In this solo talk recorded at Rubaga Cathedral in Kampala, Zach Selch draws a parallel between religious missionary work and the practice of "missionary selling" – introducing a completely new solution to a market and converting customers much like converts to a faith. He explains that success requires deep personal belief in the product, resilience against skepticism, and a strategic focus on early adopters who become reference sites and eventually key opinion leaders. Selch illustrates the process using his experience selling healthcare products internationally, emphasizing the steps of identifying quick converts, building reference sites, and leveraging opinion leaders to scale market adoption. He concludes with a call to action for companies ready to expand their international sales, offering his mentorship services.
Chapters
Hi. Hi. I'm in Rubaga Cathedral in Kampala, Uganda. It's the primary Catholic cathedral in the country. This is an overwhelmingly Christian country, divided up pretty much equally between Catholics and Anglicans. But the missionary work here did a fantastic job, and in about 2 generations, virtually everybody left their traditional religions and went to Christianity. Missionary work is very, very difficult and more difficult sometimes than we imagine, more dangerous sometimes than we imagine. And it goes the same thing for missionary selling. Most of my 30-year career has been in missionary selling. Aside from— I can only think of one product I've ever sold that I wouldn't count as missionary selling, where I'm essentially taking a product that is a Totally new way of solving a problem and bringing it to the market and trying to convert the market. And I've done really, really well with that. I enjoy it. It's intellectually stimulating. It's financially gratifying. It works pretty well. But it's not an easy way to make a living missionary selling. What sort of characterizes missionary work? You're going in, you have to have a huge amount of faith because everybody is going to be disagreeing with you. Everybody's going to be saying, well, we solve this problem, we face our God in a different way. We solve this problem in a different way. Why is your way better? And you have to have deep ingrained, deep internalized belief and faith that your product is going to work. So if you're not really— if you don't really believe in your product, if you don't believe in your solution, that might not work for you. You also are going to be facing a lot of challenges. People are going to challenge you. It's going to be difficult. You're going to be— people are going to be saying, well, you know, I've been doing it this way for so long. This is the way that's most commonly used. This is the way that's most commonly documented. Why should anybody trust you? Why should anybody try the way that you're talking about? And you have to show them. You have to show them logical and emotional pathways To help convince them that they can solve their problem with this new solution that you're talking about that's very different from what they've done before. There'll be, as with missionary work, tests. There'll be challenges. Like I said, all these things are going to come in front of you with missionary work. On the other hand, when you can prove it, this is going to be very, very gratifying and very, very Lucrative, possibly, in the end. One element of missionary work is really trying to find one or two first people. And when you take a look at how missionaries work, they really do that. They go out and they find one or two people who they believe are going to be quick converts, who they believe maybe are going to be early adopters. And when you find one or two early adopters, that helps you then lead to a key opinion leader. Okay, and think about— I sell mostly healthcare products, so typically what I'm looking for is an early adopter. If I can find an early adopter, and then I can take that early adopter, I can get a reference site. I can take that reference site, I can get another reference site. Then I can build on that to find a key opinion leader, and I can use that key opinion leader then to influence the rest of the market. And that's typically going to be my pathway. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
