The Mistake Bank has just posted two podcasts with me. The first is a story that taught me there can be pitfalls in sharing the good side and bad side of things with a reporter.
The second is on the profound teachings I received from a prospect who simply wouldn’t call me back.
You can find them both on this Shoptalk post.
Here are some rhetorical questions about selling. Everyone in sales has asked themselves at least some of these questions at one time or another. Unanswered these questions can be demotivating. It may be helpful to have a place where you can find the answer.
I’ll answer the next six questions in an upcoming blog post.
1> Why bother making long-term relationship development calls when the probability that any one of them will result in new work rounds to zero?
Why? Because, if you make enough of them, the cumulative probability that someone you talk to will hire you is high.
2> Why bother calling an old client when our contact there knows what we do and where to find us?
Why? Because if we don’t, he may give his business to someone who talks to him from time to time and shows an interest in him and reminds this busy and sometimes distracted client of what her firm does.
3> Why bother going to an association meeting when I hate doing it and am no good at small talk?
Why? Because it is a highly efficient way to meet and catch up with many market contacts. Also, because networkers know that there is no such thing as small talk; there is only business talk and relationship talk. And finally, because you don’t have to be good at small talk. You need to listen to other people, so that you learn about them.
4> Why bother inviting more than a couple of people to the firm open house, when most people don’t want to come and when no one decides to buy our kinds of services based on having attended a party?
Why? Because if they don’t want to come, they will decline, and then you can ask how they are doing, and who knows what you will learn? Also because more people probably want to come than you imagine, but they can’t come unless invited. And finally, because some will hire us if they know us and like us and trust us which will result from many small steps, such as this invitation.
5> Why bother building a relationship beyond our current assignment with people my age in a client organization, when they don’t decide what firm to hire?
Why? Because they will move up the organizational ladder over time, just as you hope to, and if you stay in touch with them with even one call a year, you will have a much better chance of doing business with than if you drop them for ten years and only show interest in them again when they have become important.
6> Why bother calling former clients when we have so much work already that we couldn’t deal with another matter if one of them wanted us to. Or, why bother calling former clients when we know that none of them will have any work for us until the economy improves?
Why? Because when the economy turns down you will have a better chance of getting what little business there is, if you have shown an interest in them in good times. Because we need to be first in line when they do have work to offer.
You have just delivered a speech on the effect of the new tax law on employment expenses that packed the emotional wallop of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Had a Dream speech.
The association audience rose to clap, whistle and cheer, calling you back for an encore. You gave them some quick insights into increasing deductions for charitable donations, which was followed by over five minutes of heartfelt applause, forcing you to the podium three times to wave and bow.
Later, after the high from presenting had worn off, you asked one of the conference organizers for a list of people who had attended your session. She told you that the organization didn’t keep track of attendance at the smaller breakout sessions. During the following week you hoped for calls from members of the audience, but they never came.
You never knew it, but three of the attendees intended to call you, but didn’t get around to it. Six months later, a fourth thought of calling after arguing with her tax advisor, but couldn’t remember your name. The other sixteen people who attended the breakout session never thought of you again.
Though the audience was smaller than you remembered it, had you actually talked with the four people who thought about calling you, you would have achieved an impressive twenty percent follow-up rate.
After giving a speech, if you don’t follow up with attendees, your chances of converting any of them into clients drops to low single digits. But, you can’t follow up with them unless you know who they are. That means you have to get their names and contact information and often, as in our example, the organizers of the event can’t tell you who was there.
Withhold Slides – Not Always a Good Idea
Speakers have developed a number of ways to get the information they need. Many withhold copies of their slides before and at the event and then offer to send them to anyone in the audience who provides a business card.
Though easy and obvious, this approach has several drawbacks. First, it frustrates those attendees who want to take notes on hard copy of your materials. This clearly runs counter to your goals, and, lest you forget, the goals of the conference organizers who have given you this opportunity. It will also be ineffective, if you allow the sponsoring organization to post your slides on its website, providing the attendees an alternative access. Denying your hosts the use of your materials will frustrate them a second time.
Offer Additional Materials
You can avoid these problems by providing copies of your slides at the event and then offering additional materials, such as a whitepaper, to anyone who leaves a business card. Of course, someone will have to develop the whitepaper—a big increase in the work required to prepare. Most firms post such documents on their websites for all to see, anyway.
