sell me this pen

In the movie Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort who is played by Leonardo Dicaprio, starts his own brokerage firm after realizing how much money he can make in the industry and how good of a salesman he really was. Jordan Belfort found a new market of people to sell to after selling pink sheet stocks to common people such as postman or garbage workers. This market was the rich people that would invest common stocks like IBM and Disney but he had to attune to the market he was selling to.

He then went out to try to find a sales team that were good salesman but the problem was that the people he knew did not sound professional enough to sell the rich people types. He had to try to train these people to sound more established and professional so that their clients will trust them enough to believe them to buy the stocks they were pitching.

The scene in particular that I am talking about is when Jordan Belfort and his future salesman are at a diner and they are talking about their sales experiences and how they are qualified to work for Belfort’s brokerage firm. Jordan Belfort tries to see how good they actually are by telling them to sell him a pen. Most of the guys feel confident because it is just a pen and it is so simple that they know they can sell to Belfort because of their experiences. The first couple salesman try to describe the features of pen and they drone on an on and Belfort is not buying it. Then one of his salesman goes with the simple approach and asks him “Can you write down your name?” and Belfort responds with “I don’t have a pen” and then the salesman says that he used the tactic of supply and demand. This scene shows that meeting to the needs of the client is better than trying to sell the product to them.