Mormons Knocked On My Door- A Lesson in Salesmanship

Who hasn’t been hat home just enjoying a Saturday morning and then the infamous knock at the door comes. Oh look its some very polite, nicely dressed young men but wait they have backpacks and…. and….. Aww hell it’s the Mormons. I had this happen today, but the big question is “how should I handle this?” You always have two choices in this situation, you can either tell them to get out of your face, or you could talk to them. I chose to go with the more civil of the two choices.

If your familiar with selling techniques you can always spot them when people come to your door. One of the first is presentation, there is a reason these kids look like a boy scout version of a car salesman, but you cant fault them for it. The next is creating a sense of rapport, these people don’t know you from the last door they were at but they want to hear your sob story so they can “know how you feel.” I bet they are even sincere about it and really want to know about you. Once they start getting you to tell your stories or even sob stories they are going to get the overall feeling and repeat what you said back to you except this time with a positive twist like “ I know exactly what you mean, would it have made a difference if ______ was different, how would that have made you feel?” When you start to visualize yourself in that moment with everything going right and you begin to get a conversation going that’s when they feel they’ve got their hooks in.

So now you know and knowing is half the battle…. that’s what the Transformers used to tell me anyway. Stay tuned for the follow up to this on how to use these same techniques and how I suspect it works.