Sell me this pen

We all love that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street. Some will even push the pen analogy to their grandmother, but what does it mean?

For selling a random pen, to a random person, the character of the movie pushes the boundaries of understanding one core principle: What does any unspecific pen have for attributes in an elevator pitch that may quickly be attributed to solving an unplanned purchase? The pitch by any good salesperson should, of course, be inclined towards what solution the pen may give the buyer. Not price, not apparel, not color, not if it has black or blue ink. These are product traits that need pre-qualification of the client enabling better sales.

A real wolf in a sales pitch of a random pen would go:
“This pen will improve your writing speed by 20%. Think of the time you will be able to save.” How much do you charge per hour? And how much more would you be able to get done with this pen in your hand” 10 bucks for this pen is peanuts in what you will be able to get in return.” Sell the solution, not the product.

This is how growth hackers, as well as good salespeople, think. They never sell a product or a service. They sell solutions.

A legendary coder will never post his best code on GIT or Stack bragging about it. He will post a half-baked s*** coding solution and brag about it. Why? Fairly easy, our human psychology will want to correct. The community of these forums will jump in and trash him/her will endless flawless solutions that he/she can easily lift over, compare and even see if there are flaws or room for improvements in his best work. You leverage human psychology in providing multiple self-serving solutions. All SoMe platforms are based on this. They don’t push any content, you push it for them. 99% of these platforms’ users don’t even understand this “reverse psychology manipulation”. You are their content generator, self-served and curated all at the same time for you in return to be bombarded by ads that are profiled by the specific type of content you post. And stuck are 99% of the users going to be in the echo chamber of algorithms just by simple human psychology.

There is a third element in the psychology part of a “great growth hacker” mindset. It’s the glue that holds together behavior psychology together with data and tooling. “Fight the enemy where they aren’t…YET” – Battleship? Another movie analogy? Well, a great one!
Data together with behavioral psychology tooled together in the digital marketing realm dictates your terms, landscapes, and moves mountains.
What is a good example of this that is tangible? Foresight.
The individual that has the most foresight, between awareness, consideration, buy and retain in the sales funnel will benefit the most. If you create an enormous buzz with your content, but you don’t enable the inbound sales, so you may fork in the benefits of the buzz? What then? Has this been taken into consideration in the first plan of action and the setup with the foresight of how your customer will behave? Or an understanding of this? If not, then all your buzz in the awareness phase will be lost. Most will go, yeah right, but how do we measure this? Even called attribution in the game. The attribution of sales in simple KPIs is an animal sliced very differently from case to case, business to business, but the magic of growth hacking happens by testing your understanding of where to sow and how to reap.

With these three points, always be fearless and working with a hard consistency.