Mormon Mission Sales Training

Craig and Shaan discuss how early sales jobs that require facing constant rejection shape successful people.

Craig shares that at a mastermind event where everyone paid $250 to attend, he asked how many people had some sort of relentless sales job in their youth - like making 200 phone calls a day or knocking on doors. Almost everyone in the room raised their hand.

Shaan notes that Mormon missionaries develop exceptional resilience:

"Mormon missionaries spend two years in complete solitude, isolation, not talking to their family, selling Jesus to whoever. You're selling religion to people who didn't ask for it necessarily. You're knocking on doors, facing tons of rejection, and day after day you carried on. That is such a formative experience."

They discuss how this pattern appears in successful people - from door-to-door textbook salespeople to credit card processing telemarketers. Craig mentions that in telemarketing, "It's about 200 calls. A shitty day is one sale, five sales is an amazing day."

Shaan shares his uncle's psychological trick for handling rejection when selling textbooks door-to-door: "I just did the math and realized I have to knock on a hundred doors to get two sales. So I don't just count the revenue from the two yeses - I assign a price to every no. A no is worth $50 for me. Every time I collect a no, that was $50."

This mental framework helped him see rejections as progress toward the inevitable yes, a technique Shaan later applied to fundraising.