Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Sell Me This Pen (by Xerxes)

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There is a scene in “The Wolf of Wall Street” where Jordan Belfort is explaining to his friends how they are going to become extremely rich selling essentially worthless pink sheet stocks for obscene commissions. “Sell me this pen” has been the summation of a sales mindset for many years and this scene really does well in presenting the end-all-be-all of sales. “Create a need” in the customer’s mind, and you can sell anything.

I’ve actually been asked this in an interview before and, being that I do NOT have the salesman mindset, I failed miserably. I unsurely said “Well, this is a very nice pen. It will write all the things you need to write,” to which the interviewer said, “but I have this other pen”.

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