Written by Raisinberry

Enthusiasm sells. It absolutely must because there is never any occasion where Mary Kay sales training starts without the facilitator telling you how excited she is. Her hope is that you will catch fire by her mere words, and she will have “sold” you the product. Her product is her “Simple Plan” whereby you can make (insert fictitious figure here) by just doing (insert fictitious action plan here) and you will profit not only in sales but in recruits, while achieving Diamond Star every single month, and can you say, “Queen’s Court”?

Just like product sales in Mary Kay, results are never measured, never tracked, never evaluated. All these pie in the sky selling ideas are delivered with grandiosity and enthusiasm, as if every word dripping from the facilitators lips were utterly true. Wouldn’t it great if you had a sales job where all you had to do is do the math on paper and sell the story of how the math got on paper, without any real activity happening in the real world to support whether the math on paper matches the consultant’s actual experience?

So there’s this “Simple Plan” scenario that has been foisted upon the pink masses for years. It starts with you booking 4 hostesses with 5 friends each who get to buy something from you and they are promised a “spa experience” for just being responsible to bring you a total of $250 in combined personal order and outside sales.

In One day called a “Power Day”, you book 4 time slots, with 4 hostesses, who bring 5 guests to you, who buy stuff, and who all leave with the opportunity to go out there and lock down the equivalent of orders to get to$ 250, which will “Send them to the Spa”. How simple. That’s why she calls it a “Simple Plan.” But wait. I am not done. We have to do the math on paper.

Do you know that this will generate $6,250 in retail sales? Of which you will do a wholesale order of $3,125? Because for this example we don’t want to mess up our enthusiasm with the idea that we usually tell you to do a 60/40 split of the money (60% to buy new products, 40% left over), or mess up our enthusiasm with Section 2 sample depletion, hostess gifts, no shows, cancellations, guests who buy nothing, cost of spa experiences should they actually be earned, travel, returns, bad checks, etc. And we surely do not want to damper our enthusiasm with any potential struggle to GET 4 hostesses who can find 5 guests, who ALL desperately want to go to the SPA, and who miraculously all show up for Power Day to boot!

Look, all you have to do is to get her to sell a bunch of this set or that set. She can buy her own Miracle Set and then sell 10 mascara sets to get to $250, and You are going to “Send her to the SPA!!!” So you see how simple this is? And if you DO IT AGAIN, next month, you get 25 new women every month who will do the same thing! CAN YOU SAY QUEEN’S COURT!?!?!?!

Many exclamation points and question marks are required to capture the exact level of enthusiasm that is sure to fire up your activity and allow you to reach these results. These words, delivered by a National Sales Director, who knows there is no way in Hell for the results much less the activity, to manifest in the real world of cosmetic party sales, are the product of a debased and deceitful mind. These words, are used for the facilitator to con herself into believing she actually has a viable opportunity to sell, while she neatly holds the trump card that if you, YOU, would have just used a “Simple Plan” you would have been wildly successful! I mean, it’s all on paper.

She’ll never check the results. In fact, she has never done it herself! She just knows it is possible on paper. And that’s what Mary Kay is all about! Possibilities! She knows in reality that her speech will cause a little activity spurt that might net a few new appointments and a few good “crows” for meeting, but it will flame out as reality sets in, leaving the consultant to wonder why she doesn’t make it happen, why she gives up, why she can’t get bookings to hold, and why the outside sales just never hit the mark.(Poor woman doesn’t realize that everyone is having the same results… failing to book and sell according to this plan because it almost never happens the way these fantasy plans are laid out. Not even close!)

She’ll try again. She’ll try other ideas, too. And sooner or later she’ll figure it out, that the “sales job” was never cosmetics sales. The sales job that she fell for happened when a woman pretending to be of substance, convinced her, that her selling scenario’s were actually true, instead of mathematical pencil scribbles in a perfectly pink world.