At a conference the other day I set myself the task of spending time with one of the speakers after a breakout session which was attended by about 40 people. At the end of the workshop, eight people lined up to talk with the speaker, and he gave each of them a minute or two of his time. Unlike the others, I spent almost twenty minutes with him, enough time to come up with a reason to follow up next week. And I owe it all to Dennis Donovan.

Many years ago, when I was transferred east to run the eastern regional office of the firm I was with, Dennis’s firm was our chief competitor. It was taking business from us left and right. But it wasn’t really his firm that was beating us; it was Dennis. During my first months on the job, I had my head handed to me seven competitive presentations in a row. Dennis won all of them.

So, I went to school on him. One of my first efforts was to attend a professional association’s annual meeting where I could meet a lot of clients. Dennis was there, too, and had obviously been coming to the meetings for several years. He could really work a room, but what most intrigued me was how he worked the speakers, who tended to be senior people with a lot of influence. This is what he did:

He would arrive early at the room for the breakout session and take a front row seat directly across from the speaker. During the entire workshop, he would give the speaker full attention. At the end of the session, when the speaker asked for questions and there was the usual awkward pause, Dennis would raise his hand. He said his name and the name of his firm and then lobbed an easy question that gave the speaker a chance to look smart.

At the end of the workshop, most of the audience shuffled out to get coffee and five or six lined up to talk with the speaker. But Dennis didn’t move. He sat patiently scribbling a few notes, until the last person in line got her time with the speaker. Then Dennis got up and added himself to the end of the line. When his turn came to talk with the speaker, the speaker saw that Dennis was the last in line and so felt no need to rush to get to someone behind him. So the speaker took his time with Dennis, and, still conversing casually, they would walk out of the room together. He did this with speaker after speaker.

And, I’ve been doing the same thing ever since. Thank you, Dennis.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Rainmaker, Rainmaker Story, Working a Room. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.