Pass out an Attendance Sheet
More artful speakers prepare an attendance sheet, with columns for each attendee’s name, company, email address and phone number. A few minutes before the session is scheduled to start, the speaker or her colleague gives the sheet on a clipboard to someone in the front row and asks him to sign in and pass it on. At the end of the session, she collects the sheet from wherever it has been left in the back of the room. If you ask, the sponsors of the event may discourage this tactic. It doesn’t work well for large audiences.
Pass out a Survey
During my days as a location consultant; helping companies select places for factories, offices, and research labs; I gave a presentation to a group of human resource officers on labor markets. It was at the peak of an economic boom with labor shortages in many areas. At the beginning of the presentation, I passed out a ten question survey of how companies were dealing with tight labor markets. There was a place at the bottom for participants to provide contact information to which I could send the survey results. That information was what I was after.
Better still, Question #3 asked how the respondents’ companies would address the labor shortage. They were asked to mark all the things they would do from a list that included raising wages, lowering hiring standards, advertising more heavily and other tactics. Among the tactics was move operations to a new location. Everyone who indicated that her firm was planning to use that tactic was a potential user of our services. I still feel a bit smug about that one.
Q: In earlier postings you have described formulas professionals can use to write an article efficiently. Are there any others?
A: An interview format can be effective.
Q: But don’t you have to wait around for a journalist to find and then interview you or convince some journalist to? And even then don’t you sacrifice a lot of control over the piece?
A: Not necessarily. In my experience, though the journalist sometimes seeks out the expert, as likely as not it was the subject of the interview who sought out the journal. Three times I have interviewed colleagues and once wrote out a series of questions and silently interviewed myself, typing my answers into my laptop. All four interviews were published in reputable journals.
Q: Is there an ethical issue here?
A: I don’t think so. As long as the answers are honest, I’m not sure it matters who asked the questions. The publications didn’t name someone else as the interviewer. The format does imply that you have some authority on a subject—a good thing—but so does a bylined article. And most likely, you do have some authority on the subject of the interview
Q: Are there advantages to the interview format?
A: It’s engages the reader who can scan the questions and dip in to read the answers that interest her. Its loose structure allows you to wander across an array of topics not possible within the development of a theme required in bylined pieces. The questions can change the direction of the piece more abruptly than is possible in an article.
Q: What about the time commitment?
A: It usually takes less time to write than a traditional article.
Q: How does one go about writing one?
A: It’s quite simple. You sit down alone or with colleagues and develop a list of questions. Include both those the clients frequently ask and some of those you wish they would ask. Sort them by subject. Winnow them down and then write down your answers.
Q: Are there any disadvantages?
A: Yes. Many journals won’t accept a piece in this format. Those that do are amazingly diverse, from blogs to trade journals to large circulation publications.
Q: Do you have an example of another blog posting or other electronic media use of this format?
A: Yes. Take a look at my posting, He Talks Too Much. Suzanne Lowe uses this format in her newsletter The Marketplace Master™. Michael McLaughlin does, too in Management Consulting News. It’s a flexible format enhances your reputation, and that allows you to put something together fast. What more could you ask for?
For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition
“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)
Many thanks for two people who reviewed the new edition of Rain Making.
First, to Emily Granstaff-Rice of the Young Architects Forum , which is organized to address issues of particular importance to recently licensed architects (licensed 10 years or fewer). You may read her review here, and learn more about the Young Architect’s Forum here.
And second, thanks to Tim Klabunde, whose review is in this recent issue of the Society for Marketing Professional Services of DC book club. Tim also posted the review in his blog, cofebuz.com.
Most rainmakers work large networks. The size of the networks varies with the profession—executive recruiters who sell a lot of searches in a year need more contacts than do actuaries with their evergreen services—but networks over of 1,000 are common enough.
With that many contacts, most of the relationships by necessity are . . . well . . . shallow.
Shallow when modifying relationships has distinctly negative connotations. Yet, we all have relationships that, though not deep, are good and sustaining in their own way. This is not to deny the importance of deep relationships. Rather, I bring this up, because I sometimes work with professionals who are so focused on deep relationships that they forget the value they can give and receive from ones that will never be deep.
The characteristics of a good, though not-deep relationship include mutual respect as people and as professionals and commitment to help each other, if in limited ways. They do not need to include shared interests beyond the narrow field in which the two people network together.
At this level the born-again Christian and the atheist give to each other and get back. The sports nut and the ballet buff work to make each others’ lives better. People whose countrymen are at each others’ throats look out for each others’ welfare.
This is not a utopian vision. It exists in many heavily networked markets. It is not a formula for world peace, but can make our lives more interesting and rewarding.
