Multilevel Marketing - Just Another Way to Spell Sales

Recruiting and retaining quality, high-producing top quality sales people is a tough job. That's because selling is the toughest job on earth.

Sales is the only profession where compensation is based almost entirely on performance. A sales person is only as good as their current sales. There's no resting on past laurels. Sell a lot consistently and you become very wealthy. Sell nothing and you starve. It's that simple.

No other profession, with the exception of acting, requires putting your ego and self-esteem on the line every day in order to make a living. Psychological studies have repeatedly shown most people have self-esteem problems, a poor self image, various childhood based insecurities or other obstacles that prevent us from becoming effective sales people. That makes it even more difficult to recruit effective, results-driven sales professionals.

People who know how to sell and enjoy doing it are true professionals who are at the top of their game, making incredible incomes and enjoying enviable lifestyles. I have friends and associates selling stocks and mutual funds, airline engine parts, pharmaceuticals, yachts, imported sports cars and advertising media who make over $250,000 a year. Competitive employers are constantly offering them bigger and better incentive packages to lure them and their clients away. True sales professionals always make great income and have incredible job security and a skill that is the most marketable in the world.

"All the good ones are always taken", that's what a single-mother CEO of a $10 million home based business and good friend recently said to me at a trade show. No my friend Amy wasn't talking about men, she was talking about sales people.

Amy's business was very successful, almost entirely due to her own efforts. To take her business to the next level, she could no longer do the selling herself. She needed a top sales professional to take over as her "Lean Mean Selling Machine"- a term she used to describe her ability to aggressively produce sales at an extremely low cost to her company. Networking through her local chamber of commerce and paying for job postings on Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com provided a "big" but a "shallow" pool of applicants for her key sales positions.

Fortune 500 clients of mine have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to create and run recruiting ads for sales positions for their companies. They experience the same problem as my friend Amy and her $10 million dollar "working mom" business - finding good sales people to help their business grow.

The root of the problem is that unlike accounting, advertising, dentistry, law, marketing. Medicine, Nursing, TV & Radio Production and other occupations, sales doesn't' attract a large number of qualified professionals. Sales isn't considered glamorous, high paying or desirable by most people. Quite the contrary, the general public considers sales as a career for "drifters", "low life", and people whose education and experience don't qualify them for a technical, executive or professional level job.

It's true. Too many people "sell" for a living not because they want to, but because they have to.

Unfortunately, when "over-qualified" managers suddenly find themselves out of work, college graduates find themselves in a tough job market, working moms want to start a business, or aspiring blue collar workers need a better alternative, one of the fastest, easiest options is sales. That's because every business is always looking for sales people. And since sales positions are performance-based, and every business needs sales to be profitable, there's little risk for the company. You either sell or you're out.

That's why for decades, ever since marketing as a "concept" became popular in the late 1960's, companies have always, intentionally and misleadingly, advertised sales jobs as "entry level marketing positions" in newspaper ads under the "marketing" or "advertising" or "public relations" help wanted classified ads. These companies justify this practice by rationalizing that sales is part of marketing, that sales is a form of word of mouth or direct advertising and that sales does involve "relations with the public".

Multilevel marketing is no exception. Like any business, it's all about sales. No sales and the business fails. It's that simple.

Many multilevel marketing companies claim in their advertising and on their web sites that there is "no selling involved". Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth.

Sales is the basis of all multilevel marketing companies. Most of them have just devised new ways of spelling SALES.

The success of anyone involved in multilevel marketing rests on their ability to " recruit" more people to become part of their "down line" and in turn "recruit" other people to come in under them. Many multilevel marketers promote the fact that you don't have to "sell" people, you're just "recruiting" them to join the company.

But is it really "recruiting". Recruiting is usually associated with hiring new salaried employees to fill a vacancy in a company. It costs the recruit nothing. The recruit gets paid with no investment required.

In multilevel marketing, on the other hand, recruiting means convincing a prospect to make an up front investment thousands of dollars, incur other ongoing business expenses, and sign a contract with a company, Convincing a prospect to spend thousands of dollars and sign a contract with a company to me doesn't spell Recruiting ... It spells S-A-L-E-S.

After investing in many of the multilevel marketing opportunities available, you also have to forfeit or "pass up" your first "recruit", "new director", or "training exercise" to your "up line" or sales manager. Where I come from, that doesn't spell multilevel or marketing. It spells S-A-L-E-S.

Many multilevel marketing companies claim to have "money making engines", "self closing processes" or even "sales centers" that do all the prospecting and closing for you. Prospecting and Closing - that spells S-A-L-E-S to me too.

The fact is simply that multilevel marketing means selling, regardless of what the ads claim. If you can't sell, don't want to sell, or are afraid to deal with the tedious chores of prospecting, making emails, phone calls or sales calls - realize before you invest thousands of dollars and countless hours - multilevel marketing is just pure selling and it's not for you.