"The darkest hour of any man’s life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it."—Horace Greeley
(Because times are tough, many are looking for ways to cope financially. Job growth in many US industries has ground to a halt. There are a few cushy, undemanding jobs available that pay cut-and-dried salaries. On one hand, there are many offers of opportunities to make money in multilevel marketing and direct sales organizations that depend on a network of people (bodies) to push their products or services. Properly and ethically done, multilevel marketing can work for some. One caveat: If you don’t like selling or dealing with people and all that it entails, you would do well to look elsewhere. Here’s an article that may shed some light on this practice should you decide to go this route.)
For some reason, multilevel marketing organizations find ethnic communities fertile ground for their recruitment campaigns. The promise of riches to the unsuspecting immigrant is a bait that works nearly all the time. Know that there are legitimate companies who operate this way and may be worth your while and a host of others on the pyramid scheme that operate bordering on the illegal and/or unethical.
Here is how it works. A company sells different products ranging from such mundane products as household cleaners; vanity products such as cosmetics or health and diet formulas, as well as financial products such as travel, insurance or securities. There are supposedly two ways to make money. You generate revenue as a direct retailer and salesperson of the product yourself buying products from the company and reselling them to your own customer base initially consisting of a circle of relatives and friends. As you run out of family and friends to sell to, you eventually expand to other prospects, including strangers by using cold calling and other prospecting techniques.
Note that the outfit will stress that the more lucrative way to make money is to recruit people as your downline into the company. You earn override commissions from the sales of those you have recruited who in turn, can recruit others for their downline. On and on it goes with recruitment providing the lifeblood of the multilevel marketing organization that suffers eventually from the natural law of attrition as members often lose interest or bail out. The one who recruited you, your upline, earns a commission off of you. The company’s structure resembles a pyramid of hundreds or thousands of other pyramids. This concept feeds on the dream of most immigrants that with a minimum of investment on their part and a consuming desire to succeed, the organization can help them become rich quickly.
Multilevel marketing companies spend tons of money to produce slick and smooth presentations replete with testimonials—very often emotional—of people within the organization claiming that being in the company, doing everything the company does, has done a tremendous difference in their lives with tremendous wealth and a quality of life beyond imagining. The websites of successful multilevel marketing organizations gush in florid, emotional language claiming individual success. A few of these stories may be true; others however, may have been spun by spin doctors. Recruits: BEWARE!
Before you give up your regular job or sign up to do this on a part time basis, ask yourself this question: Do you like to sell? This is a non-stop selling job, and for you to realize your dreams of wealth, you have to sell prodigiously and tirelessly because no product, no matter how excellent and necessary, ever sells itself. Do you believe in the product? Does it have value and merit and is it fairly priced? Is this something that is really up along your alley, something you can do for long periods of time and from which you can really make a good living and be happy with what you do? How reputable is the outfit? Are there pending lawsuits and of what nature? Has it been around for a considerable length of time or is it a company that is merely riding high on current hype—here today and gone tomorrow? How many of your friends and relatives are already part of it and how are they faring with their sales efforts?
Here is a caveat for those embarking on a multilevel marketing career. To be good at selling something, you must believe in it with passion. And because you want to succeed so much, you then have a tendency to talk about nothing else but the product you are selling. If you are not careful, you will transform yourself to a boring, predictable person to your friends and relatives who will tend to scamper in all directions when they see you, thinking up all sorts of excuses to avoid being sold to. Keep your balance even as you try to succeed in a multilevel sales career.
An early warning flag that the organization may not be what it claims to be is if you are asked to pay an up-front fee just to get in on the ground floor—in exchange for a starter kit consisting of some brochures, a video and sample products. You might as well kiss that money goodbye. Organizations with good solid reputations in existence for some years with no major lawsuits might be your best bet.
Regard with deep suspicion any group that pushes recruitment with very little emphasis on the product or service it is selling. It could be an outright scam. On the other hand, if the product, just by word of mouth, gets great reviews from ordinary people who have nothing to gain by pushing it, it is likely that the company is a good one worth looking into if you are truly a salesperson at heart and you feel strongly that a sales career is where your talents lie.
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( Published on January 21 2009 in Asian Journal Los Angeles p. B3 )
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