In my opinion, trying to sponsor people from MLM company "genealogy lists" (lists of distributors of former and/or current companies) is absolutely the very top of the list of things not to do.
These are people we are not willing to sponsor.
A proportion of them will be "jumpers". Others will have multiple businesses, and/or a history of multiple businesses. Others will already be working another network marketing company at the moment, in which case we wouldn't be willing to sponsor them anyway.
Unless possibly you have a genealogy-list from a company that's just very recently gone under leaving all the distributors afloat, or something very similar, all you know for sure about such "leads" is that they've failed to make a living in companies in which other people have managed to make a living, and/or they already have an MLM business.
I suspect (some will disagree with this and consider it "judgmental") that it all comes down to whether you're willing to spend your time/effort looking for and sponsoring and coaching and getting started with "floundering network marketers" and people with a history of bad previous judgments. I'm not. And we don't want people in our downlines who are, either.
Someone very successful indeed in my group says that it's a bit like dating married guys: they're not going to leave their wife for you and if they do, within a couple of years they'll be leaving you for the younger/flashier/newer/more-hyped-up model anyway, so why get involved with them in the first place.
All the successful people in my company have done best, over the long term, by building their business with people who have never been involved in network marketing before. They're entirely fresh and unprejudiced (the ones willing to join you, anyway!), and they'll be able to learn your company's duplicable system and build a business without being full of all sorts of nonsense they've "learned" elsewhere and not made a living with because the people teaching them didn't know what they were talking about. (This is also one of the reasons why the overall success-rate in network marketing is so low among people trying to build their businesses predominantly online: they're dealing, to a greater or a lesser extent with "previous failure".)
It's (relatively) easy to sponsor people from genealogy-lists, of course, but very difficult to retain a significant proportion of them.
Unfortunately, it's easy to find people in internet forums saying "I wasn't sponsoring anyone at all until I started using genealogy-lists, and now I'm sponsoring plenty". This may be so, but two or three years later those people are not still in the business because their downlines dropped to bits. In the short-term they thought it was working, and the learning-curve is long and slow with this.
You can't tell them that at the time because they're only copying what they've been told to do (by someone who knew no better and was only half-way along the learning-curve) and you can't tell them later either, because they're not still there. So appearances can be very deceptive indeed over this issue.
I suspect that if you ask "network marketers" in general whether or not this is a reasonable idea worth trying, quite a lot of them will tell you that it is. But if instead you ask only "network marketers earning over $15,000 per month" (or whatever - in other words just the successful ones), you'll look long and hard to find anyone at all recommending this "technique", and when you do find one, he'll be trying to sell you something.
