“Go Ahead, Sell Me This Pen.” An Important Sales Lesson by Jordan Belfort

The other night I forked over $20 to iTunes for Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest movie — A recap of the life of penny stockbroker Jordan Belfort, “The Wolf of Wall Street”.

As a sales professional, for me this movie ranks right up there with one of my other all-time favorites, “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

If you haven’t seen these two movies, do you yourself a favor, watch them and study them.  They both include lessons about what it takes to sell two difficult things — Stocks and real estate.  But if done correctly and positioned with the right messaging, they can be sold very easily.

Information Technology Services would be third on my list of the toughest things to sell.

Why is this when IT makes life easier, provides the best computing power, and innovative devices that allow us to receive and send emails and text messages?

How do you position IT Managed Services to your clients? 

Are you telling them about all the great things included in your package such as antivirus, backup, remote monitoring, managed security, managed print and all the other components?

Most MSPs do this, however it’s the wrong approach, and is why so many MSPs struggle with one of life’s most sought after professions.  Sales!

In the movie Belfort “breaks the seal” early on.  Why?  He needs to bring the down-and-outers up to speed on how to best position penny stocks.  His angle?  Easy, penny stocks were cheaper to get into. He could sell them to anyone regardless of their profession.  He sold “The Dream” to plumbers, garbage collectors and those who wouldn’t normally be able to invest in the market. He sold “The Dream” to strike it rich, and get rich quick.

So I ask you, “Go ahead, sell me this pen.”

How do you “sell a pen?” 

How do you sell your managed services?

Do you want to know how?    

Attend a Ulistic MSP Boardroom.

For more information call your Ultimate MSP website and MSP marketing team at 716.799.1999.

Stuart R. Crawford

Stuart Crawford serves as Creative Director and CEO with Sebring, FL and Fort Erie, ON-based Ulistic, a specialty MSP Marketing firm focused on information technology marketing and business development. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience pertaining to how technology business owners and IT firms can use marketing as a vehicle to obtain success.