Kleeneeze or Betterware?

wongawonga

In an attempt to up distributor numbers Kleeneze are reaching out to ex-distributors inviting them to return to the Kleeneze Family,special rejoining terms are being offered.

Morethanconcerned

wongawonga wrote: »

In an attempt to up distributor numbers Kleeneze are reaching out to ex-distributors inviting them to return to the Kleeneze Family,special rejoining terms are being offered.

I wasn't going to come back here and discuss kleeneze having got back on with my life after doing it for a gruelling three years. I have kept in contact with people when I discussed kleeneze and was snet a link about this latest scheme. I really can't let this go by without commenting .

Earlier this year I was contacted by my old upline to rejoin as part of the free to start thing. Better than that was the fact the bronze upline had offered to get me 200 free books, the level of desperation was palpable and not a little embarrassing. Not least of which was that I had given my upline all my customer lists and equipment in the hope he could find someone to do it in my area.

Of course I pointed out that my new job paid far more, for fewer hours , had holiday pay, sick pay , bonuses, proper structure and most importantly it gave me proper spare time to actually spend more time with my family , to actually do the things I wanted to do in my spare time like hobbies and the garden. The utterly daft idea I would start again working 7 days a week for little over £300 a month FULL time after all expenses was just incomprehensible, and I told them that as politely as I could.

Of course they'd like an 18% ++ big hitter on their team , pure retailing , well it's not going to happen. I suspect I will receive such a letter . I await the clump of the postmans size 9's even as I type.

PatrickD

I must admit that I feel very sorry for Kleeneze people because they've obviously never been taught the way to ''network market'', i.e. use products yourself, find a few customers and teach others to do the same. Its all retail, retail, retail, which is fine if all you want is to be a salesperson and earn, say, £300 a month for continually walking the streets with catalogues, but the problem is that you can never step back your hours doing it that way, its a lifetime occupation which has more to do with a job than a business imo.
If you ''network market'', you may very well be putting in hours you're not very well paid for at the the start, but as your team grows, so does your ''per hourly'' rate, so eventually you can step back the hours for more money.
I do take on board the comment Peter Pan made that probably Kleeneze products are more suited to catalogue sales rather than a ''use yourself and find a few other customers'' type of system.

Pat

alanbluecat

I used to be involved with Kleeneze several years ago but had to stop due to health reasons. I have been following this thread for some time and see things that I recognise on both sides of the argument. Recently I have been considering starting again as my health is improving and coincidentally I recently received the invitation to re-join together with the latest catalogue and Christmas book.

If anyone is interested, here is my experience.

Retailing via catalogues - timescales mentioned recently sound about right - 2 hours to get 200 out, around 3 hours to get them back in. Several return visits required to get the majority back but even so 10% were consistently lost on each drop (both from 'blanket dropping' an customer base drops).

Returns per catalogue varied. I was building a customer base in 2 neighbouring towns. Sometimes I got great returns, sometimes nothing. On average though one town consistently returned 75p per catalogue dropped and the other averaged £1.25 per catalogue dropped. Combined, I was close to £1 per catalogue dropped that the company claimed, over my period of involvement. There was a great deal of fluctuation though on each drop, and orders increased running up to Christmas, but these figures were for all my drops averaged over a long period of time. Also these figures were achieved from Day 1.

Sponsoring - I was getting 1 lead from every 100 pieces of promo material put out, mainly cards and flyers but also some shop ads. I was also involved in an ad pool which produced many leads but it is difficult to know the strike rate from this.

From all these leads, the majority of people were not interested. Some put the phone down on me, others never even picked up. I would say that roughly 1 in 20 leads showed some interest, and of the people who showed a bit of interest, roughly 1 in 4 of them joined.

If you do the calculation you will see that to get 1 person to join my team it took 8000 cards or flyers to find them!

From these people who joined 1 in 3 never put any catalogues out!
1 in 3 put them out once or twice then stopped.
1 in 3 put them out for a few months ...... then stopped.

I don't know what the figures would be to find 1 person who would stick it for a considerable period of time, but these people DO exist and some people are finding them.

A person who started at roughly the same time as me, and who I know personally, has recently got to Gold.(We were both sponsored by the same person) I know that they have been trying to sponsor from the beginning and have had people in their team over the years but at the moment they currently have no team members. This means that they achieved Gold by retailing alone, all by themselves! This is a phenomenal achievement as it take sales of £8813 over a 4 week period to achieve this. I have heard that they achieve £5 per catalogue dropped and are working mainly from a customer base now. The income from retailing this amount with no team is £3174 for the 4 week period. Obviously there will be deductions from this for petrol and lost catalogues, but it does show that people ARE buying and that it is possible to earn decent money. Be under no illusion though, to retail this amount takes a lot of really hard work 6 or 7 days per week, week after week, month after month, and there are not many people who would want to do that.

In my time I was working the business on a full time basis, working with a huge amount of catalogues and despite having lots of expenses to pay out, I was making money with the business, but not near these figures. I know that despite low returns and a huge churn on the sponsoring side, it is possible to be successful. It is a bit of a numbers game on both sides of the business but if you know what it will take and are prepared to do it then you can get there.

So am I going to start again? No.
Why? Well despite the goods being 'overpriced tat', the above example shows that no matter the price, people are still buying from the catalogue. This will always be the case. Not everyone makes a purchasing decision on price alone, although many do. It is possible, like the person I mentioned, to find a customer base of people who are prepared to pay over the odds for cheap rubbish. My problem is that having looked at the most recent catalogue I found that the prices have rocketed since I last saw a catalogue about 2 years ago. Most of the products I can find at the numerous 'bargain' shops in my town for a fraction of the price, and I feel that I could no longer look a customer in the eye after ripping them off.
The other factor that made my decision was that this person STILL has no team after several years of trying to sponsor. This shows how difficult it is to churn through the high numbers and make anyone stick. If they stopped retailing tomorrow they would earn nothing next month.

