Our Amway 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!
The huge name list was about generating hope, that's for sure. But it also served as "an exercise in obedience," as they say in military training camps. You make the new recruits do all sorts of silly and pointless things just to get them into the habit of obeying up-line orders without thinking.
ReplyDeleteCertainly the "list" was basically useless, since most of the entries were for people whom you couldn't contact anymore. Also, "cold" contacts made at random in bars or bookstores are proverbially pointless, since they are done by mere chance and nothing else. Why should somebody sitting next to you at a luncheonette counter be interested in a dumb-ass MLM scheme? Stoking up a conversation with them is just too stupid for words -- but then again, being in Amway generally makes you stupid.
One final thought -- the internet is now filled with persons who offer to show you how to advertise for the purpose of getting "hot" contacts for Amway, ones who will actually be interested in what you have to say. All of these internet advertisers tell you openly that making a long list of your friends, relatives, acquaintances and old school buddies is a totally insane and useless thing to do.
The fact that these internet advertisers are in business is solid evidence that the long compiled lists are silly and pointless. Amway IBOs are frustrated, and are giving business to these internet advertisers because these self-generated lists aren't helping them at all to recruit a down-line.
Anonymous- occasionally we gave Ambots end up at marriedtoanambot after searching for where they can buy a list of prospects. Probably compiled by someone going through the phone book. So these guys selling name lists are making more money than Ambots.
DeleteBut yeah an exercise in stupidity that only helps with the brainwashing process to make Ambots more obedient to the Amway upline.