Give him the pen, then sell his mailing address to a paper manufacture.
Then cap his refills at 1 per 3 months, but for a low monthly subscription offer to give him all the ink he wants, and all the new pen models as they rollout.
Hard selling of ubiquitous consumables in highly competitive markets has no place in the SaaS world.
Unlimited ink? How do I ask for a shipment- through a form or a human? What happens when I request to much ink or pens? Do you conveniently forget to place my order?
How hard is it to cancel? What does the price tiering look like? When you are acquired, will I still receive my shipments?
All of these are arguments for why the "subscription market" is absolutely bogus
Which is why every major operating system (except iOS) in the world is now free, has free upgrades and updates and if it wipes your system, well tough, that's in the EULA.
Cancel? You can't, you can only revert your account to the unpaid plan.
We also reserve the right to take our pens back whenever we want.
Now, we could setup a special "enterprise-level" plan for you, with onsite production, dedicated management, and pen and ink manufacturing which you'd own after you paid off the terms, but that'll be a bit pricey.
That's a terrible answer and to be honest, I don't particularly believe this actually happened.
I was once asked to sell a pen to an interviewer and the first thing I asked them about was their pen use. After that, I pointed to things on the pen and told them about the benefits of it and why it was a good choice. he stopped me and said he heard enough because I established need, and then translated real features of the product into benefits of the customer.
On top of all of that, it's titled "The Best .. I've Ever Seen" and it's his own anecdote. That's up there with Trump's "I have the best brain." crap. Terrible.
What? First of all, ignoring the semantic argument of whether saying you've "seen" your own anecdote is proper; if you refer to yourself as the best ever for anything you better be world champion class at that thing or you're either a liar or really ignorant.
Based on the anecdote, the author one of the last two.
The original article is full of overly specific details that are typical of fabricated stories; he's not just talking to a hiring manager, he's talking to the CEO. The CEO wasn't just happy with his answer, he had to pick his jaw up off the floor, etc.
The commenter you're responding to gave a very typical template of how you're supposed to respond to the question (and how anyone who has any aptitude for sales would.) It's nothing special, and that's the point.
His account talks about his overly verbose question and answer session and a bit of a click-baity "when they heard his response, they were floored!" ending.
Mine was a bit of I ascertained their need, talked up some of the benefits and the interviewer was like, "cool, you passed, we'll keep speaking". It wasn't an epic revelation that floored people. It was just, "okay, you have some sales skills, let's keep going."
He also doesn't say how to react if the person does remember what pen they used. I have a couple of good pens on my desk that I use all the time for everything, that trick wouldn't really work with me. You better hope the CEO likes using disposable pens.
Elon Musk sells luxury cars to people who are aware of climate change and also love technology. He uses that money to build more and cheaper cars, moving towards mainstream, because existing car manufacturers didn't really move toward electric. Elon Musk solves a problem for his buyers. It's frustrating to see his name used in a sales pitch that is driven by a "Vitamins" approach rather than a "Painkiller" approach. Fighting climate change isn't optional.
The premise of the question is that a pen is ubiquitous and used all the time by everybody. You can trust that the interviewee already understands exactly what a pen is and does (as opposed to the company's niche Foo Widget -- in this way it's similar to the classic datastructure/algorithm coding question: no, you'd never actually be solving this exact problem in the job, but it's a level playing ground to see if you can display some qualities we expect to be correlated with things you need to do in the job). If that premise fails, you (as an interviewer) need to come up with another object that does meet the criteria (say, an iPhone).
But if the interviewer is trying to have an interviewee sell them a product they up front know they're not even mildly interested in buying (as is probably the case for most of the HN crowd, we'd probably never actually buy a pen - digital for almost everything, free pens from wherever for whatever might need writing), they're either cynically hiring for a boiler room operation or doing it wrong.
That's the point of the question, isn't it. Finding an opening with the potential buyer before even working on the product. If the buyer does not care about the pen, you will try selling him how cheap, light and not leaking the pen is, so he can buy a box of ten, leave one in each of his jacket and always have a pen ready when he needs it.
