If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails (18 page)

One man rushed back to the contract table announcing he liked the C line of apartments in the building. * c It doesn't matter which floor, I just want to buy a C, any C." When we told him that all the C's had been sold, he decided he liked B's, too, "any B.'"

We started the day with eighty-eight apartments that nobody wanted and our company near bankruptcy. By day's end. eighty-eight proud new owners were celebrating their good fortune, and we had eighty-eight checks to deposit and had earned over a million dollars in net commissions.

MOM'S LESSON #19: When there are ten buyers and three puppies, every dog is the pick of the litter.

THE LESSON LEARNED ABOUT MARKETING

On the morning of our One Day Sale, the economy was in a slump and New York City real estate prices were down. But the market was ready to come back, if only someone would prime the pump. Our a eighty-eight-sales-in-a-day" was its wake-up call.

The One Day Sale was a great marketing gambit, but it was not a swindle. It was a fair deal, and its easy terms enabled people previously unable to buy an apartment to do so. It' was also a good deal lor the sellers because it enabled them to make more money than they would if they sold the apartments at auction.

When the last apartment sold, there were still another fifty buyers who wished they had gotten one. One guy who didn't get an apartment actually sued us, saying the couple who used cell phones cheated. We settled the suit by selling him the next apartment that became available.

As a result of the One Day Sale, I learned five big lessons about marketing.

1. Everybody wants what everybody wants.

Competition always communicates the message that there's a good deal to be had. And when people are told that they can't have something, they want it even more.

On the day of the One Day Sale, buyers could plainly see the number of customers ahead of them and behind them in line. Even the customers who weren't sure they wanted an apartment decided they wanted one as the litter thinned.

By announcing the sale date in advance, we set the stage with anticipation. The "one per customer" rule emphasized the lad dial there was a limited supply, and the pile of contracts, waiting on the banquet table, added to the sales pressure.

None of the buyers bailed out, because they knew there were another fifty people in line behind them who went home empty-handed.

Create a deadline and you create urgency.

As long as customers perceive the value as fair, urgencv can be created by setting a deadline. Our offer to "pick any one-bedroom for the same price'' created urgency as customers raced to pick the best one. And as most people buy with their hearts and justify with their heads, our "'sign now/think later'* strategv felt acceptable, even though it was contrary to the way business was usually done.

The biggest opportunities abound when nothing else is going on.

Most people are afraid to step up to the plate when no one else is around. The apartments sold at the One Day Sale had languished on the market for three years. They were sold at the bottom of the real estate cycle.

In marketing, all my biggest opportunities were always found in the silences. Fve learned to look hard at the silences.

The best time to answer an objection is before it's raised.

At the One Day Sale, we addressed all the buyers" potential objections up front. As most of the customers were first-time buyers, the prospect of securing a co-op board approval was frightening. So we eliminated it.

In New York, real estate contracts are usually prepared by the seller's attorney and then take two to five weeks of legal review before signing. We said, "Sign now, show it to your attorney later." The oversized legal warning stamped on the front of the contract made the buyers comfortable enough to sign. Finally by paying the first two years' maintenance charges out of

Barbara Corcoran

so salespeople and bragged, "Our new video will give our Corcoran Group customers all the information they could possibly want. All in one convenient place! We're calling it Homes on Tape. HOT for short. Get it? Now, thanks to this innovation, our customers can shop for apartments anywhere, anytime, simply by picking up a copy of our video at any of our offices and taking it home for only a twenty-dollar, fully refundable deposit. It's just perfect for the busy New Yorker!"

As I raised my arms into a high papal V, I vowed, "Our Homes on Tape will transform the way people buy and sell real estate forever! Now, New Yorkers will be able to see all the property they want, without ever having to leave their own couch! Amen!"

The entire sales team burst into spontaneous applause as I dramatically nodded my head and lowered my arms. Yep, I thought, this is my best idea yet!

Summer. The side yard.

Marty Joe was perched on the third-story window ledge outside the girls' room, grinning from ear to ear. "We're ready!" we all shouted up.

