An answer to the “Sell Me This Pen” interview challange

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

Both asked about recent pen use, both responded based on that?

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.

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.

* 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.

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, ...

Do you take notes?

The pen is just a simple object to arrange a quick role play around.

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.

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 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 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)