[onion2k]

This is a lovely anecdote, but it's largely irrelevant to modern sales. There's no margin in consumer goods to sell directly any more. The cost of each sale would be too high[1]. If it was an enterprise product the person buying only really cares whether it works better than the competitor product and how much it costs, so a personal approach is a waste of time (beyond getting the customer to talk to you in the first place).

[1] Every sale would end with "What a brilliant pen. You've made it sound incredible. But I won't buy it right now; I'll check the price on Amazon when I get home."

[mseebach]

The fundamentals of sales are the same whether you're selling pens or $10m enterprise widgets -- you need to understand the customer and the product and how to fit the two together. It also applies in marketing, a closely related field -- you have to understand the needs of abstract groups of customers, and how pitch your product to those groups.

The pen is just a simple object to arrange a quick role play around.