Great for rainy day reading:
http://www.mbajungle.com/magazine.cfm?INC=inc_article.cfm&artid=3010&template=0&date=December2003 Business Lessons from Jehovah's Witnesses: God's Sales Team by Dan McGinn Their product: salvation. Their mission: conversion. Why Jehovah's Witnesses are the world's scrappiest, most dedicated sales force -- and what you can learn from them. Rejection hurts, and 41-year-old Chris Collier has had more than his share of it. Driving around in his late-model Jeep Grand Cherokee, he could be a pharmaceutical sales rep on his way to a doctor’s office, or a financial planner about to hawk an annuity to a client. But Collier’s sales job is a bit more challenging than that. He sees people wince when he shows up on their front stoop. He has doors slammed in his face over and over again, and he gets yelled at on occasion. He’s even had to make a run for the safe confines of his SUV once or twice, an aggressive dog hot on his trail, nipping at his ankles. No matter. Collier believes in what he sells, and so he perseveres, unfazed by encounters that end with snarled exhortations to get the hell off of his prospect’s property. Turning the other cheek is second nature to him now. He’ll dust himself off, pick himself up, and get back into the business of selling the Lord to a frequently hostile audience.
Today, Collier--bald, African American, gray suit, blue-and-yellow tie evangelizes in a working-class section of Boston. After hitting four homes where nobody answers, a woman in a white tank top opens the door at residence number five. Collier greets her politely. “We’re stopping by today to talk with our neighbors about the Bible,” he says, and starts discussing how difficult life can be, opening the Good Book to read a verse: Beloved ones, if this is how God loved us, then we are ourselves under obligation to love one another. “Do you think if people would love each other, they’d get along more peacefully?” Collier asks. The question could invite a big duh, but Collier’s sales prospect nods intently. He is heartened, smiles his broad, mustachioed smile, and tells her he’ll come by again in a few weeks to talk some more. Then he heads for the next house.
Chris Collier is one of the 1.1 million Americans who belong to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the religion best known for door-to-door proselytizing. He is a “field-service overseer” for the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the Shawmut Congregation in Dorchester, Massachusetts, supervising 19 of the church’s “pioneers.” These pioneers--the congregation’s most active members--each spend 70 hours a month trying to convince strangers to join their faith. “They’re fantastically motivated,” says Michael McKenzie, an associate professor of philosophy and religion at Keuka College in upstate New York and the author of Understanding the Faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Imagine you’re selling a product and your sales force doesn’t get paid, but instead it volunteers millions, billions of hours a year worldwide. It’s a marketer’s dream.”
But the Witnesses possess more than supreme dedication. Their finely honed sales craft carries lessons for anyone looking to seal a deal.
LESSON ONE
PLAN YOUR ATTACK--AND LEAVE A PAPER TRAIL
If you’ve ever observed Witnesses wandering from block to block, you’d think they’re no more organized than a Girl Scouts troop pushing Thin Mints. You’d be wrong. As Collier and his wife Susan begin an afternoon’s work, they consult a laminated map showing Territory No. 39--three blocks of well-maintained homes in this Boston neighborhood. The map shows that this area was visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses the previous December, May, and August (the group tries to cover most neighborhoods four times a year). The Witnesses have proprietary maps like this for just about every neighborhood in the country. Their records contain details that census takers wouldn’t dream of noting and that marketers wouldn’t know how to compile unless they wore out lots of shoe leather themselves. The Witnesses track homes where residents work the late shift, so the pioneers don’t wake them up by visiting too early. On their maps, they mark the homes where residents seemed receptive during previous visits, as well as those where people reacted so negatively that the Witnesses should avoid calling on them in the future. Although the federal government only recently instituted a Do Not Call registry, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have kept one of their own for years.
As the Colliers progress down the block, they fill in a “House-to-House Record” card, noting the gender, age, and name of everyone who answers the door. The goal is to turn today’s “cold call” into tomorrow’s “warm call”: “Hi, Jason, we spoke a few months ago about the Bible and your search for a new job. Has God helped you with that?”
Back at Kingdom Hall, the Witnesses’ house of worship, each pioneer fills out monthly field service reports, detailing how many brochures they distributed, how many hours they spent visiting homes, and how many repeat visits they made to people who seemed interested.
Good record-keeping is central to the Jehovah’s Witnesses goals--and it’s how the group charts its progress. At the group’s world headquarters in Brooklyn, statisticians can tell you its U.S. members spent exactly 184,842,031 hours preaching in 2002, and that they conducted 463,249 Bible studies. As a supervisor, Collier uses the documents the same way a retail manager uses a daily sales report. “I might notice that [one pioneer] is putting out a lot of literature, but making very few return visits,” Collier says. “That signals to me that they need some help learning how to go back and cultivate the interest they’ve created.”
LESSON TWO
ADAPT TO YOUR MARKET
Today, so many women in the U.S. work that the Witnesses have shifted house calls to evenings and weekends. And they adapt in other ways, too. In Collier’s territory of Dorchester, the population used to be predominantly Irish-American. Today it’s nearly 40 percent Vietnamese. So the Colliers now have five years of Vietnamese lessons under their belts. They carry a Vietnamese Bible, and their promotional literature is split evenly between English and other languages, Vietnamese among them (the Brooklyn headquarters has translations available in 44 languages). “You have to vary your approach to fit the community,” Collier says.
