Rainmakers aren’t born, they are made. All of our research and experience shows that. And usually there is an event when someone suddenly gets it. They get an insight into selling that allows them to embrace it.

Some people have that experience early in their lives. Rainmaker and civil engineer, Steve Rush, got it one night as a ten-year old selling newspaper subscriptions door to door in Ohio. To win a contest, he had to get fifteen new customers to sign up and he was three short. For three hours he went house to house, but no one was interested. He was ready to quit, but his mother said, “Let’s try just one more.” The next three houses in a row signed up. Steve learned perseverance and the numbers game aspects of business development.

Most people get it later in their lives: Rainmaker and architect, Guy Geier, got it one day on the golf course with a client from a Japanese company. He had had little success at selling his firm’s services until that day. And he suddenly knew why. That day he realized that having the creative and technical skills and track record on similar projects weren’t enough to win. Those things might get you in front of a client or even short-listed for a project. But, in the end, prospective clients go with the firm they feel most comfortable with and that usually means they have a relationship with someone there. He realized he needed those relationships, himself, and could not delegate that part of the effort to a business developer.

A management consultant in her late thirties, whom I will call Naomi for no particular reason, was going through the motions of trying to sell without much success. Following a suggestion, she asked for a meeting with one of her clients, an executive with a Fortune 100 company based in a southern city. She began her meeting by saying, “I’m looking for some advice. I’m at the point in my career when I need to start selling business, and I want to do it the right way. You’ve seen a lot of professionals in your day, and, I’m sure, some of them have sold to you in ways you found appropriate and others didn’t. I want to know what I should be doing.”

The client reflected for a moment and said, “You should ask me more often. I know most of the leading business people in this city, and I would be happy to introduce you, now that I know it would help you. But I’m busy, so it would help if you reminded me from time to time.” And that’s when Naomi got it. Most clients aren’t offended by being asked for business, as long as it’s done appropriately. And many are glad to help, if they know you want the help. Networks are made up of people trying to help each other. But you have to ask.

Attorney Eric Bergner got it over a lunch he had arranged between two friends, one with a major cable TV company and the other a screen playwright peddling a script. Says Bergner, “The two hit it off immediately and it was obvious they would do business together and they were so appreciative. A lot has come back to me from that simple act, which I enjoyed doing. It changed my whole orientation about selling, from looking for things for me to looking for things for other people.”

A Canadian actuary made a call on a prospective client. During the meeting, the client mentioned that the agent at an insurance company, who had been assigned to her company, wasn’t returning phone calls. Knowing the company, the actuary offered to call in her behalf. The next day, when he, too, had not received a return call, he called the switchboard and learned that the man in question had quit. His voicemail had accidentally remained connected. The actuary spoke to the replacement, who promised to call the client. The actuary then called the client, himself, to explain what had happened. She said, “Gee, I mentioned the problem to the actuary we use, and he didn’t offer to help.” At that moment, the actuary got it.

Of course, some never get it. But, it’s a memorable moment when you do.

I was recently asked by a promising young professional if he should accept his firm’s offer to head up a team taking a new service to market.  To do so he would have to give up an important, but not leading position in one of the firm’s most profitable, traditional services.  He was being offered the chance to become a professional firm’s equivalent of a product champion.  A product champion at a company like Proctor & Gamble or Diageo is responsible for making her product a commercial success, be it a shampoo or a champagne.  My young friend was concerned he might be moving off the mainline of his career onto a siding.

 After asking a few question about the new service and its importance to his firm, I told him to take the offer without delay.  In giving this advice I was influenced by my experiences in a similar position early in my career. 

Service champion is a wonderful job.  If offered one, by all means accept it.  You are given your own little business, with a budget and a mandate.  Because the service is new to the firm, few of your colleagues know enough about it to meddle.  It’s all yours to make of what you can.  It creates a solid platform for more senior management positions and rainmaker status later in your career.
I am a great believer in service champions.  I guess that makes me a champion of champions.
 

Some professionals have thinking habits that make it hard for them to succeed as rainmakers. These habits result in logical errors that reflect the professionals’ inexperience. I will address specific kinds of thinking habits from time to time in this blog. The first is what I call the Build-It-And-They-Will-Come Fallacy. People making this error assume that if they make one highly visible effort, business will come. They feel surprised and almost cheated when it doesn’t.

The Brochure and Website Fallacies are, perhaps, the most common versions of this fallacy. They are especially common when professionals start a firm or a new practice. In many such cases professionals rush to create a brochure or a website and then wait for the business to come in. It doesn’t.
Here are a two more examples of such thinking:

• Attorneys from a major law firm made a presentation to the several members of a private equity firm to introduce their services, knowing that deals these people worked on produced millions of dollars in legal fees each year. When no work resulted from the pitch within three months, the head of the Corporate Practice at the law firm declared the effort a failure. Actually, the attorneys had made a good impression on the people they presented to, about all that could be expected from one meeting.
• Several partners at a management consulting firm said that giving speeches didn’t work for their firm. Over the years, they have given many speeches and never turned up any new business from it. They had done little, if any, follow-up work after the speeches, apparently waiting at the phone for calls from prospective clients, who would say, “I heard what you said last week and thought it so wonderful that I was hoping, just hoping, you could come to our company and . . .” When they had an opportunity to speak, these partners often arrived at the events shortly before they were scheduled to speak and rushed back to their clients as soon at their speech was over. When they began to treat speeches as simply one element out of many needed to build relationships with prospective clients, they began to win business.

