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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Marketing For Excel, January 13, 2000
This review is from: Excel Phenomenon: The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company -- and What It Means to You (Hardcover)
I picked this book up (for free), hoping it was a regular business book. The kind that describes the pluses and minuses of the business. Instead, its almost entirely a marketing tract for Excel. Nowhere are some of the hard questions asked -- How competitive are Excel's telco products compared to other Long Distance companies ? -- How many reps earn more than $30,000 a year from Excel ? -- What % of reps drop out ? What % of people reach the higher levels shown in the book and how much money do they make ? -- How much time does this entire activity take for a rep ? -- What % of Excel's revenues come from Long distance service, and what % from rep fees ? By covering only the successes and none of the failures, the book gives a distorted version of the truth. This book seems like a clever way to get around the FTC's regulations about network marketing (which requires more disclosure) by having a supposedly independent book. I can only conclude that anyone who's given the book 5 stars is themselves an Excel rep in some fashion, because theres no other logical reason for praising this book. Don't even read it, let alone buy it.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting Review on Excel & It's Opportunity, January 17, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Excel Phenomenon: The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company -- and What It Means to You (Hardcover)
The Excel Phenomenon is a very well written history of Excel, It's founder - Kenny Troutt, and mostly - the Excel opportunity. It is probably slanted at being a recruiting tool for Excel reps. Which is actually a brilliant idea but, it takes away from the book also when readers finally realize that they are being recruited. Robinson does a fine job of profiling Troutt, and many successful reps. Excel appears to be a tremendous financial opportunity that Robinson clearly articulates. I would reccomend that everyone reading this review to diversify your income, through Excel or through another source (actually several). When you have a few small streams of income coming in from various sources the final result is financial security. You'll never be trapped if one of the streams of income stops. This book is the tip of the iceberg, for several of Excel's reps, Kenny Troutt, and possibly you. If you're thinking about joining Excel, give it a read. It's a well written eye opener.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A political communicator as the author, January 17, 2005
This review is from: Excel Phenomenon: The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company -- and What It Means to You (Hardcover)
Many of the reviews seemed to consider more the network marketing aka MLM in general than the book itself. I think that the Excel Communications was a very well timed and well implemented business idea that worked.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about this book. Especially the first half of the book is painful rhetoric about the glory of Excel Communications. Somehow I had a feeling that the author was a professional writer, maybe a journalist. I could not believe that any journalist would write as one-sighted text as this book, and I checked the background of the author: a veteran speech-writer and political communicator. Well, that explained a lot.
The book repeats over and over the same positive claims of working for Excel: Be your own boss, be with your family, and with the hypocrisy of a Miss World candidate the story that although I make a lot of money, the most important for me is that I can help the others to succeed as well.
When you open the book on an arbitrary page, you get the feeling that the book includes facts as there are so many numbers and dollar signs. By reading the text, the reader notices that 95% of the facts are irrelevant like how much the person earned before joining Excel or how much one can gain by saving 20 years with 8% interest rate. The latter fact got 3 pages in 225-page book. The other facts were mainly related to the environment or society, not to Excel. The book had also some relevant facts like how many percentage of the Excel representatives succeed or fail, but those facts have to be dug out from a lot of noise around them, and in those cases the facts are not statistical from the Excel book-keeping but individual opinions.
What I was missing are the facts:
How much of the Excel income come from the telecom services and how much of it comes from training and other MLM supporting services.
How many customers Excel has compared to the representatives.
How Excel is sharing the customer revenue between the person who sold the service, the person who recruited that sales person and Excel.
How a typical representative income stream is composed, how much comes from getting customers, how much customer calls, how much recruiting others, how much from recruited persons recruiting new ones, and how much of training and managerial tasks.
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