A line of business where I see lots of young people gets attracted to these days are Direct Sales. Direct Selling companies offers very attractive income structures all perfectly laid out in their colorful brochures giving new participants a sense of pride and confidence that they will be making thousands per month. Furthermore they conduct frequent seminars, inviting motivational speakers to give talks on how to succeed without breaking a sweat. That’s all talk and theory. It just doesn’t work in practise.
Direct Selling takes a lot of convincing and good public relation skills. The first rule that a Direct Selling Company will teach you is Buy and Use it Yourself first. Then you go all out to look for friends to come in as members, not customers. If you have been to any of these Seminars you would realise that the most important aspect of success in Direct Selling is getting members. They don’t actually want you to sell their products to the public. What they are looking for is the public to become members and then buy their products as a member.
Look at it this way. They know it’s very hard to sell their products face to face. There is almost no repeat sales. Friends might be good enough to entertain you by buying a small product from you the first time because they don’t want to disappoint you, but after that, they will try to avoid you like a plaque. Realising this, these companies encourage people to become members and urge members to try out their products first. So the more members there is, the more their products will sell.
Public Listed Companies like Amway have huge success with this strategy. They have millions of members and if each member buy 2 or their products monthly, they will be reaping in huge profits. Imagine a business with a customer base of millions.
Having said that, I am very skeptical of those success stories that almost all Direct Selling Companies publishes in their monthly bulletins to members. Some are driving luxury cars and living in posh bungalows without doing a thing because their down line is so widespread that they are contributing hundreds of thousands to his monthly income. Is it that easy? I have my doubts. If you are really one that enjoys selling products to people face to face, I would advise you to sell Insurance instead.