How To Close Deals Fast

Hey there Workplace Warriors. It's Dave Lorenzo and this is, The 60 Second Sale Show. I'm the guy who helps you close more deals, fast, and today I'm going to remind you that we're in the business of building relationships. When we build relationships we close deals, and we do it quickly. Now, being fast is often times more important than being best. I know that's shocking, so I'm going to say it again. Being fast is more important than being best. In fact, I've made a career, a great career, out of being faster than everybody else. Back in 1999, I was the Vice President and General Manager of ExecuStay, that was Marriott's corporate housing brand, and I worked in New York City. There is no faster place on earth than New York City. Corporate housing at that time, especially in New York City, was an extremely competitive business.

Now, for those of you who don't know, corporate housing is really like an extended stay apartment, if you will. In fact, in New York, these were actual apartments that I would go out and sublease for Marriott from either condominium owners or from large developers, and then my team and I would furnish them, we would turn on all the utilities, the cable. At that time they had land line telephones. We'd set all that up, and then executives would move into them for 30 days or longer. Now, Marriott had just gotten into this business. In fact, I was the pioneer of this business for them in New York City and this period of time in New York real estate was crazy. Apartments were flying out of realtors' inventory, developers would finish putting up the walls in a building and while the paint was drying, they would sell out the entire building.

They'd rent the entire building full of apartments overnight. This made it really tough for my team and it made it really tough for me to close deals because we could never get enough inventory, we could never get enough apartments. We had nothing to sell. This was actually good news. We took those lemons and we made fantastic lemonade because it meant that my competitors couldn't get any inventory either. I realized that if I could solve this problem, solve the problem of demand in the market, I would have a huge competitive advantage. I used my sales skills to tackle this problem. There were a few publications that developers would use to announce projects they were developing. They would do this with the hope of attracting people to lease their new building quickly.

What I did was I hired a publicist and I instructed that publicist to go out and connect me with these developers. I wanted to know which buildings were being developed and which buildings would be ready quickly. At 2:30pm, one April afternoon, I remember it like it was yesterday, this is in 1999 now, I found out a developer was ready to lease up a building on the West Side of Manhattan. The building was due to open in July of that year. Once my publicist let me know that this developer was going to go out with a big campaign to announce this building, I went to his office that afternoon. I went with my check book and I wrote a hundred thousand dollar check as a deposit for the entire building. He cancelled the publication of the story, didn't have to do any marketing at all for his building. I was able to lease up the 80 apartments in that building and my sales team was outstanding.

We filled it before the ink was even dry on that lease. Now, I used this strategy several times over the next two years and I dominated the market. We were able to obtain a 70% market share, 70% market share of the corporate housing business in New York City, in 1999, 2000 and early 2001. We were able to do that because I was better than my competitors, well, maybe I was better than my competitors. Was I smarter than my competitors? Yeah, maybe I was a little smarter than my competitors, but was I faster than my competitors,