When I was in high school, my thoughts were; to graduate, get a really good job and make lots of money and then live happily ever after. So, you can imagine what ran through my mind when I saw my ideal job being advertised in the paper. The ad read something like this:
I need one young man who is a self-starter, who has visions of making a lot of money and someone who wants to be his own boss. Call . . . . .
They were talking about me! I went down as fast as I could to secure my job. When I got there, I met a secretary that looked like she just came out of a Roger Rabbit cartoon, and after about a two-minute interview, she called her boss out to meet me. She told him that they had just found their man. Boy! I was so excited. With the snap of a finger, I had just been hired at what they said was a very prestigious company, and I was going to make lots of money because they said I had what it took.
After a one-day training seminar, I went out to sell my first vacuum cleaner door to door. I will never forget the first door I knocked on. This older lady came to the door. She must have been all of 28 to 30 years old. When she answered, I smiled and held a brush up in front of me and said, You don’t want to buy a vacuum cleaner today, do you, ma’am? She said, ""No" and shut the door.
Where did I go wrong? I had the energy and the ambition. I had the smile and just tons of charm. So, why did she shut the door? I had failed to make a sale for several reasons. I did not know my product very well, I did not know how to sell it very well, and my focus was on all the wrong reasons to sell in the first place.
There is an old saying among salespeople: Know what you are selling and be able to tell people why they need it. If I had just had that information before that first door, I might have made some money in that job. But, after selling one vacuum cleaner to my parents, the job soon lost its luster and I quit to become a janitor at a car lot where I made a whopping 52 cents an hour! And, as they say, the rest is history.
That story is true, and it reminds me so much of how we normal everyday Christian are when it comes time to evangelize. All churches tell us that we must evangelize, but how many of them explain anything about it or how to do it?