Where’s Your Name List?

Our upline told Ambot and I to gather a name list of everyone we know. To help us out they gave us a prompt sheet to use to help jog our memory that we know more people than we think we know. The people we know that we don’t know that we already know. This prompt list consisted of friends, family, the cashier at the gas station, the mailman, the garbageman, etc. I don’t really remember the suggestions on the list. I wasn’t too enthused about working on a list. A list of people on an Amway ambot list meant those people were doomed to be harrassed to come to Amway meetings, be scammed into signing up to be an IBO, or be pressured into buying useless overpriced shitty Amway products. I decided to be difficult and only listed people I knew who Ambot also knew so that left out a lot of people I went to school with and former coworkers from before we met.

The big problem when getting involved in Amway for a second time is that we had already pestered everyone we knew the last time around to attend an Amway meeting or buy Amway products. Any names on our list would be tortured again to be shown a board plan.

Our Platinum bragged he had 1000 people on his list at any time. Sure enough he showed us his notebook and pages and pages of names many with notations written beside them. He suggested using Facebook to make new friends and then snipe the friends of Facebook friends and put them on your list. Conceivably you could have hundreds of people on your Amway name list and not know any of them in person. Within the first couple of weeks of signing up for Amway Ambot and I came up with a list of over 200 people that he showed to the Platinum.

Now its one thing to come up with a list of a bunch of people that you might see casually during a month. Its another thing to actually have their phone numbers or know them well enough to ask for their number. I mean how many people snipe the water meter reader and ask for his home number. All Ambots raise your hands! What about when I’m at Starbucks. Its one thing to ask my favorite barista to make me a triple venti raspberry mocha with an extra shot of espresso and whipped cream and another to ask for her phone number.

I think Ambot put down the names of every former co-worker he ever had even though he didn’t keep in touch with them nor knew how to get in contact with them.

So we had this list of names of people we were supposed to bug to come to Amway meetings. I suppose from time to time Ambot looked at it and called someone whose number he actually had to harrass them into coming to an Amway meeting. Not too much we can do about the people on our name list whose phone numbers we don’t know. Even though we and other IBO’s were told to make the list and show it to the Platinum as proof we’d done it no one upline ever talked about the list afterwards or referred to that list again or asked if we were contacting any of the people on our name list.

In other words one of the first things the upline had us do was create a list of names of people we knew, then make notations if they were hot or cold as prospects and then they didn’t particularly care if we were contacting these people.

It was more important for the upline to badger their downline to buy more products and buy more tools than to follow up on their name list and what exactly they're accomplishing with the name list. Or at least in our WWDB group. Lousy phony ass leadership training program that it was - better known as World Wide Destructive Bastards due to its main training of destroying relationships of their ambots if they had a significant other who was not interested in wasting their money in this scam.

After we were long gone from the Amway cult I figured it out with a little help from former IBO’s. The name list is to give the IBO hope. Even though the IBO is not having any luck persuading prospects to come to an Amway meeting or finding customer to buy overpriced shitty Amway products as long as there are still names left on the list then there is hope. Hope that there is still a fleeting chance of signing up a downline. Hope that there is still a chance of finding a customer to pay too much money for an Amway product instead of shopping at their grocery store for a better product at a better price.

Sell the hope! Not the soap!

Sniping Prospects on Facebook

About 2 months after Facebook became live on the Internet an acquaintance of mine sent me a friend request. I didn’t know him all that well but he was in an on again off again relationship with a woman I know because she shared a house with a friend of ours for several years. I didn’t know what Facebook was so I left the email alone for awhile and then one day I finally clicked on the link, accepted the friend request and registered. He sent me a message saying he was happy I’d joined and almost right away the other 2 people I knew him through also sent me friend requests. The couple already had many friends signed up and some of them sent me friend requests too even though I didn’t actually know them I accepted the request. In the beginning I thought it was weird that people who had never physically met me wanted to be my friend. I joined a couple of groups - schools I went to and organizations I was part of - and signed up people I really knew as friends. I’ll admit I even got brave and sent friend requests to a few people I didn’t know but were friends of friends.

Facebook was kind of a good thing. I’ve reconnected with people I lost contact with many years ago. I’ve also met some new people through various groups I’m part of. I’m not huge on Facebook. Mostly I use it for posting photos and then send the link to friends of mine who aren’t on Facebook. I’m not on there every hour changing my status or seeing what my friends are doing.

