"Sell me this pen"

A friend of mine just came back from a stupid interview.  By stupid I mean the interviewer was a man of very little brain and blew his chance to hire Dave.   My oh so experienced friend with 20 years experience closing "C" level executives on multi-million dollar deals was confounded by a young pup who had just ascended to his first VP Sales and Marketing role and was rather very proud of himself.

The first question he asked Dave wasn't even a question.  He pulled a pen from his pocket and said, "sell me this pen".  Now Dave's a master salesman so he knew how to handle the question, but what would you do? 

I had to do this with a perspective client early on in my career who was testing my sales abilities; I asked the question, “Do you need a pen?”  He said, “Yes”. Great, how much money do you have in your wallet? He gave me the $150. I folded it and put it in my pocket - then I told him that wasn’t near enough – but it was a reasonable down payment. 

With age comes wisdom [and just a touch of impatience for stupid parlor tricks].  Here's what I did the last time someone did this to me.  I asked the interviewer, "do you need a pen?"  He said, "no".  I said great, so what do you need?  "Nothing", he said.  To which I said "terrific I'll be on my way because you're neither a suspect nor a prospect”. 

You don’t need to perform parlor tricks for interviewers. You also don't need to waste your time with people who have no intention of hiring you  - unless of course you want to practice your closing routines. Remember that the next time an interviewer asks you a stupid question.

In the recruiting business we refer to these as throwaways – sales calls we use to sharpen our technique. We know ahead of time they’re not going to hire us or we’d never work for them – BUT practice makes perfect.  Who can you practice on this week?