Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2018, during Donald Trump’s first presidency.
For Barbara Corcoran, Donald Trump may well be the best salesman she has ever met. Barbara is a businesswoman who turned $1,000 into $1 billion, and who had the chance to meet Donald Trump back when he was on the verge of bankruptcy.
According to Corcoran, it’s not that he’s a good salesman, or even a great one. He is, quite simply, the best salesman she has known. A few years ago we published Donald Trump’s commandments of success, but Corcoran has no doubt that the secret of Donald Trump’s success lies in his sales and negotiation skills.
What is Donald Trump’s sales technique?
In an interview with Business Insider, Corcoran explains that Trump is a genius at spotting a weakness in someone’s personality. If he’s negotiating with someone who is insecure, Trump will use that to his advantage. If he’s negotiating with someone arrogant, Trump will use that to get his way too.
Corcoran, who has sat at a negotiating table with Donald Trump, says he can smell it and feel it, and that she has seen it happen again and again.
He can even gain the upper hand when negotiating with people who think they have the advantage over him, as in the case Trump himself describes in his book The Art of the Deal. In it, he tells how he was bankrupt, $5 billion in debt, and had to sit down with the heads of the banks. He managed to turn the tables, bring them onto his own ground and become a multimillionaire again within a few years.
Knowing how to spot people’s weaknesses and use them to his advantage is probably what led him to win the presidency of the United States.
The Plaza Hotel sale he never made
Corcoran recounts that Trump once received several wealthy families from Hong Kong. They had come to negotiate with Trump to buy the Plaza Hotel, which he owned. They didn’t want to talk about anything else. It was the only thing they were interested in.
Around that table sat several real estate brokers eager to close the deal. In fact, Trump needed the money from the sale, because he was facing bankruptcy. Even so, instead of closing the deal, he started to set the Plaza sale aside and began talking about the land he owned along the Hudson River.
There was nothing there but land, but Trump started talking about the buildings they could put up. Corcoran says that at first she thought Donald Trump had lost his mind for not closing the deal quickly while they were keen to buy the Plaza. But in a masterstroke, Trump managed to save the Plaza and sell the land along the Hudson. That’s where the Trump towers you can see along the river came from.
How did he manage not to sell what they wanted to buy and still get his way once again?
By exploring and identifying the weaknesses of his multimillionaire buyers. He also avoided looking desperate to close a deal, while knowing that, if things went badly, there was real interest in buying the Plaza: an anchor he could return to in the negotiation if his strategy failed.
Most successful businesspeople agree on the same thing. To succeed, you have to learn to sell, because in business, and in life in general, everything is a sale. In fact, when we answered the question why don’t you have success or money?, not knowing how to sell was one of the reasons.
See also: 1991: Donald Trump’s excellent advice for business and life
Featured image: Jacqueline Zaccor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