Back in the early days of Facebook whenever somebody posted a comment on your friend’s wall that would show up on your news feeds too. Actually get kind of annoying seeing all these comments that people you don’t know have written on other people’s walls and on and on it’d go. It hasn’t been like that in a couple of years.

There’s a woman who I’ve never met but we’re both members of the same online group and we do have a lot of things in common so we became Facebook friends but we don’t interact all that much. One day I noticed some man had posted a comment to her wall because it showed up in my news feed. The fellow’s photo showed him dressed in a suit and he’d written a message to the effect of thank you for accepting my friend request and I look forward to networking with you in the future.

I thought it was a little weird for someone to say. When you get a new friend on Facebook you write a little hello message and maybe compliment their photos. But looking forward to networking with someone? Screams Amway all over it.

Ambot didn’t get started on Facebook until after he joined Amway, about 2 years after I'd signed up with Facebook. The sack of shit Platinum would bring it up mostly when he was talking about the name list all IBO’s have to make of people they know. He said if you have 800 friends on Facebook you can prospect them all as potential IBO’s or customers.

That seems a little creepy to me. I’d say if you have a couple of hundred friends on Facebook you probably don’t know all of them personally. Using Facebook to snipe friends as Amway prospects just seems a little screwy to me.

But Ambot decides the Platinum might actually know something and spends all his free time (and there’s not much of that when you’re involved in Amway!) looking for local entrepreneur groups he can sign up with and then he goes nutso signing up “friends”. He went overboard and Facebook suspended his account. I believe there is a maximum amount of “friends” you’re allowed to sign up daily and he exceeded it. He even told me he was getting warning messages from Facebook saying he was approaching his daily limit of friends and that he would get blocked if he didn’t stop. And then his account got suspended! Ha! Did it not occur to Ambot that Facebook puts limits in effect to stop people from spamming or signing up “friends” for business purposes - like potential Amway prospects! Like Ambot is the first person involved in an MLM who thought about using Facebook to prospect for recruits!

Its also possible that some of these unknown friends were complaining to Facebook or maybe after a person gets enough declines on friend requests that Facebook suspends them.

For all the effort Ambot put into signing up unknown people as friends and I’d have to say he got a couple of hundred he never got a single one of them to an Amway meeting or purchase any products.

Name List!

Our upline told Ambot and I to gather a name list of everyone we know. To help us out they gave us a prompt sheet to use to help jog our memory that we know more people than we think we know. The people we know that we don’t know that we already know. This prompt list consisted of friends, family, the cashier at the gas station, the mailman, the garbageman, etc. I don’t really remember the suggestions on the list. Our Platinum used to brag he had 1000 people on his list at any time. He also suggested using Facebook to make new friends and then snipe the friends of Facebook friends and put them on your list. Within the first couple of weeks of signing up Ambot and I came up with a list of over 200 people that he showed to the Platinum. Ambot got more names on his list once he signed up on Facebook, joined various groups, and started signing up unknown friends left, right, and center. In fact Facebook froze his account because he’d gone ballistic on adding too many friends. He exceeded his daily limit of adding friends.

Now its one thing to come up with a list of a bunch of people that you might see during a month. Its another thing to actually have their phone numbers or know them well enough to ask for their number. I mean how many people snipe the water meter reader and ask for his home number.

I think Ambot and I put down the names of every former co-worker we'd ever had. These were people we knew but not necessarily kept in touch with after we started our own business and we don't know if these people still work for the same place or how to get in contact with them if we had to.

So we had this list of names. I suppose these were people we were supposed to bug to come to Amway meetings and I suppose from time to time Ambot looked at it and called someone to harrass them into coming to an Amway meeting. For the most part the names on the list were people we run into from time to time but don’t know their phone numbers. The odd thing is even though we and other IBO’s were told to make the list and show it to the Platinum as proof we’d done it no one upline ever talked about the list afterwards or referred to that list again or asked if we were contacting any of the people on our name list.

In other words one of the first things the upline had us do was create a list of names of people we knew, then make notations if they were hot or cold as prospects, and then they didn’t particularly care if we were contacting these people to come to board plan meetings.

It seems more important for the upline to badger their downline to buy more products and buy more tools than it is to follow up on their name list and what exactly they're accomplishing with the name list. Or at least in our LOS.