person can dismiss an appeal from a “friend” to help them reach their goal? This is the tactic that MK, Inc has used for DECADES to extract the highest level of financial compensation possible, using the team leaders and DIQs and sales directors to do it.
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Everyone is ordering, and few if any are selling. This is great for Mary Kay corporate and the up-line. Not so good for the down-line, which will always lose money in the aggregate.
In what legitimate sales job would you get double credit?
You might get extra sales credit for actually SELLING a product that is either going obsolete or that is a new intro they are launching.
But that’s to real customers. Legitimate sales jobs don’t make you pay upfront for product and require you to recruit your customers as competitors to get bonuses. They actually want to see verified SALES, shipped to CUSTOMERS.
I, of several legitimate sales jobs throughout my career, never received double credit of invisible dollars. We occasionally had certain products for which we received a higher-than-usual commission percentage, but the product had to be sold to earn it. And we certainly never used invisible credits to come to a made-up retail sales volume. It amazes me that everyone in MK just completely overlooks this. If you bought $5000 at wholesale and sold it at $10,000 retail, sure. But if you bought $5000 at wholesale and received double credit and then pretend that your retail dollars sold was $20,000…that’s ridiculous. And dishonest.
As I said before it’s messed up in the sense, let’s pretend MLM products sell themselves and they “fly off the shelves” if a single person could sell that all by themself they would t qualify for a car because they didn’t recruit. And MaryKay says they don’t go by recruiting.
Correction: would NOT qualify for a car
“…let’s pretend MLM products sell themselves and they ‘fly off the shelves'”
If there was true market demand for Mary Kay products at these prices, Mary Kay would sell them directly to consumers on their website and eliminate the huge cost and overhead of their colossal, antiquated, door-to-door MLM distribution network (which exceeds two million consultants globally). Mary Kay Corporate would easily double their earnings by doing this (assuming the demand was actually there). No real business needs so many salespeople per product delivered. With a similar number of “employees” as Mary Kay, Walmart generates more revenue in two days than Mary Kay generates in a year. And Walmart’s bottom line does not depend on purchases made by their own employees!
In reality, there is no real market demand for Mary Kay products at these prices…at least not without that elusive “opportunity”. Instead of empowering women, Mary Kay is actually powered by the pocketbooks of the women in their own sales force.
June 30th is not only month end but also Seminar year end. It will be interesting to see how many NSDs debut at Seminar and what overall attendance will be this year. Numbers have been shrinking each year. I don’t think double credit is helping!
From NSDs to IBCs, they are all over social media begging for orders. Begging for sales. Begging for recruits.
Very, very unprofessional.
Kristin Sharpe posted on her IG that she is moving this week and not by choice. Seems like an odd time for a NSD to be moving.
Ooh what is the tea on this?