What I learnt about sales from the angry subway preacher | Hacker News Reader

What I learnt about sales from the angry subway preacher

aarjav.wordpress.com

11 pointsajju10 comments

I believe in the utility of my product more than he believes in his.

I can almost guarantee you this is false. His beliefs have driven him to stand on the street corner every day and yell at strangers. Your beliefs have you picking up the phone here and there or sending a few emails. Not even remotely similar in terms of evidence of underlying belief in what you have to offer.

It's true, here's a more accurate statement: In my opinion, hard evidence of the utility of my product outweighs hard evidence, if any, of the utility of (at least) his brand of religion.

As to the fact that his belief drives him to stand on the street corner and yell at strangers, that is what I am admiring. I can't comment to his motivations, but I didn't mean to cast aspersions on his enthusiasm with that sentence. Quite the contrary, in fact.

That depends on why he is out in the street yelling. If really is as angry as he sounds, it's probably not his faith per se that is prompting him to yell at strangers but his own disillusionment with either his faith or society at large. In this case, his beliefs merely give him cause to vent. I've known people like this.

Then again, maybe he's not really angry and the whole 'fire an brimstone' thing is just his shtick.

You're probably right, but everything is relative. Maybe he's deathly afraid of phones. Maybe the other guy feels very at home yelling at strangers.

Que Dr. Jules Hilbert "if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes."

I am not deathly afraid of phones, in fact I have grown sort of fond of the challenge of calling of stranger and convincing them about something I believe in. In that sense at least, I am not very different from the preacher. (Assuming of course that he likes what he does. Didn't seem that way from his demeanor :))

A funny experiment in street preaching and the crowd's reaction:

http://kcimprov.com/?p=mission02

Of course the question I want to know his how many sales does the angry subway preacher make. More then one every few months like this guy?

If you're talking about public conversions, very few, I would guess.

Most preachers I have heard speak on the subject like to say that if you witness to people and the number of conversions you see in your lifetime is > 0, then you can call it a success, and if the number of conversions = 0, then you can at least be confident that it had some impact according to a verse in Isaiah 55:11 that says "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Given that, from the street preacher's perspective, his success-rate is 100%.

As far as actual conversions, also called a Profession of Faith, I would guess that the quality of the pitch has a lot to do with the final results. Here's an example of a good pitch (American street preaching in Peru, with subtitles):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYLUpHQaiE

I suspect that this is true, although in my view religious conversion is not very different from changing your clothes. Neither, in and of itself, affects how good of a person you are.

That's the point. He won't even know if or how many sales he makes. Yet, he perseveres. Don't like what he's selling but props to his enthusiasm.

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