Sell Me This Pen

This is a classic sales practice that was even shown in The Wolf of Wall Street.

The key is not about trying to tell everyone how great the pen is

It’s about thinking about different angles that would help you to sell the pen, whether that’s urgency, scarcity, manufactured need, or reframing the context around writing itself.

It’s this playground for demonstrating that selling isn’t about the object, it’s about the story, the situation, and the human in front of you.

The pen stays the same, but the context around it is manipulated.

That’s kind of the same for your ideas, because you only believe a certain amount of things that are relevant to your audience.

You’ll share your ideas, and then they will decay in the mind of the audience unless they’re refreshed.

Someone can hear something life-changing that you’ve said on a Monday, and they’ve forgotten it by Friday because the brain prunes unused pathways.

With the amount of inputs that we’re exposed to, you just can’t expect your audience to hang on to everything that you say

Even if you say it in a way that’s completely life-changing.

If you don’t repeat your core ideas, clients won’t retain them.

If clients won’t retain them, nothing changes.

Repetition isn’t laziness, it is maintenance of the real estate that you own between the ears of each individual in your audience

You only get to keep this real estate if you can continue to share your ideas in a way that is engaging and interesting and different

Which means you need multiple ways of saying the same thing

Which means you need a system for developing different ways of saying the same thing