Have you ever seen a family where the kids all turned out great and there were more than two kids? I was talking to another crazed papist recently and she said people ask her parents all the time why all three of their kids kept the faith. I think I've got the answer.
In pondering how to sell Catholicism or at least how to keep the young customers we've got, it's occurred to me that each person is looking for something unique to them. When you make a sale to a customer, you are solving a problem for them. Your product fills a need. To figure out how you can make that happen, you need to spend time listening to them and trying to see the world through their eyes.
I've asked a couple of Catholics lately why they believe and the answers I've gotten are quiet varied. One said she believed in heaven and hell and wanted to go to one and avoid the other. Wife kitteh said she was doing what Jesus asked of her. For me, Catholicism is the textbook of life. I feel like it explains everything and with it I can relax and just use it as a reference book as I live. It works and I love the security of that.
There is no way to use a single approach to sell all three of those viewpoints. Let's use an analogy to explain this.
Imagine that you're a shoe salesman, but all you sell are work boots. If a fashionable young lady comes in and wants something strappy and elegant to wear with a summer dress, you could offer her a work boot or you could offer her a different work boot. When she turns you down and leaves the store, you commiserate with your fellow salesmen and talk about the problems with kids these days and all those newfangled sandals they want.
Now imagine that you get three customers in a row who are going to visit the shipyard at Pascagoula. They need something to keep their feet safe. You sell them work boots and everyone is happy. Hurrah for work boots! Now those are some young people with their heads on straight. It sure is nice to meet some of the good ones for a change.
The family where everyone turned out great? Well, the customer-kids just happened to be looking for what the salesmen-parents were naturally selling. They hit the jackpot three times in a row, probably by sheer chance.
So how do you handle it when your kids won't buy what you're selling? Well, after you consume some Zig Ziglar and some Brian Tracy on selling, you spend time asking the kids what it is they want out of life. What is it that they're looking for in their future? Do they want love, money, security, adventure, freedom or what? If you know that, you might be able to make the sale.
If you yell at them that they need to buy work boots because grandpa and grandma bought them, it might not work.
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| Now you listen to me, young lady. I'm willing to compromise, but I can only go so far! |
1 comment:
I like your shoe analogy[1], and would stretch it a bit to include sizing, not just styling. If the shoe store only sells sizes 8-11 in C/D width, it will be able to fit a lot of people, maybe even the majority. But I am never going to buy shoes there, because I wear size 12 EEEE. The styling doesn't matter, or the quality, or the intended application. If they don't fit, they're no good to me and I'm not buying.
I went for about 40 years without ever having shoes that fit properly, because no shoe stores I had access to sold anything wider than D and mostly topped out at size 12. To get them wide enough, I had to go up to a size bigger than what I actually needed, and so they fit badly in other ways and were extremely uncomfortable. Once my feet stopped growing, I had to wear size 13, which on top of everything else also had poor availability. The poorly-fitting shoes blew out the sides or broke the soles in a short time because my feet pressed on them oddly and flexed the sole in the wrong places, so I was chewing through shoes at a ridiculous clip.
For many, many years everyone either told me, "oh, you just need to keep trying on shoes until you find a pair that fits" (of which there were none available in the pre-internet days) or "you just need to tough it out and suffer with bad shoes". Both of which are alarmingly close to what people now tell me in regard to religion.
(Currently, I buy my shoes from Hitchcock Shoes at wideshoes.com, because they are not a typical shoe store. Their shoes go all the way up to EEEEEEEE width, and they have what I need. As an interested added bonus, since they aren't competing with cheap mass-produced shoes at those sizes, their shoes can be priced at a level where they can justify very good quality construction. And the majority of them are made in the US and Canada as a result.)
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