Money for Nothing by Edward Ugel

Author:Edward Ugel [Edward Ugel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061748295
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

Deal One

She was mine from the start.

The first deal was easy. I didn’t even have to leave the airport. As promised, Sally had found a notary in the main concourse. She and Evan had brought all of their documents—their win letter, W2-G, they had even made copies of her driver’s license. In hindsight, it makes complete sense. While I was on the plane convincing myself that I was a big, tough monkey, they were driving to the airport, doing everything they could think of to make sure that I didn’t pull out of the deal on them.

That’s the irony of this business. For weeks at a time, you get nothing but angry, disinterested winners, avoiding your calls and blowing you off. Then, out of nowhere, you find a winner in need and suddenly she’s more into the deal than you. The trick was to see it and recognize it for what it was—before you thought yourself right out of an easy deal. If you’ve been getting turned down left and right, it’s hard to realize when someone is actually interested. Even “yes” sounds a lot like “no.” Sometimes in sales, you can’t get out of your own way. During a bad stretch on the phones, it was hard to turn on the “I’ve got the money and you don’t” persona. But that’s exactly what I had on my hands—a winner who needed me even more than I thought I needed her.

All the worry, all the nerves I had during the flight, and all the confidence that Ben had sucked out of me in his office the day before was much ado about nothing. This deal could have been done through the mail. It would have gotten signed had I sent it via carrier pigeon.

What I’d have missed by not coming down on my own was the chance to build some rapport, some trust, to establish a face to go along with my name, to give some personality to The Firm. After all, this was a big winner. She was selling us only a tiny slice of her annuity. There was a lot more to buy—a lot more. While this was a nice deal, the potential add-on deals could be massive. And the key to doing more than one deal with a winner, a partial, is to knock the trust issue right out of the equation. If the person likes you and trusts you, there’s less reason for her to shop around when it’s time to do the next deal. And, as you know by now, at some point, it will be time to do another deal. You can all but set your watch to it.

Sometimes, we’d do a skinny deal with a big winner, making only a small fee. Regardless of the size of the first deal, having it in the books was key. Odds were, when the winner needed money again, they’d call us rather than a competitor. When they did, follow up deals were a lot easier than the first ones.

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