Remember one more thing about these less than profound relationships: Anyone who has been out of work or had a personal crisis learns that it is not always the people you expected to who help you the most. Sometimes the deep relationships are not as deep as we had thought and some of the shallow ones aren’t so shallow.
I recently had a conversation with John Caddell of Shop Talk, a blog on marketing strategy and management.
Among the things we discussed was the fact that most professional services people are hired for their native intelligence, critical thinking skills, etc., and not for their sales competence. This results in an often painful transition when these folks are asked to start selling.
Listen to the podcast at Shop Talk.
“I find the business development and sales process a mystery. I don’t have a handle on it. I don’t feel like I can control the outcome.”
These are the words of a human resources consultant whom I will call Charlie. A smart and talented man of about 40 with an MBA, he had successfully changed careers and been selected to help turn a successful regional practice into a national one. This marked him as a candidate for rapid advancement at the firm.
He is well aware that advancement along this fast track will hinge on his ability to bring in business and, at his own expense, has taken a well-reputed sales course that is open to the public. He learned useful things there, but clearly something is missing.
Our firm works with many professionals in similar straits. These are full-time deliverers of their firms’ services, who must learn to sell, often at levels equivalent to or higher than is expected of dedicated salespeople in non-professional firms. It is the making or breaking of many careers.
So what’s missing? If Charlie is to gain control of his professional life, he must first identify the factors that will determine his success at business development. Being clear about his goals will allow him to focus his scarce business development hours on the right things. That is why Harding & Company coaches spend so much time on goal clarity at the beginning of an assignment.
For Charlie, as it is for many others, it comes down to:
This is a lot to learn, but well within the range of the possible. Now that we have a clear picture of what he needs, we can set about helping him regain a sense of control of his professional destiny. The first step in becoming a rainmaker is a clear diagnosis of what you need to learn.
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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin
I have been reading Shawn Callahan’s blog ever since he commented on one of my early posts, Sadder but Wiser, about the use of an anecdote to show you had really learned something. The Anecdote is a well-known blog, one seen as successful. Among blogs it has a Google page rank of five, something for the rest of us to aspire to. So, I thought it might be useful to see if he has turned up any business through it.
Shawn’s firm, Anecdote, consults on the use of business narrative and collaboration techniques “to redesign and improve the way people learn, share information, retain knowledge and build resolve to make changes in the workplace.” Asked what that means, he gave this example:
One of our clients is a leading financial institution and they have just completed an organizational culture inventory. These survey instruments can be a little dry and difficult to understand so we are helping them collect stories that illustrate the culture and then working with people in the company to design and implement initiatives that will shape their organizational culture.
The firm has served many large corporations and departments of the Australian government.
Shawn has been blogging since 2002, the Pleistocene by blog standards, and The Anecdote blog is his third, so he had two earlier ones to shake the ticks out of his approach. That accounts, in part, for its professional look and content. The Anecdote dates back to November 2004.
Callahan reports that he gets lots of leads traceable to the blog. Because I have not found many blogs that generate a significant number of leads for a professional firm, this becomes an important case. Here are the reasons that I think he has been more successful than so many others.
First, he had the insight to get in early and the persistence to keep at it. Yes, I mean that the blog’s high productivity probably results, in part, from its age, a factor of much importance in a network, as described by Albert-Lázlo Barabási in Linked: The New Science of Networks [Perseus Publishing 2002].
Second, it is also, in Barabási‘s terms fitter, because it has masses of content and lots of links. Type in “knowledge strategy,” “business narrative” or “storytelling training” into Google and you will find Anecdote on the first page.
More importantly type these terms in with a geographic location such as Melbourne, Canberra or Australia and it’s number one. That this may be a more significant differentiator in Australia than it would be in the US or Europe, because the nearest alternative, outside resources are likely to be a ten-hour plane ride away, does not diminish what Shawn and his colleagues have done. We all must adapt what we do to our local conditions for better or for worse. I mention it because each of us must determine what will make our blogs fit in our market places, meaning we cannot expect to succeed in exactly the way he did, using his approach as a recipe. Remember that Callahan had two blogs prior to this one. That experience undoubtedly helped him make this one fitter from the start. We, too, will have to do some experimenting.
The third reason his blog is so successful has to do not so much with the blog, itself, as it does how Shawn takes inquiries he receives on it and turns them into consulting assignments. Turning an inquiry from someone who has first heard about you on the web into new business costing the client a large sum is a big aspiration for a professional and a bigger increase in commitment than most people buying services are willing to make.
Callahan and his colleagues have addressed this problem by inserting a step between the client making a query on the basis of something read on the blog and asking him to sign for a full-blown consulting engagement.
