Why Herbalife Doesn't Work - Selling Herbalife

Introduction | Work from Home page 1 2 3 | Small Business | Trying Anything to Sell page 1 2 | Universal Distributor Saturation | Active Ingredient? | Summary

Now, whether you are a regular distributor or a supervisor, you need start selling the herbalife pills or the herbalife "work from home" business. Good luck!

You will need to sell a lot of pills to make back the money you have invested. As a distributor, you will have spent at least $240 in materials to get started, and you are probably anxious to get that money back in sales. If you are a Supervisor, you have an easier road, but it is a lot longer, because you are trying to make up for buying that initial $2,000 in product.

You will most likely spend the rest of your "herbalife" sales career trying to earn back your original investment.

Making the $2000 initial investment to become a supervisor may seem like a good idea, but it is extremely rare for someone to sell enough Herbalife to make back that money. Take a look at the variety of herbalife products that people are trying to unload on ebay.  Anyone with more than $100 in products probably bought a giant batch to gain supervisor status, not realizing that the market for home-sold diet pills was totally saturated.

There are two main groups of people that you should consider selling to: 

• all the people you already know
• the masses of people you don't know

Now, the people that you know might buy some of your products.  Make a list of the people that you know and try to imagine yourself approaching them about a great way to lose weight. Maybe that isn't going to be as comfortable as you would like. Still some people may buy your products just because they feel sorry for you, especially if you have been in trouble with the law or have been living on the streets. 

As far as the "work from home" part of the business goes, you probably don't want to sell that to people that you know. Odds are that they will just lose the money they invest in it, and then they will blame you.

Selling to people that you don't know is tricky.  You have to make contact with people who are interested in what you have to sell. This can be pretty expensive.

You will probably want to try newspaper ads first.

They will probably fail. One woman I talked to put small ads in her local paper for four weeks straight.  She spent $31.50, which didn't break the bank, but she only got 4 phone calls, and no one bought any pills from her.

You can try putting an ad in the phone book.  Of course, you will have to compete with the other people in there.  Sacramento is bursting at the seams with distributors, and it really shows in the white pages here.

Your "Mentor" will encourage you to go to mall parking lots and distribute 1000 fliers a day, but most people don't like that idea.

Once you start in the Herbalife business, you will find yourself in a number of socially awkward situations.  No one likes fliers on their windshield, so you will probably be half-sneaking around the lot, arising the attention of security guards. If they see what you are doing, they will chase you off.

I think it is tacky, and half the time they end up on the blacktop.

A cheap way to reach out a lot of people is to send out unsolicited email.

Everyone on the face of the earth hates this. Please don't do it.

Herbalife will probably sell you some chintzy marketing merchandise, like bumper stickers and magnetic car signs, key chains, mugs, t-shirts, pens, paper weights, squishy herbalife balls.  This is fun stuff, but lets face it, that kind of stuff is more for YOU than for your customers.

I don't know anyone who has called the number on the side of a car to buy weight-loss pills.

The sales method that motivated me to write this story in the first place is the cheap sign nailed on a telephone pole.  These are illegal in Sacramento, West Sacramento and many other areas of the country.  I believe the reason they are illegal is that they are ugly.

Some people don't find them ugly at all, but other people go to great lengths to tear them down in their neighborhood. I guess it depends on your own sense of aesthetics. I don't mind fallen leaves on the sidewalk, but other people feel strongly enough about them to buy leaf-blowers and rakes.

Here are 40 more photos of signs on telephone poles and fences.

Sometimes people only cut away part of the sign, such as the telephone number. 

This may be for two reasons. The first reason is that some signs are difficult to remove without a crowbar.  They often have long nails and nickle-sized washers holding them on the pole, so it is easier to just cut part of the sign off.

The second reason is to have a discouraging effect on future sign-posters, indicating bandit sign posting is not welcome. A clean pole seems to be an invitation to some sign-hangers.

I've heard that it is forbidden for distributors to indicate the herbalife name on the "work at home" and "use a computer" signs. 

I believe this is because they don't want their company name to be associated with these cheap, illegal signs. It might also be because if you knew all these signs were for herbalife, you would recognize how saturated the market was already.

These signs cost about $1.50 each when ordered in quantities of 100 or more.

You can buy them at Witness Designs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, "where God does signs and wonders, and we do signs and windows".

Another cheap method of advertising is to create small paper or plastic pouches filled with tiny paper fliers.

I've seen them on ATMs, newspaper stands, phone booths, gas pumps, church pews, in toilet stalls, library cubicles, and on drive-thru menus. These pockets really look crappy, so you will have to be pretty self-serving to put them up around your own neighborhood.

Some herbalife distributors refer to them as "hot pockets".  Because these pouches are a new form of advertising, they may not be a law against them in your area yet.

It is common to see these tattered plastic envelopes half-full of colored water. What a mess.

When I first began researching these Herbalife signs, I found a website called, "your body is a miracle", which, to be fair, doesn't have anything to do with herbalife, but has this sickening line: "These are GREAT Work From Home Ads for PLASTERING EVERYWHERE YOU GO." and continues, "Get some double stickytape and then put them "EVERYWHERE "you can think of. Laundry Mats, bus stops, telephone booths, put them on the inside of bathroom stalls, telephone poles ,hand then put individually too."

On the official Herbalife site, they have a bunch of "success stories", one of which is the story of Katiuzka Vera.  

In her story, she describes distributing 1000 fliers a day for 90 days. Can you imagine? 90,000 fliers. Think of all the time that takes, and how her city looked afterward.  Jiminy. And she netted 225 customers. That is 400 fliers for each and every person she made a sale to. 

Another Herbalife "Success Story" describes the work of Diana and Nile Eddy:

“Every day for weeks we packed up our car with flyers, staple guns, heavy tape, tacks and our children. It was a family affair,” she explains.

I'd like to show her a trick with that staple gun and heavy tape.

The sticky backs of "hot pockets" leave distinct adhesive rectangles wherever they are torn down.  They are all over the curbside features of downtown Sacramento.

Here is another excerpt from an Herbalife "success story": Matthew and Michelle Leavitt:

There are about 1,000 homes in our neighbourhood," he continues. "Every other week we put the same flyer under people's doormats. It wasn't long before we had 10 new Distributors in our neighbourhood alone." Now, Matt and Michele spend a maximum of two hours a day, five days a week, putting flyers on cars and under doormats in front of people's homes.