Marty's legs looked white against his navy-blue swim trunks high above our heads. He was about to leap out over the Roanes' landing into the plastic-walled, blue metal-framed pool Dad and Grandpa had set up in the side yard. The pool was four feet deep, but was a lot shallower next to the house, where Dad and Grandpa couldn't make it level against the hill.

"Are you sure you're ready?" Marty shouted down. For a moment, I thought he looked nervous, maybe even scared, but, then again, Marty Joe was the kid who would try anything.

"Come on, let's go, Marty Joe!" Jimmy Cleary called up.

"Do it, Dart!" another kid added.

My brother Marty had more nicknames than any other member of our family. He was baptized Martin Joseph, which was shortened to Marty Joe. Later, the kids in the neighborhood named him Martin

Jartin. That lasted until the summer day when he demonstrated his technique for throwing a dart in the air and catching it by its tail. Blinded by the glare of the sun. he missed a dart as it shot back to earth, and it landed squarely between his eyes.

The other kids' excited cries, as they watched him run in circles like a chicken without a head, were music to Marty's attention-loving ears.

"Look at me!" he shouted to the crowd like the sideshow barker at the amusement park. "'Look at me, the aa-maaaazing Martin Dartin.' pierced by a flying dart that went straight to his braaaaaaaaiii !

With the bloody dart poking from his forehead like a bull's-eye shot on a dartboard, Marty took a bow to mixed applause and shrieks of horror. His self-anointed name stuck, and Martin Jartin became forever known as Martin Dartin. or "Dart for short.

"Dart," Michael Mertz shouted up with his hands cupped like a megaphone, "we don't have all day!'

With that, Martin Dartin leapt off the window ledge, sailed past Mrs. Roane's landing, and hurtled toward the shallow section of our plastic pool.

"What an asshole! my brother Eddie shouted, as we all scrambled away from the pool with a collective gasp. We all covered our eyes as Marty plunged into the water. When we opened them. Marty was standing up in the middle of the pool bowing and everyone ran and crowded around the pool.

"I don't believe it! I don't believe it! I just don't believe it. we all clamored, congratulating Marty for being alive.

Marty looked as amazed by his survival as we were. Shaking the water from his hair, he reached out for the hands of his adoring fan club.

"Hey, what's happening?" Stevie Mertz hollered as he hurdled the front retaining wall. "What's going on, what did I miss?*

"Dart just jumped off the roof and lived!" Timmy Tom proudly exclaimed as he inched closer to Marty, trying to catch some of his glow.

"And he hit the pool dead center!" Ellen bragged.

"Oh, man," Stevie whined, "but I didn't see it. That's a bummer."

Without a moment's thought, Marty gripped the pool's edge, swung his muscular legs, between his arms, and popped out of the pool dripping wet. "No problem!" Marty said. "Watch me this time, I'll do it again."

Before Marty's second jump ended, he had become the town hero.

That night, while Mom pounded the chicken cutlets, we were all still talking about Marty's amazing feat. Mom didn't look happy. She rolled out a sheet of waxed paper, looked up at Marty, and said, "Jumping out that window could have made you either an ass or a hero. You got lucky ■, Marty." As Dad came in the front door from work, Mom lowered her voice. "Since your father's interpretation won't match your friends'," she warned, pointing with the meat cleaver, "you better keep your braggin' to yourself."

December 1993. Corcoran West Side.

I made my way down the wooden steps that leaned precariously against the moldy cinder-block wall in the wet basement of our West Side office, right next door to Zabar's deli on Broadway.

I pulled the string on the single lightbulb at the bottom of the stairs, and it cast a dull yellow light over the final resting place of my $71,000 investment. Thirty-two piles of black video boxes were stacked eight feet high against the back wall. My Homes on Tape idea was dead on arrival, and not one person came to "check out" our video sales tour.

