Pink Truth: Why It’s Not Such a Hot Idea to Recruit Your Mary Kay Warm Market

Pink Truth Facts, opinions, and the real story behind Mary Kay Cosmetics.

Why It's Not Such a Hot Idea to Recruit Your Mary Kay Warm Market Mar 19th 2012, 11:00 Written by DupedByPinkFriend When a new consultant begins her Mary Kay journey, she is instructed to practice giving facials and skin care classes with her friends and family.  This sounds reasonable, and seems to make sense, as many women who join Mary Kay have no previous sales experience, have little knowledge about skin care or [...]

I'm not sure I even understand "dupedbypinkfriend"s point much less agree or disagree with it.  It sounds like someone put all of Pink Truth's typical, half-formed arguments into a blender, ran it for a few minutes and poured this into a glass to serve up for today's article. The first half of the article, the part where she explains how Mary Kay encourages new recruits to start with their family and friends and why, makes sense.  The part where she "explains" why this is a bad idea is what loses me. A word about recruiting a team, if I may: If you are going to tell people, give ________ a try and if you are not interested, there is no obligation (and the ________ could be "come to a meeting", "buy the starter kit", etc.), then you need to be prepared that people will try and decide to walk away.  This is NOT a "churn and burn" mentality, it is simply keeping your word to allow people to stay or walk away.  If you are prepared for people to walk away, you have to assume you are going to need to talk to a lot of people in order to get a few people that will "stick". If, for instance, you want 5 new team members and we assume a 10% "stick" rate at each stop on the journey, it would (possibly) look something like this: To get 5 (solid) team members, I need 50 people to buy the starter kit and give it a try (10% of 50 is 5) To get 50 people to try Mary Kay by buying a starter kit, I need to offer it to 500 people (10% of 500 is 50) To get 500 people to come to a class where I can offer them the Mary Kay opportunity properly I need to invite 5,000 people (10% of 5,000 is 500) These are obviously big numbers, and 10% may be a low or high number depending on the person, their location and a lot of other factors.  The point is that you are going to have to hear a lot of "no"s at various points in your journey.  By this example, you will hear 4,995 "no"s to get those 5 solid team members.  This, in my opinion, is why it should NOT be the concern of the Mary Kay (consultant, recruiter, director) what made you say "yes".  They have a lot of people they are offering to, they should be able to assume that you will make a responsible decision for yourself.