On this episode of the 60 Second Sales Show I share my September 11th story.  This was recorded on location, overlooking the 9/11 memorial, the day after the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks.

Here is a transcript of this show:

Welcome once again everyone to another edition of the Sixty Seconds Sales Show. I'm your host, Dave Lorenzo. Today's show is all about following up. Today's show is about your follow-up skills. It's about the most important thing, the absolutely most important thing in sales, in business and in life. Follow-up is critical to your success as an entrepreneur, as a business leader and as a sales professional. Before we get in a follow-up, I want to take a moment and recognize our fantastic producer, the lovely and talented Nancy Popp. Good morning Nancy. How are you today?

Hey David. I'm doing good. How about you?

I'm doing great. Nancy helps us with finding guests, she helps us with getting great questions every week and she helps us put the show together, so thank you Nancy for all that you do for us. We are today, talking about follow-up. Before we get into follow-up, I want to tell you about an unusual experience I had this week. We're recording this show today. We're recording it, it's just a couple of days after the 15th anniversary of September 11th, and this day in history, it's one of those days that for me that is surreal. Many of you who have followed me for awhile know that this day has some significance for me.

I worked in Manhattan on September 11th, 2001. I ran a corporate housing company and we had three hundred employees, but in particular we had thirty that worked in Manhattan cleaning apartments. We had eight hundred apartments in Manhattan, and this crew of thirty people would clean all of our apartments, some of them once a week, some of them twice a month. On September 11th, 2001 I was in my office, and I had held our cleaning crew back because we had an awards ceremony. We were giving out the awards for the folks who had, we'd had a contest over the summer and we were giving out awards for the winners of the contest, we'd had a breakfast.

Usually the housekeepers who worked with me in our offices at 518 5th Avenue, which is 5th Avenue and 43rd street, just two blocks from Grand Central Station, usually these fantastic men and women, the housekeepers that worked with us, would leave our office no later than 8am. Some days they would go to the Upper East Side, some days they would go to the Upper West Side, some days they would go downtown to work in the apartments that we managed. Well on September 11th, 2001, I held them back. They left our office at 8 o'clock, and a crew of twelve of them, it was ten housekeepers, a housekeeping trainee, and a housekeeping supervisor left our office at 8am.

Now that's ... The time they left our office is significant and you'll find out why in just a second. They left our office at 8am, they got on the subway to head downtown. They were going to clean apartments in a building on 17 John Street. 17 John Street just two blocks, two and a half blocks really from the World Trade Centers where the twin towers stood. They left our office at 8am and I went upstairs in the building to have a meeting with our staff of thirteen sales people and then my admin team, so I think there was seventeen of us. We had a stand-up meeting every morning, like a little huddle where we talked about what the priorities were for the day, so on and so forth.

September 11th, 2001 was a beautiful day, just as September 11th this year was, and I was doing the stand-up meeting our break room with our sales and admin team. Behind me was a television and the television was always on, and it was always tuned to a news channel. We had to be into the news because a lot of our clients were in the financial services industry, we needed to know what was going on on the markets.