How I Turned 20 Entrepreneurs Into Sales Pros in Just One Hour | by Aaron Dinin, PhD | Nov, 2023
Once you know the right strategy, selling stuff isn’t nearly as hard as most entrepreneurs think.
Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash
Every year for the past seven years I’ve given students in my Duke entrepreneurship class the same impossible challenge. I hand each of them a Jolly Rancher — a 5 cent piece of hard candy — and I ask them to sell it for $100 in an hour. Not surprisingly, nobody has ever been able to sell it. However, I just finished giving my most recent class the same challenge, and five people succeeded.
So what happened? How did five 20-year-old entrepreneurship students suddenly manage to do the impossible and sell a piece of candy for 2000x its value when hundreds of students who’d come before them couldn’t? Are GenZ-ers just that much better at sales?
Certainly not!
The reason my students finally sold the candies was because I changed something about how I structured the challenge, and that one small change made selling the candies much easier. If you find a way to make the same change in your startup’s sales process, it’ll be just as valuable for improving your results.
I’ve always known that selling a Jolly Rancher for $100 in an hour is possible. It’s not even particularly hard. It just requires understanding the nuances of customer acquisition better than the average 20-year-old entrepreneurship student.
Most young entrepreneurs think effectively selling something consists of explaining the benefits of owning a product and then convincing people to buy it. As a result, inexperienced entrepreneurs approach sales as though it’s a process of browbeating potential customers into submission. You chase them down until they’ll listen to you. Once they’re listening, you give your best pitch that explains every possible benefit of what you’re selling. And then, when the pitch is over, you keep pestering people until they finally agree to hand over their hard-earned money. “Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” is the advice people always give.
To be fair, the method of sales I’ve just described can work under the right circumstances. But that doesn’t…
