For my sales conversations, I used a real-life scenario. The small private high school I went to was renting space from two churches. It was growing fast and had a long waiting list. The school needed space to expand. They were approached by a land developer who was trying to get the city’s approval to build a neighborhood. He himself would not build the neighborhood but instead would just develop the land by slitting up the properties and putting road and draining systems. The city said that he would need to add something else to this neighborhood and the idea of building a school next to this neighborhood was good for development. The city wanted to avoid another cookie-cutter cluster of houses.
The developer needed my high school to develop this land. When my high school agreed to the plan the project was approved by the city. However, through a series of events, the developer gave up on the project and sold the land. However, the high school still owned its portion and is even now questioning whether or not they should sell or hold out for future funds to build their much-needed building.
The nuances of the situation are the increase in prices for property in the area and funds needed to build a building as well as new opportunities to buy other buildings. Best case scenario the school receives a large donation prompting lots of smaller donations to build on the land they bought. They could also sell that land for the profit they are guaranteed due to recent inflation. They could then buy a building or look to buy other land elsewhere. The issue is that it will be a long time before the school finds a property for as low a price as they bought the original property for. This is an issue I touched on in my sales conversations. I was playing the role of a new developer hoping to restart the project of the last developer. I still need the school for the city’s approval. I had to convince the school not to sell both for myself and for their own good. Their issue was with the broken trust from the first developer and they were weary of entering in an identical relationship. To combat this fear I tried to sweeten the deal by telling the school that I would redraw the plans in their favor. In fact I said I had already done this. However, Professor Sweet said I was in danger of giving out free consulting. My only thought here is that I was not in a consulting role, but rather needed to do everything in my power to convince the school to stay. And in this particular case, I had to draw up the development plans for myself and they were the exact same plans that I would give the school because it was the same piece of property.
All that being said, I had fun with this slightly complex scenario.
BoweryJE22