The Correct Answer to the “Sell Me This Pen” Sales Test

I have a love-hate relationship with the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s a highly entertaining movie that inadvertently glorifies a con man and the art of dirty selling.

This post isn’t about that, though. Instead, I want to talk about the famous scene at the end of the movie where Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, asks a person from an audience to “sell me this pen.”

He doesn’t like the first answer, so he moves on to the next person.

In reality, it’s a trick question. If anyone replies with an immediate sales point, they fail.

The heart of the question lies in what comes before the direct selling, finding out more about the person who they’re selling it to.

Why People Get This Wrong

Most people (myself included when I first started researching this) resort immediately to assuming they know enough about the person they’re selling to and they jump directly into pushing the features of the pen.

• Beautiful design
• Smooth writing
• Light weight but sturdy
• That sort of thing….

It’s easy to assume that everyone sees these features in the same way that we do. Someone who…