Catholic Answers As A Sales Tool

At work, our Intranet is under constant attack. No, not by hackers, viruses or denial-of-service ping blizzards, but by heretics. People who cling to the false worship of the Microsoft file system and Microsoft Office in general*. "There is no god but Sharepoint," they cry, "and Powerpoint is its prophet!" They then go on to mock our blogs, wiki and social networking tools as creations of silliness and stupidity.

Ignorant heretics.

"Hellfire and damnation await you if you use anything other than Sharepoint!"

We've heard all of the objections dozens of times. Blogging is a waste of time, I don't have time to read the blogs, blogs are nothing more than ranting, social networking is just egotism, wikis can't be trusted, I was never loved as a child and my tremendous insecurities lead me to lash out at anyone who seems to be successful and having fun.

OK, that last one is just some psychoanalysis on our part, but we're pretty sure it gets to the root of the problem.

I was in church about 30 years ago, probably attending daily Mass for Lent or something like that, when I came across a copy of Catholic Answers. I scooped it up, found where to get the rest and ended up reading a bunch of them. Catholic Answers responds to all of the most common objections about the Catholic faith and the Church itself. In that model lies our means of overcoming the Sharepoint throwbacks.

Catholic Answers gathers up all of the objections, doubts and misinformation and then responds to each in turn. It's a salesman's best friend. Your prospect comes up with an argument against your product and you've got a ready response. Catholic Answers, as you'll see from the link above, is now run using Web 2.0 tools. Questions are submitted, answers are prepared and published.

Why not do the same thing to respond to the Sharepoint fanatics?

After you've been selling a product for a while, it's pretty unusual to be surprised by a question or objection. In fact, that's true in most human endeavors. After a dozen or so interviews with customers, clients or users, you've picked up a good percentage of all of the objections you'll ever hear. As a salesman, it's your job to have ready responses to those objections.

Up to now, we've done a good job selling to the open-minded in our workforce, but we tend to blow off the Sharepoint maniacs as too stupid to convert. That's turning out to have been a bad choice. Most of the Sharepoint nuts are in their 50s and 60s, the prime ages for positions of leadership. Not surprisingly, that's the cause of our real problems right now.

I don't know how other sales teams do it, but we're going to start using our Web 2.0 tools to gather up all of our opponents' objections and prepare a ready list of responses, a la Catholic Answers. Instead of simply raging at the Sharepoint heretics, we'll use the mighty strength of our holy collaboration tools to convert them to the cause of righteousness and blogosity.

Blog for joy to the LORD, all the earth, burst into jubilant prose with embedded videos. (Psalms 98:4).

* - MS Office and Sharepoint have a place in the world, just not the central place that Microsoft tells you.