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Everyone aspires to be a mentor in commercial real estate. Like rush week at Sigma Chi, the industry breeds big brother, little brother relationships.
Typically, the mentor propositions the mentee with a Dale Carnegie book, a meme of Jordan Belfort on a yacht, or a YouTube link to Al Pacino’s Any Given Sunday speech.
I was not so lucky.
One morning, I found a 4-disk CD set on my keyboard titled The Art of Selling. The plastic case barely encapsulated its contents — the packaging company clearly started with 8-track cassette tapes but didn’t have time to change designs before the technological revolution of the CD-ROM. Whenever that was, 1999?
The course became my sales bible, and my naive ears hung on every word. Particularly the strategy for what do when a decision-maker says, “I’m sorry, but we are working with your competitor.”
“When a prospect says, we are already working with Todd over at Company B, simply smile and reply: Todd? I thought he went out of business!”
I would never say that, I thought to myself. “And the funny thing is,” he continued. “this strategy…
