Young Mormons are taking the skills – and thick skin – they developed as missionaries and using them to become ace door-to-door salesmen, according to the NY Times.

Mormons are notorious for their work ethic. Utah got its nickname “the Beehive state,” after the industriousness of its Mormon settlers. A local joke in Salt Lake City has it that a statue of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young points not at the Temple, but at a bank.

“It’s missionary work turned into a business,” Cameron Treu, 30, who served his mission in Chile and was recruited into D2D (that is door-to-door in sales lingo) by another former missionary, tells the paper.

From the Times: Managers at Pinnacle Security, founded in 2001 by a student at Brigham Young University, the Mormon Church-owned school, say missionaries simply have the right stuff. Many speak foreign languages learned in the mission field. All have thick skins from dealing with the negative responses that a missionary armed with a Book of Mormon and a smile can receive.

Mormon men are expected to serve a two-year mission in their early 20s, and about two-thirds of Pinnacle Security’s 1,800 sales representatives this summer have been through the experience. Former missionaries work for other direct-sales companies, too, though Pinnacle seems to be in a class by itself: It has deployed them in 75 cities nationwide.

“They’re used to knocking on doors, and they’re used to rejection,” said Scott Warner, Pinnacle’s manager of the Chicago sales team.

Photo by NY Times.