The Strategies that made Mary Kay Successful - 7
Not Limiting Sales Territories
Working for another company, Mary Kay, through a series of circumstances had to end up moving from her top sales territory. Amazingly, the company wouldn't allow Mary Kay to retain the benefits that she enjoyed through building up a powerful sales force. She remembered that experience when she built her company.
Mary Kay had the belief (which ended up being true), that if a beauty consultant could recruit anywhere in the world, more consultants would be recruited. She explained it this way: "We have what we call the adoptive system. It works like this: say you recruit a consultant while you're on vacation in Hawaii. You leave her with a director of consultants in Hawaii who trains her. Meanwhile, you draw a small percentage of your recruit's sales. But the company pays that commission, not the recruit. The Hawaiian direct does not get any percentage except to count on the recruit's sales as a part of her unit, but the Hawaiian director will have a recruit somewhere else, under some other director and it balances out. Most of our 900 directors have adoptees. Everyone helps everyone else."
While this won't make sense to some people, it really worked for her. She was looking for top notch consultants. Territories, when you really think about it, can cater to the insecurity of a person. It can also make them think in limited ways.
But when the world is your potential territory, it allows you a flexibility and big vision that brings about superior results, as Mary Kay and her consultants proved.
In the end, this helped to build the company fast and brought in large numbers of consultants from around the world.
Mary Kay was another great business leader that wasn't afraid to break the existing rules to bring success to her company. It couldn't have happened if she hadn't built the business around caring for others. That was the foundation to the acceptance by her people.
Other Mary Kay Resources:
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