For those prepared to do it despite all this - good luck to them.
Sorry for such a long post, but I hope this true reflection of what it is really like to operate a Kleeneze business will help someone decide if it is for them or not.

PatrickD

Great story Alan! What would be the earnings on that £8000 a month sales? Would I be right in guessing £2,500 to £3,000 a month?

Pat

alanbluecat

Hi Pat, the amount is in there above but probably lost in all the words!

It would be £3174 income.

Edited to add - of course there would be expenses to come off such as replacement catalogues, petrol, sponsoring materials etc so it is impossible to know what the net figure is. However this person drives a nice, nearly new car, pays the mortgage and has no other means of income and on the face of it, a seemingly nice standard of living. They seem to be doing very well for themselves but it should be noted that they work really, really hard, in all weathers to achieve this. It is a very physical job at this level. As someone said earlier - simple, but not easy.

PatrickD

Thanks Alan, sorry I missed it in there and you're right, very hard work to earn that I should imagine, and even harder keeping it up month after month.

Pat

Morethanconcerned

PatrickD wrote: »

I must admit that I feel very sorry for Kleeneze people because they've obviously never been taught the way to ''network market'', i.e. use products yourself, find a few customers and teach others to do the same. Its all retail, retail, retail, which is fine if all you want is to be a salesperson and earn, say, £300 a month for continually walking the streets with catalogues, but the problem is that you can never step back your hours doing it that way, its a lifetime occupation which has more to do with a job than a business imo.
If you ''network market'', you may very well be putting in hours you're not very well paid for at the the start, but as your team grows, so does your ''per hourly'' rate, so eventually you can step back the hours for more money.
I do take on board the comment Peter Pan made that probably Kleeneze products are more suited to catalogue sales rather than a ''use yourself and find a few other customers'' type of system.

Pat

Having taken the time to sit back and read through all of this thread at least going back to when I was last here , it's obvious that , even though you said you did Kleeneze that you'd don't understand it. You can't *teach* kleeneze catalogues - there are hundreds if not thousands of products ranging from homecare, car care, to OAP aids, to gardening to beauty products. You don't knock on the door and go let me demonstrate this OAP toilet seat , you put the catalogue and all the ancillary books that go with it in the pack through the door and let the customer look , you go back on a prearranged day to collect and take any orders left.

Now an encyclopaedic knowledge of the different products helps on the doorstep if someone says *Oh I wanted such and such* **Oh do you have something that will clean the rings on Xmas balballs ?** . Obviously this level of knowledge comes with doing it for ages and ordering hundreds if not thousands of pounds worth each week. But at no time did I have to or was expected to *sell* the products by personal recommendation, nor was anyone recruited - they are told *no selling needed* .

Personally the stuff was overpriced crap - nothing there no able bodied person couldn't have got off the high street or online for a fraction of the cost, few of the weird gadgets were any good, the consumables like cleaners and cosmetics were cheap crap sold for inflated prices, the big high value items like big brushes and push along cleaners , furniture and bedding etc were way over priced and often shamefully cheap and nasty. The Xmas book is full of pound shop tat no one with any taste would have anywhere near their house. Of course you'd go to uplines houses - often quite poor houses really given the fact they reckon they are doing so well - and there would be the glow in the dark out door rock things , the light changing ball things that frankly were laughable.

Of course putting out near to 1000 books a week over a continuous cycle through out the whole week I would enthuse as much as I could if some ne'er do well wanted to know if the £18 singing and dancing reindeer on the front cover was any good *Oh yes they are flying out the warehouse and may soon be all out of stock so popular are they!* no good for sales and my bills if I said , *no it's sh%%te plastic tat that you can get for £5 in argos but you'd need a brainectomy if you were daft enough to buy one!*

Morethanconcerned

alanbluecat wrote: »

Hi Pat, the amount is in there above but probably lost in all the words!

It would be £3174 income.

Edited to add - of course there would be expenses to come off such as replacement catalogues, petrol, sponsoring materials etc so it is impossible to know what the net figure is. However this person drives a nice, nearly new car, pays the mortgage and has no other means of income and on the face of it, a seemingly nice standard of living. They seem to be doing very well for themselves but it should be noted that they work really, really hard, in all weathers to achieve this. It is a very physical job at this level. As someone said earlier - simple, but not easy.

You do realise he'll NEVER be able to hold that gold? I regularly knocked on the door of 18% with 750 - 1000 books a week, I did it full time and worked form 7AM in the morning to evening every night of the week, weekends all day , in a constant round to get the books back and the orders out.

After ALL costs were removed - I kept strict records , something which many kleeneze agents say they do but rarely actually achieve or it would mean admitting it was costing them hard money - after all the fuel , the books and ancillary costs, taking into account a two week holiday with my children the average for the whole year was just over £300 pounds - £342 to be precise.

alanbluecat

Yes I do. My post is not pro-Kleeneze but I'm simply reporting what I know.
Your story sounds very similar to mine (and the person I posted about) although from the figures I did better than you did and the person I posted about did much better than me.

Oh, and my figures were accurately kept too - I was a bank manager and now have a bookkeeping business so I'm well used to dealing with figures and am not fooled by income cheques. Profit is what counts.