To be published November 2012 by McGraw-Hill
How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett
Lessons from the World’s Greatest Dealmaker
Warren Way #1. “Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America,” Warren Buffett told his stockholders in 2011.
There are many books available on Warren Buffett as an investor and an equal amount on negotiating a deal. But How to Close A Deal Like Warren Buffett by Tom Searcy and Henry DeVries (McGraw-Hill, Nov. 2012) is the first book that analyzes the moves Buffett makes when making a deal and let’s readers find out how they can do it too.
If you want to know how to make a deal, nobody does it better than Warren Buffett. Here’s why:
- Warren Buffett is famous for doing mega-money deals with as little information as a few pages of business plans and the standard financials a company would submit to a bank to qualify for a loan.
- For those dealmakers on a quest to improve, the book offers a special kind of wisdom pulled from his most famous deals. This book deconstructs the Buffett blueprint for deal making and gives readers a wealth of Warren wisdom along the way.
- When others fled to the sidelines, Warren Buffett was still in the deal-making game. This is a time of rapid changes in the marketplace, and also of great opportunities for those willing to follow Buffett’s lead and make deals regardless of economic ups and downs.
- Dealmakers today must get really good at commoditized transactional deals and fight over market share, or grab market share by differentiating so they can close really big deals. This book teaches the reader the Warren Buffett way of how to do just that.
The targeted readers for this book are the 45 million business owners, entrepreneurs, sales professionals and those in related occupations whose businesses live and die by getting money to flow toward the opportunities they represent.
The book includes many case histories of deals that illustrate important lessons about how to make a deal like Warren Buffett. With each of the book’s 19 major lessons, readers also get some specific thoughts on how to put the lesson into practice. No book about Warren Buffett would be complete without a generous amount of the wit and wisdom of the world’s greatest dealmaker.
About the Authors: Former CEOs Tom Searcy and Henry DeVries are foremost experts on key account sales strategy. With his sales strategy company Hunt Big Sales, Tom has helped clients land more than $5 billion in deals. Tom writes weekly columns for Inc.com and CBS MoneyWatch. Henry, the ex-head of an Ad Age 500 agency, is on the marketing faculty and is the assistant dean of continuing education at the Univ. of Calif. San Diego. He writes a weekly column for the UT San Diego daily newspaper and co-authors a column on making deals with Tom for Forbes.com.