For instance, preaching in Boston requires a different approach from spreading the word in the Bible Belt, where more people already belong to a church. Think of it in terms of marketing a health club: Is it easier to get a person who doesn’t belong to one to sign up, or to convince someone who’s a member of Bally that they’d be better off joining Gold’s Gym instead? The first group requires a simpler pitch--its members may not know what free weights or spinning are--while the second requires a more sophisticated presentation based on the relative benefits of one gym versus another. When it comes to marketing religion, both types of assignments are challenging, but the Witnesses see more potential growth among people who don’t already belong to a church. That means this neighborhood is fertile ground.
LESSON THREE
ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE
Every religion contains a few rules that might make a person hesitate before signing up. But the Witnesses are an unusually demanding bunch. Devotees abstain from tobacco and excessive use of alcohol. They attend church services up to five times a week. And the religion forbids blood transfusions, a prohibition that can cost followers their lives.
Another bummer: The End is near. Since the religion’s founding, Jehovah’s Witnesses have believed the world is headed for the kind of fiery cataclysm described in the Book of Revelation. Periodically, the group has predicted exactly when this would happen. First 1914 was the Year of Doom; later it became 1975. When those dates passed without mankind’s destruction (though 1914 came close enough), some followers became disillusioned and left the church. Today the group remains a bit vague about when the day of reckoning will happen. But make no mistake: Among the Witnesses, Armageddon is an incipient reality, not just a Bruce Willis movie.
As they go door to door, however, Witnesses downplay the hard-to-swallow aspects of their beliefs. There is no talk of fire or brimstone. During many exchanges they don’t even identify themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses. “We’re visiting our neighbors today to talk about how difficult the world is right now, and how the Bible might help,” they often say. They quickly segue into talk of terrorism, SARS, unemployment, or the latest weather anomaly, and point to it as evidence of society’s deterioration. Then they pull out the Bible to read a verse aloud.
Skirting past the unattractive elements of a product is a classic marketing technique. The folks peddling Kia cars emphasize the low price and avoid mentioning the car’s history of questionable quality, or the fact that valets will laugh at you for driving one. Likewise, if someone asks Collier about the Witnesses’ apocalyptic beliefs, he casts them in the best possible light. “We don’t believe the Earth will be blown up or anything,” he says. Rather, Witnesses see a coming battle in which God will winnow out the faithful from the nonbelievers. As long as you’ve repented, what’s so scary about that? “It’s a positive message,” says Susan. She sees the Witnesses’ overall communication strategy as comparable to the advertising tagline recently adopted by Home Depot: “You Can Do It. We Can Help.”
LESSON FOUR
TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER
Until a few years ago, conversations with Witnesses often felt like debates or courtroom cross-examinations. “They had an adversarial relationship with the world,” says McKenzie, the professor and author. “You were either for Jesus or against him, and everything was very black and white.” But lately the Witnesses’ style has become slightly more low-key. They’re less likely to want to spend an hour on your doorstep during a first encounter. “Now they’re focusing more on the personal touch, on gaining converts by building relationships,” McKenzie says. “That’s where the higher success is.”
To spend time with Collier is to watch this soft-sell approach in action. When a person seems willing to talk, he often bids them farewell of his own accord in less than three minutes. “I try to be concise,” he says. On a second visit, perhaps he’ll try to talk for five minutes, and on a third visit stretch it to 15. Eventually he’ll hope to get the person to commit to a weekly Bible study, and then to visiting Kingdom Hall.
It’s a shift in strategy that founder Jacques Werth of High Probability Selling, a sales consultancy, says should work to their benefit. In his experience, the Witnesses have been walking illustrations of ineffective sales techniques: “They were trying to convert everybody who can fog a mirror, whether they’re interested or not, and they alienated most of the population.” Werth says high-efficiency salespeople get right to the point, gauge a prospect’s interest, and move on if he or she is not a likely buyer. “When you’re relatively brief and give them a chance to say yes or no, [then you can] just terminate the conversation courteously but quickly, and let them know that’s okay. And when you don’t put pressure on people, they’ll talk to you again. You leave the door open for the next offer.”
Unlike a traditional salesman, the pioneers have no quotas to meet, and other than being awarded an enviable afterlife, they earn no commission for their work. Over time, they say, the approach works: Last year the 120-member Shawmut congregation gained 10 new Witnesses thanks to their door-to-door efforts. But worldwide, some critics suggest the group’s marketing efforts are losing steam. Anne Sanderson, a former Witness and author of the expose Fearless Love: Understanding Today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, has analyzed the group’s statistics and says today’s Witnesses must work much harder to find a single convert than they did in years past. “Just by the law of averages, if you do enough door knocking, you’ll come across people who will be responsive,” she says. But she says finding converts remains especially critical for the Witnesses, because they suffer a higher turnover than other religions. “They’re hemorrhaging very badly,” Sanderson says. (The group’s spokesman disagrees, saying U.S. membership has grown 2 percent annually for the last decade.)
For his part, Collier says he’s not bothered when someone refuses to hear his message. “Jesus said, ‘Wherever anyone does not take you in or listen to your words, on going out of that house or that city, shake the dust off your feet.’” Rather, like a company that tries to profit from lifelong relationships with customers, Collier believes success has to build, that it comes over time. “You don’t drop a seed and, boom, instantly create a Christian. You have to go back and cultivate it,” he says. “The person doesn’t know you enough to reject you--what they’re rejecting is the product or service you’re offering, and we think they’re only rejecting us today. Circumstances change, and someone may suddenly realize they have a need for spirituality.”
When that need arises, rest assured: The Witnesses will soon be making their way to your door.
_____ sKally