In this exercise, you know nothing about the pen, so obviously it is not about the pen - you will not sell the pen if you focus on the characteristic of the pen, you need to find a need for a pen within the interviewer which is the 101 of a sales position. Like those programming questions - of course there are better way to find prime numbers or whatever you need to code - you are not here to discuss the math stuff, you are here to show you can write a few lines of code with a structure, solve a problem, ask the right question, ...
1. store info of the pen not being memorable (can use that later as per the transcript)
2. Ask for what typical activities they use a pen for. Then try and describe back to them why the pen is important based on those events. If they respond 'I don't really use a pen much'....well that might be a little harder :)
Overall an interesting transcript. I haven't studied sales much so not sure about the theory behind it all but the example seems very good. Though I'm sure there's other ways to succeed at the task without necessarily following the OP's principles exactly.
Then you make a different pitch. What counts is that you display the traits that can make you successful in sales, not that you emit a canned speech - it's not about following a script, but about improv.
Which I suck at, for the most part, and have never put much effort into getting better - and that's why I'm not in sales. But you don't need to be good at something to understand in general terms how it works.
This is a special pen, and you just carry it around with you at Walmart? I shudder to think what would happen if you were to drop it -- that happens all the time, people drop pens and stuff, and they practically never get it back! See, this is the BIC Premier. It's a nice, classy pen, it writes smoothly with no clumps or leak -- and it's $14.95 for a box of ten, so you can just have a few in your pocket, in your bag, in your glove compartment, always a nice, good pen to hand, and you can leave your anniversary pen in the place of honour on your office desk where you can use it to sign the all-important contracts that befits a pen of that stature.
I was kind of hoping for a response where they talked the pen up a bit, gave the interviewer the pen, then used the gained social capital to get the interviewer to listen to their real pitch (ie. why you should hire me.)
This is a lovely anecdote, but it's largely irrelevant to modern sales. There's no margin in consumer goods to sell directly any more. The cost of each sale would be too high[1]. If it was an enterprise product the person buying only really cares whether it works better than the competitor product and how much it costs, so a personal approach is a waste of time (beyond getting the customer to talk to you in the first place).
[1] Every sale would end with "What a brilliant pen. You've made it sound incredible. But I won't buy it right now; I'll check the price on Amazon when I get home."
The fundamentals of sales are the same whether you're selling pens or $10m enterprise widgets -- you need to understand the customer and the product and how to fit the two together. It also applies in marketing, a closely related field -- you have to understand the needs of abstract groups of customers, and how pitch your product to those groups.
The pen is just a simple object to arrange a quick role play around.
When they ask this question, what kind of pen is it? The author's pitch compares against a cheap Bic (which I imagine is something like this [1]), so I assume it is usually something fancier and/or more expensive, but are we talking a Uni-ball micro roller [2] level of fancier, or a Montblanc Meisterstück Moon Pearl LeGrand Rollerball [3] level of fancier?
PS: so, what pens do other HN readers use? I used to use the Uni-ball micro roller pens, but I've since switched to the Pilot G2 gel roller with the ultra fine (0.38mm) tip. I switched for the ultra fine tip, which makes superscripts and subscripts easier. There are Uni-balls with ultra fine tips, but last time I bought a few boxes of pens they were harder to find.
For pencils, I use a Uni-ball Kuro Toga [4]. It has a clever mechanism that slightly rotates the lead every time you put tip to paper, so that it wears evenly from all sides, keeping the look and feel uniform throughout your writing. Here's a video showing how it works [5].
Compared to kids these days, I used to write a lot in high school and college and the only memorable pen in terms of comfort, color and thickness that stood out was the Zebra. I write much less now and mostly use it for quick notes and back of envelope schematics.
My #2 choice would be a Parker Jotter ballpoint, which is quite similar in form and weight.
I absolutely hate gelpoints and any other sort of gel pens.
Seriously? All he managed to sell was the aesthetics feel. It's like selling email marketing software solely for the design. How about selling a pen by pitching the frustrations
it solves? Pens get lost. Pens stop working randomly. Pens finish without much of a warning. If you're using it after a while, you have to rummage for a paper to scribble before you use it.
It's hard to recall any pen which solves any of these. So, in the end, selling a pen becomes a marketing problem, not a sales problem.
