By: Paul Freiberger

If you’re in sales, there’s one question you must be able to answer in a job interview: Sell me this pen.

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It may happen today or tomorrow, or it may come up further down the road, but it pays to be ready for it. It’s also a question that can teach you something new about sales or remind you of some core sales principles that are sometimes neglected.

The question gained fame recently when it appeared in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese’s fact-based 2013 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort.

Belfort got rich running a stock brokerage, Stratton Oakmont, that was a boiler room operation specializing in penny stocks and, not so incidentally, defrauding its customers of some $200 million. After it all came crashing down, he served 22 months in federal prison.

In the movie, DiCaprio is at a deli with a group of friends and potential recruits to his new brokerage business, talking about how everyone wants to get rich and about capitalizing on people’s natural greed. As part of that conversation, he asks the pen question in response to someone who says he can sell anything. When that person won’t give a sales pitch for the pen, DiCaprio turns to “my boy,” someone who allegedly can sell anything. That person takes the pen and asks DiCaprio to sign his name. Since DiCaprio now has no pen, the sale is made.

The deal closed, according to the scene, because of supply and demand, or, in DiCaprio’s words, by “creating urgency.”

Somehow, the movie presents one or both of these ideas as valid foundations for the sale, but the movie gets this very wrong. Interestingly enough, it gets it wrong without even touching on a common mistake novice salespeople make in similar situations.

In a nutshell, that mistake consists of excessive attention to the thing being sold. It’s the failure to see that the pen is beside the point.

When you’re asked to sell a pen, it’s all too easy to focus on that pen. You might be tempted to talk about its many features. It works in outer space. It writes under water. It molds itself to your hand like a living thing. It’s a beautiful color blue, the like of which has never graced a pen before.

It’s a natural mistake. There’s the pen. The pen is for sale. This must be about the pen.

When interviewed by CNN after his downfall, Belfort called the question “a trap,” and, whatever his moral failings, he hit the nail on the head with that characterization. When you talk about the pen, you’ve fallen into the trap.

What’s the alternative? Start with the customer. In a process known as “qualifying,” the real starting point of any sales pitch is the act of getting to know something about your buyer. It’s all about asking questions, looking for insights into what the customer is looking for.

The Globe and Mail got Belfort’s own answer to the question. “Before I’m even going to sell a pen to anybody, I need to know about the person, I want to know what their needs are, what kind of pens do they use,” he said. Armed with that information, a good salesperson can tailor the approach to the customer’s needs. Without that information, all the features in the world won’t help you make the sale.

Novice salespeople sell the features: “This pen writes upside down.” With a little more experience, they sell the benefits: “This pen’s always there when you need to jot down a note.” The real pros know that selling is about identifying customer needs first. Only then can you make the case that what you’re selling meets those needs.

Some items seem to take more easily to the inquisitive approach. If your house-buying customer has four children, three dogs and two cats, you won’t show that customer many studio apartments. You’d avoid that mistake because the importance of knowing your customer is so clear when you’re selling a house.

The point, though, is that it should always be clear, and that the qualifying approach is right regardless of what’s for sale. Start with the customer, his needs, his wants and his situation. Then, and only then, sell the pen.

What do you think? Is this something you can benefit from or do you have a few tricks up your sleeve that are just as powerful? Make your voice heard by leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to hit the share button if you know others who will find this post useful.

I.C. Collins ~ Author, Educator, Trainer and President: Has One Simple Goal: Improve a Million Automotive Sales Consultants Lives with our ebook "How to Succeed in the Automotive Sales Industry"

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