After a number of years on the finance side of a Fortune 100 company, I was offered the opportunity to get involved in sales.Sales…now that seems a lot more fun than crunching numbers.
In sales, you learn how to be approachable, how to identify the benefits and the value of the product or service you represent. In sales, you learn that at any given time, there are a number of other products and services that are competing for the attention of your potential clients. The objective in sales is making sure that you make the best of every opportunity to clearly identify the unique value proposition that your product or service offers. The really good sales approach is what the legendary “greatest salesman in the world”, Elmer Wheeler, called, “Selling the Sizzle”.
Churches could learn a lot from Elmer Wheeler. He defined ‘sizzle’ as the biggest selling point, the main reason why people would want to buy.
What is it that churches all too often try to sell? What occupies the best vantage point in the church lobby, the biggest announcement that is made on the stage? If you’ve been in more than a few churches you know that all too often, churches do a horrible job of selling the sizzle.
The Church is the personification of the Body of Christ. The Church has the unique opportunity to offer the hope of forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration. No other organization can offer what the Church has to offer. The Church is not as some have proposed, some get-rich-quick or heavenly multi level marketing opportunity. The true sizzle that an Elmer Wheeler would want the Church to identify and utilize in reaching the greatest number of people is life change.
New life in Jesus Christ is the compelling opportunity for young and old, rich and poor, single, separated, divorced and married. It is the most unique value proposition that any organization could possibly offer to anyone.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” —2 Corinthians 5:17
The objective for those of us that in the Church is to make the best of every opportunity to clearly identify the life changing proposition that only we, as the personification of the body of Christ, have to offer.
Sell the Sizzle!
