We Can Sell Anything
We Can Sell Anything is an applied exercise in which participants improvise a sales pitch for an absurd, useless, or impossible product, training persuasion, benefit framing, confident delivery, and the ability to find genuine value in unlikely material.
Structure
The Setup
Participants are randomly assigned a product that is strange, useless, or paradoxical: a transparent window, gravity, sadness, a broken umbrella. They have a brief moment to collect themselves before pitching.
The Pitch
Each participant delivers a short sales pitch as if genuinely persuaded the product has value. The pitch should include features, benefits, and a call to action. No irony or winking at the audience.
The Debrief
The group discusses which pitches landed, what made them compelling, and how the structure of a pitch applies to conventional sales and communication contexts.
How to Teach It
Objectives
We Can Sell Anything trains the structural habits of persuasion: problem identification, benefit articulation, specificity, and confident delivery. Absurd products remove the anxiety about factual accuracy and allow participants to focus on structure and tone.
Facilitation Notes
Praise pitches that found genuine emotional resonance, not just clever humor. A participant who makes the group genuinely want to buy gravity has mastered the exercise.
Common Pitfalls
Participants treat the absurdity as the joke and play for laughs rather than commitment. The best pitches are delivered with complete sincerity.
In Applied Settings
Sales and Persuasion Training
We Can Sell Anything is used to train persuasion fundamentals by separating the structure of a compelling pitch from the need for a credible product. Participants who can sell the implausible develop the structural confidence to sell the reasonable.
Marketing and Brand Communications
Teams use the exercise before messaging workshops to loosen attachment to conventional framing and discover unexpected angles on familiar offerings.
Leadership Communication
Facilitators use the exercise to train executives in conviction and presence, coaching them to commit fully to a position even when the position feels uncertain.
Skills Developed
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Related Exercises
Bad Ad Product Game
Groups create a product and ad campaign for something that does everything wrong. By revolving an object to view its weird sides, players discover creativity through inversion.
Commercial Capers
Commercial Capers is a performance game in which players create spontaneous advertisements for fictional products, combining exaggerated sales tactics with improvised scenarios. The game builds confidence in public presentation and rewards creative collaboration under time pressure. It works well as both a workshop exercise and an audience-facing performance piece.
Creative Solution Building
Creative Solution Building is an applied improvisation exercise in which participants use improvisational principles -- acceptance, building, and collaborative emergence -- to develop solutions to presented problems or scenarios. Rather than analyzing the problem and generating solutions individually, participants build solutions incrementally through a structured ensemble process, with each contribution extending and complying with what has already been offered.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). We Can Sell Anything. Retrieved March 19, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/we-can-sell-anything
The Improv Archive. "We Can Sell Anything." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/we-can-sell-anything.
The Improv Archive. "We Can Sell Anything." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/we-can-sell-anything. Accessed March 19, 2026.
The Improv Archive is a systemically maintained repository. The archive itself acts as the corporate author.