I have a clear fountain pen. It solves most of the issues. It can still get lost, but because it's more expensive than a disposable I'm more careful with it. If it stops working it's probably clogged, the nib is easy enough to wipe off to clear the clog. If it's really bad an alcohol swab might be needed. It's clear, I can see the ink level. The "scribble before use" thing is because ink on the ball dries out. Not so much an issue when there's no ball.
And of course there's the classic issue of people stealing your pen, but most people don't know the technique to write with a fountain pen so it rarely gets borrowed.
This is a limp answer, he seems to be selling another pen, not the one in his hands. After all, if it's really important what pen you use to sign contracts, why would the one on the desk suffice? Why not get a beautiful bimetal nib fountain pen with navy ink?
That's what I mean, he starts by saying that it matters what type of pen is used, which is why I say "why not", as in, if you're going to tell me I need an important person's pen, why stop at the pen I already have?
Sales, then and now, 10-minutes exercise comparing two links. How we approach sales in innovation and startups has changed a lot recently, but not for everyone. Enter the "sell me this pen" as seen in "Wolf of Wallstreet". It's a sales classic. You inspire desire in your customer in your sales pitch, and quickly he wants to buy, at any price. I frequently talk to startups about sales, but coming from a product management perspective.
The closest thing to selling in strategic product management is "solution selling". As the name suggests, it's about identifying a problem the customer actually has, then understanding how big the problem is. So when talking to the sales people at startups, we talk about pricing, job-to-be-done, and unmet needs of the customers. What kind of product do you have, in the eyes of your customers? Is it a nice thing to have once the customer learns about its existence, a "Vitamin"? Or is it something the customer really needs, a solution to an existing problem, something the customer already needed before he learned that there is a solution to the problem, is it a "Painkiller"?
If your product is still a Vitamin, it will be hard to sell, you will see a lot customer churn, customers quitting soon, instead of staying for the long run, and no recommending of your product to other people in the industry. To transform your product from a Vitamin to a Painkiller, you need to understand your customer's pain point. That's very close to S-P-I, "situation", "problem", "implication" in the SPIN-selling system that we use in solution selling.
Do this little test: Read a very short description about Vitamin vs Painkiller, and then read through a sales pitch (which is described as "the best" by its author) and note which parts are addressing a need for a Painkiller, and which address the wish for a Vitamin.
When you compare those two, you will see that the "sell me this pen" pitch is based on a Vitamin product. Most pens are Vitamin products to most customers, no matter how brilliant your sales pitch is. You can't use sales skills to fix a lack of product management.
The examples given for "vitamin" and "painkiller" are poor, or at lease not describing differences in products, but in marketing strategy. Also, the idea that "vitamins" are poor product is betrayed by the success of many, many madly successful "vitamin" products, not least including literal vitamins.
The product-load-feature that is described in the entrepreneur.com article as a "vitamin" mere seems poorly marketed. Keeping your e-business platform up-to-date with your products is very much something that can raise revenue or lower costs (or, if not, it's not actually a product at all, vitamin or not). On the other example, the healthcare payments solution, why would you not expect the provider of the existing invoicing solution to "just" enable some sort of upfront payment to lower bed debts, if this is really a problem?
(Also, dismissing business ideas on the basis that someone else would already be doing it if it's actually a problem seems to be a great way to never be successful in business)
If you haven't read Paul Graham's essay on startup ideas, and why they should address problems that really exit, I suggest: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Some product like Skype, Facebook, Dropbox spread just by word of mouth. They address pain people really feel (for some, you might need to dig deeper what it is). Other products need national TV commercials and still have a hard time to sell what they have. Big difference.
These were outlawed when, after being marketed as improving male libido, someone drank 1400 of these and died. But he did not die before getting a horribly disfigured jaw that actually fell out before the eyes of the doctor. He was buried in a lead lined coffin, after an agonizing death.
I must say I am a bit worried about "poly-unsaturated fats", which I must say I'd be amazed if they weren't bad for you (they result in a great many secondary chemicals, and if just one of those is dangerous, ...), but I doubt they'll make anyone's jaw fall off before slowly and painfully killing them.
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Give him the pen, then sell his mailing address to a paper manufacture.
Then cap his refills at 1 per 3 months, but for a low monthly subscription offer to give him all the ink he wants, and all the new pen models as they rollout.
Hard selling of ubiquitous consumables in highly competitive markets has no place in the SaaS world.