If there were a record for selling the most ballpoint pens in the shortest time to American restaurants, I would probably hold it.

This was one of my part-time jobs in graduate school, along with college teaching. In fact, it was this work that enabled me to make payments on a sparkling sports car during that time, making me a rare visage among my academic peers.

The pen-selling story is worth telling because it demonstrates an amazing, simple, and powerful point about increasing your sales.

When I was trained, I sat next to a guy who was pitching pens to bakeries, a gross, or twelve-dozen pens at a time. The most common objection he heard was