My brilliant marketing innovation had a pair of Achilles' heels. First, our salespeople didn't give out the videos because they

didn't want to show customers another salesperson's face or phone number. Second, the videos contained so many images that each shot clicked on and off faster than even the New York eye could possibly see.

I glared at the eight-foot pile of videos sucking up the water from the basement floor and knew I should be giving some serious thought to how to recoup the $71,000 I had blown on my big idea. But. instead, all I could think about was the next big sales meeting and how stupid I would look standing there in front of everyone explaining why my great idea had belly-flopped.

I climbed back up the basement stairs and headed over to the East Side, where I was meeting my husband at Maxwell's Plum for dinner. A former FBI agent and a captain in the naval reserves, Wild Bill Higgins had just returned from three weeks of war games with the I .S. Navy in South Korea. He was anxious to tell me about his trip, and. between big bites of steak, he excitedly gestured and explained how he had played war games against North Korea on computer. He was a lot more animated than usual.

"It was incredible, Barb, you should have seen it! We fought the whole war on this new thing called the Internet, and it was exactly like a real war. We were moving our ships and supplies as if there was really a war going on!"

I was still bruised by the soggy image of my pile of tapes and was trying my best to feign interest. I took another sip of my white wine and said, 'Didn't you play those same games last year in Washington?'' I asked.

It was totally different. Barb." He chewed on. "We were actually playing war in real time. When the North Koreans bombed us, we immediately bombed them back. And when they took out our ports and highways, we instantly blew up their supply ships. You could see everything on the computer like it was actually happening!

"Well, who won?" I asked, hoping to conclude and move on to my subject.

He smiled. ''''They did!" he said. "And the South Koreans went berserk! You'd think they had actually lost a war." He gestured with his fork. "We had to keep reminding them that it was just a game on a computer!"

"Is the Internet thing only in the navy?" I asked. "Made to play war games?"

"No, Barb, that's just it, it's not just for games. Anyone can use it to exchange any information with anyone, anywhere, anytime, as long as they have a computer. And it's free! I'm telling you, Barb, this World Wide Web is going to connect everybody and become the greatest library of instant information on the planet!"

The following week, my salesperson Linda Stillwell volunteered to have her husband in the computer business register our company's "domain" name on his computer. Then I hired the video guy to put our Homes on Tape pictures on the World Wide Web.

January 1994.

"Ladies and gentlemen, today I'm proud to announce phase two of our Homes on Tape video project! The Corcoran Group will be one of the first companies in America to take our listings into cyberspace!" Although I didn't know if anyone besides the South Koreans could find our listings there, I knew for sure that I had come up with a plan to save face. Everyone applauded.

Within the month, four new customers found our properties on the World Wide Web, and my belly-flop began to look like a heroic leap into the future.

MOM'S LESSON #80: Jumping out the window will make you either an ass or a hero.

THE LESSON LEARNED ABOLT INNOVATION

I've found that all innovation is built on a leap and a prayer using money you shouldn't have spent in the first place, and that waiting to spend money on a good idea is the business equivalent of saving the good china for Sunday.

Here are my personal beliefs about all innovation:

1. People are reluctant to innovate.

It's not because they don't have good ideas, it's simply because they don't enjoy failing. The best innovators are great at failing. They might look like they're Hying, but four times out of five they're simply falling with style.

2. There's no better time to bring a good idea to life than at the moment of its inception.

The surest way to kill a good idea is to send it to a committee.

3. Anyone can have a good idea, but it's a rare person who can make the good ideas happen.

4. The "Big Idea" rarely comes from top management. \

Most great ideas come from the little guy, told to the big guy who listens.

5. Innovation never happens in a dictatorship.

Period.

6. Nothing new was ever invented without a lot of flops.

The best way to justify spending money on a new business idea is to categorize it as "research and development."

The first four customers who visited our Web site were only the beginning of the coming wave. In 1993, the world had only fifty Web sites, and by the time we started corcoran.com one year later, there were already several hundred. Today there are more than 7 million Web sites, and corcoran.com generates more than $700 million a year in sales.