I was sitting and thinking about what would be considered non-sales salesmen when suddenly a random thought popped into my head, that thought being “remember that time when those Mormons were kicked off of the campus for being problematic?” and then it suddenly dawned on me as if it was there all along. Mormons are by far the most annoying non-sales salesmen that are out there. Aside from claiming to be Christians when that is seriously up for debate (personally I don’t think so) I have come to acquire a decent amount of knowledge on the subject. My mom tended to watch a lot of documentaries on cults and crap like that when I was in middle school and often there would be stuff on Mormons and spin offs of their religion. Ever since then I will occasionally do more research on why they think they are Christian, what they do to reaffirm their faith, etc. I’m pretty sure the reason this keeps occurring is because in addition to learning a lot about them passively, we have a Mormon church next to my neighborhood, which means often I will see two Mormon teens walking around and trying to chat it up with people (the operative word being “trying”). As a result, I tend to think about Mormons from time to time, and once again that time has come, only this time I am thinking about them from a sales perspective instead of a theology one. The core of this is obviously how they go door to door, everyone knows that, it’s in memes and jokes across all media. “Have you heard about our lord and savior *insert funny person or idea*?” is a pretty well known joke, my personal favorite being the Lightning McQueen variation. To get back on topic, what’s interesting about Mormons going door to door is that it isn’t just a strategy for engagement and theology, they view it as a spiritual obligation that’s equivalent to taking communion and prayer. While in regular Christian denominations we aren’t exactly required in the same way to go evangelize, it’s ok, not everyone is gifted in that way. For Mormons however, it’s taught that everyone IS gifted that way, and that it is paramount that you do your door to door visits, otherwise you may not get into a good heaven. Mormons call this and other activities “service” and see it as a quota that needs to be filled. While I do believe that Mormons are flawed in both their theology and their approach to sales, I think the one thing that can be said is done effectively by them is their ability to go for no and go for appointments. Having spoken to a lot of close friends who were approached by Mormons in door to door fashion as well as seeing their training media, it’s fascinating how effectively they train their evangelists to go for the no and get appointments. Unless you say no and immediately start closing the door to definitively stop the conversation, they will not stop. If you say you don’t believe in God they will ask if there is a time that you can meet to talk more in the future. If you say you do then they will say the same thing. I think that while they are good at this, they do not effectively find the pain, the reason being they go in thinking they already know the pain. Anyways that’s my spiel on my thoughts on Mormons as non-sales salesmen.
BoweryJE22