Everyone knows the cheesy interview challenge.
“Sell me this pen.”
Show me how good you are at sales.
The instinct is usually to start selling immediately.
Beautiful design. Smooth ink. Comfortable grip. Reliable. Premium…
Basically the pen equivalent of reading a datasheet out loud.
But that misses the entire point.
Before selling the pen, understand the person sitting across from you.
How long have you been looking for one?
What do you use it for?
What is wrong with the one you have?
Why are you looking for another one now?
Only then can you understand what actually needs to be sold.
Now replace the pen with cybersecurity.
“Sell me this XDR.”
I cannot. Not yet.
How large is your security team?
What are you using today?
Where are the gaps?
Why are you looking now?
Was there an incident?
Is there an audit coming?
What happens if you change nothing?
Now we have something to talk about.
Because nobody wakes up thinking, “I really need an XDR today.”
They have a problem. A deadline. A risk. An internal pressure. Something changed.
Your job is to find that first.
And sometimes discovery tells you they do not need your product at all.
That is useful too.
Good sales is not finding a clever way to sell the pen regardless of the answer.
It is understanding the customer well enough to know which pen they need.
Or whether they need a pen at all.
Oh, and there is the other one.
“How much is your salary expectation?”
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