Welcome to 2010, the defacto year of Joint Venture (JV) financing. Institutional financing is not available so developers are looking outside the box to fund their projects. The most common form of favorable financing is JV. This financing comes in more shapes, sizes, and terms than colors of the rainbow. There are, however, a few common things that all JV funders look for, regardless of the project, location or dollar amount. The purpose of this article is to share with you what these common denominators are and how you should present your project to get the most favorable terms.

Let’s look at this from your potential funder’s perspective. What does he want? The answer is simple, but arriving at achieving his goals involves a tremendous amount of scrutiny and due diligence on you, the developer. Quite simply, the JV funder wants a return on his investment. You must speak his language. What he wants is a pro forma that shows what his internal rate of return (IRR) is at two and five years. If you cannot prepare one of these, find someone who can. This document or spreadsheet shows vision and the common goal of making money.

Everything else is secondary, but also very important. You need to prepare a package that consists of the following items:

an executive summary of the project that is no more than 5 pages (no funder will read a 120 page business plan before reading an executive summary)
the proforma
bios and resumes of all of the key players, including your contractors
the entire business plan
an appraisal if you have one
Logically, the funder has the money. You have to prove that you have the brains, muscle and integrity to be a great and cooperative partner. Your opportunity is not the only one on his desk, but it will certainly be the most presentable. Sloppy presentations make for sloppy projects.
Finally, the worst thing you can do is put pressure on the funder to act or fund immediately. Desperation only indicates weakness and poor planning.

In today’s new economy you as a sales professional undoubtedly have hundreds if not thousands of competitors selling a similar product or service. This can be the most difficult problem that sales professionals face. How do you persuade your prospects to buy from you and in turn send you referrals. From a consultative selling position the best way to present your product or service is to differentiate yourself from other sales professionals in your field.

The benefits of differentiating yourself are enormous. Anything you can do to differentiate yourself from all the other sales people out there is going to help. First of all a sale is much easier when you make the purchase unique. Secondly, your customers will refer hordes of qualified prospects to you. And third you can typically charge higher prices than your competitors. Using a consultative selling approach and the unique positioning tends to attract a much more affluent crowd. To get these affluent customers who are not concerned so much about price you have to make sure you get referrals.

So what you need to do is decide on a way of representing yourself and your product or service as incredibly special. From a consultative selling approach you can find out what it is your customers are generally looking for and then use that to differentiate yourself. For instance, in my area we have a plumbing company that is marketed as the smell good plumbers. So we have a choice. I can choose any of the great plumbers in the area or I can choose the plumber that does great work and makes it a point to smell good. Now some customers are not going to be persuaded by the additional benefit. The affluent customers tend to use this service. Why, because the plumbing service is probably just as good as many other plumbers but this company has decided to take the extra step and say that the plumber will not only get the job done, he will also show up on time smelling good. They are not selling themselves as the cheapest but having these other benefits. What additional benefits can you claim to your customers?

How do you apply this to your sales? You need to make yourself and your sales experience unique, interesting and fun. Just think about how much your prospects pay for entertainment monthly. TV, cable or satellite, Internet, movies, magazines, books, music and the list goes on. Its a safe bet that if you can make your sales presentation more interactive and entertaining you will sell more.

Probably the simplest means of making a sales presentation more entertaining is to tell a story that is designed to emotionally involve the prospect. This is an NLP sales tactic that works extremely well for a consultative selling approach. Be sure to structure the story just like a good movie or book. The character is first clueless that there is a problem, then some tragic event takes place, the character lives with the pain for a while, then finally decides to do something about it. Through trial and error the character finds the answer he’s been searching for, finally the end where all is happily ever after the problem is solved. Obviously make the story very much like your own product or service or use the story of some of your other happy clients that are as similar as possible to your prospect.

There are many ways of linking the various emotions brought up in such a story to you and your product and service. Making your story even more unique and your product or service that much different than the other sales professionals.

Ryan Camana is the lead trainer of NLP and Hypnosis for Dynamic Breakthroughs. He specializes in helping sales people and entrepreneurs learn the most effective forms of persuasive communication. Dynamic Breakthroughs mission is to empower people to take control of the unlimited potential of their minds. We improve the world by training people to be leaders in their field with the most advanced self development techniques available.