The Five Challenges of Being a Christian Sales Person
Dave Kahle
B2B sales guru & Christian business thought leader. I help sales teams sell better & nudge Christian businesses to bigger impact -- presented in 47 states & 11 countries, authored 13 books, & worked with 500+ companies.
For most of my adult life, I have been a salesperson.?I’ve sold a variety of things to a mixture of markets. As a college student, I worked during the summers as a route salesperson.?During the school year, I sold men’s suits in a clothing store. Later, I sold capital equipment, surgical instruments, and hospital supplies.?In between those major affiliations, I recruited salespeople, and sold franchises.
Since 1988, I have been a sales consultant and sales trainer.?I’ve worked with hundreds of companies, written ten books on sales, spoken at hundreds of conventions, and trained tens of thousands of salespeople.?Sales, in one way or another, has been how I have made my living for four decades.
For all but the first couple of those years, I have also been a Christian.?That combination of Christian and salesperson has presented both tremendous temptations as well as dramatic opportunities for growth and development.
In this article, I explore that dynamic in the hope that my reflections will be helpful to others facing the same challenges.?While I’m sure the same thing can be said of almost every profession (the challenge of being a Christian manager, or professional baseball player, or truck driver, etc.) I’m unequipped to comment on those professions.?My experience has been as a salesperson.
For years I’ve felt that the position of a salesperson offers great opportunities to be a light to a dark world – to lighten your tiny corner of the universe.?A salesperson, by virtue of the job, is in contact with a lot of people.?That is, after all, the heart of his job.?And each contact and every relationship offers an opportunity to shine just a little piece of God’s providence and love into that situation. By maintaining the perspective of a Christian servant, and tightly clutching an inviolate set of ethics, the Christian salesperson can add light to a set of relationships and transactions that often sorely lack it.
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