An answer to the “Sell Me This Pen” interview challange(senatorclub.co) |
An answer to the “Sell Me This Pen” interview challange(senatorclub.co) |
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.
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
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.
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.
The script he gave isn't that spectacular, and, if this did actually happen, the CEO was probably impressed that he had rehearsed.
I assume this question is used like the fizz-buzz coding test, although perhaps the CEO didn't know this.
Obviously "the best (his) ever seen" would be "his own anecdote". How else could it be?
Both asked about recent pen use, both responded based on that?
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.
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."
An example of sales people having no issue with casually slipping in outright lies?
[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 pen is just a simple object to arrange a quick role play around.
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].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/BIC-Cristal-Stic-Medium-Point/dp/B000...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006IE8R/
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Montblanc-111694-Pearl-LeGrand-Roller...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/uni-ball-KuruToga-Mechanical-Pencil-0...
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.
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.
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.
You don't need a new pen, sorry for wasting your time.
http://www.akitaonrails.com/2017/06/01/conference-talks-inte...
This answer is not enough "out of the box".
> Why not get a beautiful bimetal nib fountain pen with navy ink?
This answer is too much "out of the box" for most CEO's.
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.
- Intro Vitamin vs Painkiller: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230736
- "Sell me this pen" sales pitch: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-answer-sell-me-pen-i-hav...
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.
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.
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.
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.
* Q: Do you remember what kind of pen that was?
* A: Yes, it was my favorite pen that I got from my wife for our anniversary
* Q: Do you remember why you were using it to write?
* A: I signed a credit card receipt in Walmart.
Easy-peasy.
Do you take notes?
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)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radithor_bottle_(25799475...
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.
Based on the anecdote, the author one of the last two.
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