In my book, Cross-Selling Success, I call this a portal service. In Anecdote’s case, it takes the form of courses that the representative of an organization can attend for a modest fee. During the course, the consultants get to show what they can do and what they would be like to work with. They also learn a lot about the client and its issues. After the client and the consultants take this small step together, both have learned a lot about each other and the client is more likely to sign up The Anecdote team to help them run their own business narrative projects.
It took between two and three years for the blog to evolve into an effective lead generator. It proved valuable in other ways earlier. Shawn praises the discipline it creates to get ideas down on paper and finds it a useful place to store and access ideas and information, a consultant’s stock in trade. Says Callaghan, “I often send links to specific blog posts to clients and prospects to keep in contact and show we care about them and their business.”
It’s not all fun. Like other bloggers, he feels the stress of perpetual demand for content (I can identify with Shawn’s concern: I feel that my blog sits at my feet all day, moaning, “Feed me. Feed me.”)
To address this problem, he has developed a set of posting categories: the quick link and short comment; the mini idea (a couple of paragraphs); the foundational idea (4-10 paragraphs). Assigning ideas he has for posting gives him a sense of how much time he must devote to producing the postings. Keeping his posts short, he can distribute ideas over more days When there is nothing substantial to say, he links to other people’s blogs which not only provides content for his readers, it also increases his social network.
In spite of the demands, Shawn is clearly hooked on blogging. He says, “I really love blogging because the more I think about how things connect, the more connections I make. The blog posts become conversation topics and you are rarely lost for something interesting to say while at the same time you become attentive and mindful for new ideas and perspectives.”
Here are some valuable takeaways from Shawn:
And, now that I’ve had my jag for the day, I can stop writing.
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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin
An elevator speech is supposed to be the description of your services that you would give to a prospective client who is held captive in a descending elevator for thirty seconds. I have never tried it on an elevator and don’t know anyone who has.
Assuming for the moment that you can rendezvous with a client for such a ride, that the elevator is empty enough that you aren’t looking at the back of the client’s head, a mere inch in front of your own, and that the client is in a particularly generous mood—all of which pretty much exclude this from occurring in New York City—it would be useful to have something ready to say. And, yes, there are other situations when a concise description of what you do is helpful to have on call.
Let’s look at one elevator speech to see what we can learn from it. I have changed it slightly from the words I was given to protect the innocent, but it is essentially the same:
We use proven group psychological techniques to reconfigure and improve the way people communicate, associate and collaborate to ensure dedication to change.
This example shows what is wrong with many elevator speeches. It tells how the firm does its work (. . . proven group psychological techniques . . .) when it should only tell what the firm does and how the client benefits from it.
The client won’t be interested in how you do your work until she is considering hiring you. It is abstract to the level of incomprehensibility. Each word, one suspects, was carefully chosen because of some nuance of meaning not shared with us. Being abstract and filled with long words that are hard to absorb it is unmemorable. As the client steps across the threshold of the elevator, she purges it from her mind.
And I hate all the “-ates.” They annoy me.
Surely, that isn’t what an elevator speech is supposed to be.
Instead, it should be:
Benefits Focused: Until the prospective client grasps how she will benefit from your service, she won’t be interested in how you do your work. Imagine an endodontist in an elevator describing the superior features of his approach to root canal work, when your teeth are in good shape. Chances are you wouldn’t have much interest.
Concrete: It must use words that conjure up physical objects.
Easily Understood: It should use short, common words, as much as possible. So, for example, we might be able to replace communicate with talk and replace collaborate and associate with work together.
Memorable: Words describing simple actions are memorable, because they create a little video in our mind’s eye.
Professional: This is not the place to be cute.
How about:
We help people embrace the need for change, whether it be for a new technology, for a turnaround, for a new strategy or for some other cause. Then we help these same people bring the needed change about, whether working in teams or as individuals. For example, we helped a luxury hotel chain turn around a reputation for poor service by helping its staff members change the way they responded to guests’ requests for help.
Do you understand what this firm does now? If so, I will let you off the elevator and you can go home.
Ford Harding is the founder and President of Harding & Company, helping management consultants, public relations specialists, accountants, architects, attorneys, executive recruiters and engineers win new clients. The author of a number of books, he often writes for publications such as the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Consulting to Management. More on Ford Harding.
Creating Rainmakers: The Manager's Guide to Training Professionals to Attract New Clients
New 2008 edition:
Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field
Cross-Selling Success: A Rainmaker's Guide to Professional Account Development
