Mention MLM and you are likely to get strong reactions. Most people either love MLM or hate it with a passion.
Personally I would say that I do not necessarily hate MLM – but I generally do not like it either.
What about you?
Multi-Level Marketing or MLM
The premise is that the company provides products and services that you like and use – so why wouldn’t other people want to use them too? And that idea makes it seem oh so easy to go out and find and recruit dozens or hundreds – maybe even thousands of other people to join you in the MLM. They will be encouraged to in turn do the same thing.
Each person gets a little piece of the revenue generated by all those they bring in – and a little piece of revenue from those they bring in too – down a certain number of levels.
This is where it starts to get confusing with multiple levels and variables between them. Some MLM companies use more complicated compensation schemes than others.
One of the main complaints from people (and regulators) is when some of these companies focus almost entirely on recruiting people in instead of actually offering and truly trying to sell any kind of legitimate product or service at all. That is where the pyramid scheme complaints come from primarily.
Others do have real products. These products do vary in actual value and quality considerably. Some only have “products” as excuses and a thin attempt to skirt the law and avoid being shut down. In those cases, they do not care at all about any so-called products – except as to the extent it works well enough to allow them to keep operating.
Pushing Consumption Versus Selling
Over the years I have known MANY people in various MLM’s and they all had one thing in common. They had closets and garages full of all kinds of crap from light bulbs to lotions and potions to make up and more – not that they had sold – but rather that they had bought. They were very heavily pushed to consume – to buy and keep on buying. Some of these people were already in financial distress and having problems making ends meet.
They were desperate and looking for some way to make more money.
So they took money away from other things – like paying their bills, living expenses and even their mortgages or rent – and filled their homes with crap they could never sell and which would take them years to use it themselves if they ever did.
That is one of the things I do NOT like about many of the MLMs I have encountered in the past.
False Information and Dishonest Marketing Methods
I used to spend much of what limited free time I had in book stores reading and learning – and drinking coffee. More and more frequently people began to come up to me and start talking to me like we were long lost friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. Come to find out, this was just a “marketing tactic” that one MLM was using and teaching people in order to recruit others into their MLM.
They did not get the response they were hoping for – not from me anyway, and I usually made it an intentionally painful and unpleasant experience for those who attempted it. Why? It’s underhanded, low life dishonest, intrusive and disrespectful. They would have been far better off simply saying who they were and what they really wanted – and I might have even joined the thing if it was any good.
Others have widely used the “Fake it until you make it…” bullshit approach. They claim to make $100,000 or more when in reality they were making exactly $0 dollars and 0 cents. Even worse – they were spending hundreds of dollars of their own money – or their spouse’s money – which was earned from a J O B. That is flat out lying and is making fraudulent claims of making a lot of money so they can entice (lure) others into the scheme.
I didn’t like that – and I still don’t – and yes there are still people out there doing that crap even today.
You Must Be ” Coachable” …
Everybody on the planet who wants to learn how to do something is coachable and can infact learn if they have a good instructor, mentor, trainer or coach. Granted some will catch on faster than others and some will do better than others – just as some people are better teachers than others are too.
But that’s not what they mean. Most of the time they mean you must be blindly obedient and do as they say – or else you will fail. When you fail it will always be because YOU failed and did not do what you were supposed to do. Go watch the YouTube videos of the dipstick that co-ran LulaRoe telling its members they just were not working hard enough and putting the blame on them. When the reality was the company bought substandard crap from shoddy suppliers which they then let sit outside and mold in some cases.
Then they flooded the market with far too many reps and made other stupid decisions that destroyed any real chances their people had of making real sales on an ongoing basis.
But to listen to the “management” and the “leaders” it was not the companies fault… Nooooooo – it was YOUR FAULT if you were among the unfortunate who joined this ass bag MLM.
Yet today if you look around, you can still find all kinds of reviews, videos, and testimonials from before it all came crashing down saying what a great opportunity it was and that “LulaRoe is not a scam“. Before you decide anything – go watch the documentary and look into some of the lawsuits – then go look at all the Koolaid that people were throwing out before it imploded.
Hindsight is something else.
So no – you should NOT be Coachable…. at least not in the blindly obedient cult-like manner they want you to be.
Are There Any Real MLM Opportunities Out There?
Maybe and maybe not. I don’t yet know the answer to that question.
In fact, I was hoping you might be able to help me out with that and share your own experiences – good or bad – so that we all might learn something. If you are currently in a MLM company or have been – then by all means, please share your experiences in the comments below, or in the comments to my video on YouTube.
I really want to know what you think.
Just base it on verifiable facts please – no MLM marketing spin or theoretical pie in the sky stuff.