The illogic of these people may seem laughably obvious, as I describe it here. I assure you that it wasn’t obvious to them at the time, and I see examples of smart, hard-working professionals committing the Build-It-and-They-Will-Come Fallacy all the time. Remember, there are many steps to getting a client to hire you. One event is unlikely to generate business, and if it does, recognize that this is unusual and lucky, rather than the norm. You need persistence to get new clients. 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention; building a stadium in a cornfield in Iowa is unlikely to bring legendary baseball players back from their graves and rest homes to play one last game together. I hope I haven’t broken too may hearts by passing this along.

For a good blog on presentation skills go to http://simswyeth.com/Blog/

Sims Wyeth is a presentation coach and trainer who also writes well.

I am an introvert.  If I spend a couple of hours with a crowd, I want to go to the closet at the back of my room, close the door behind me, push through the clothing to as far back as I can go, and sit there alone, in the dark and the quiet for a long time.  Being there is like drinking cool water on a summer day.

You extroverts probably think I am joking.  How little you understand the introvert!

Introversion creates challenges for the aspiring rainmaker, but don’t be dismayed.  Our research shows that many rainmakers are introverts and are as good at working a room an extrovert.

Networking, with its intense social contact, takes a toll on the introvert.  It’s not that we don’t like other people—we do!  It’s just that being with too many of them drains us.  If only we could watch the rest of you talking and mixing and having fun from a quiet place in the shadows, that would be plenty for us!  But we can’t.  There’s work to be done amongst the crowd.

Here are a few suggestions for making participation in large gatherings easier:

• Prepare a few conversation starters: On the way to an event think of three questions to ask people to start conversations.  They can be about the event or facility (Did you have the trouble I did finding this place? Can you tell me a little about this organization?) or news of the day (Did you see the debate last night?  Did you hear how the game came out?).

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He charmed everyone.  He greeted you with a glint in his eye and a laugh. His first words showed that he remembered you and made you feel special.  Being with him gave you a lift.  Spend fifteen minutes with this man and you came away all charged up. 
 

He was like everyone’s ideal kid brother, smart and spunky.  That he stood no more than five feet, five inches contributed to the impression.  I remember watching him present to a prospective client and thinking, “I sure like that kid.  I hope he gets it.”  Yet I knew he was almost twenty years older than I was.
 

I used to wonder how anyone could be that charming. That isn’t to say that he wasn’t a tough businessman.  He was.  Or that he was flawless.  He wasn’t, any more than anyone else is.  But the charm was special.
 

One day we were working in his office, when his assistant announced over the intercom that Marie Smith (I don’t remember the real name) was on the line.  He walked to the phone, paused, and put his hand up to signal me to keep quiet.  He paused again, pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, closed his eyes and remained frozen for several seconds.  Then, suddenly animated, he reached for the phone.  He laughed lightly, “Marie! It must be almost a year to the day since we saw you at . . .”
 

He had paused to prepare these few words!  That was when I realized that the personal touch, which made him so special, was something he worked at.
 

So, if you want someone to feel special, pause for a moment to recall something special about them.

After weeks of heavy travel, it feels good to be in the office again.  My chair is familiar.  My mug sits on the shelf where I left it waiting to be filled with tea.  I have easy access to old-fashioned paper files.  Briefly, there are no immediate deadlines or airplanes to catch or sales meetings to get to.  I can wade through a little of the pile of small matters that have accumulated while I have been away.  It’s all comfortable.  Too comfortable!

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From time to time I will list resources that I feel might be helpful to professionals seeking to develop more business. Here is the first such resource:

The Wiglaf Journal is a free monthly electronic magazine focusing on sales, marketing and entrepreneurship.  It is widely read, because the content is good. It is worth a few minutes to look at it (www.wiglafjournalCom/Journal/)  You can have The Wiglaf Journal delivered monthly to your electronic in-box by e-mailing jberger@jamesberger.net and providing your name, e-mail address and the words “WIGLAF SUBSCRIBE.”

Anecdotes are used for many purposes in selling professional services. We have already seen the Sadder-But-Wiser anecdote (see April 17, 2007 posting, Sadder But Wiser), which is used to show a prospective client that long ago you learned a lesson through hard experience that will serve her well today.

Rainmakers also use anecdotes to tell a prospective client in a polite compelling way that she might be wrong or to get her to look at her problem from a different perspective. We call these Watch-Your-Step anecdotes.

The late Peter Sarasohn, an attorney and a rainmaker, would use such an anecdote when asked by small business owners nearing retirement to do the legal work required to turn over the business to their children. Typically, the children would issue stock in the company and give a portion to their parents to support them in their retirement. When such a plan was proposed, Peter would tell this story:

Not long ago I met with a couple who faced a problem that I see from time to time. Much like yourselves, they had worked hard for many years to build a solid business and had turned it over to their children on terms similar to the ones you are suggesting. It started out well; the couple moved to Boca Raton and enjoyed life. But then the business took a hard turn, and the children had to close and liquidate it. The couple had no other retirement income. There wasn’t much I could do for them. That it wasn’t the children’s fault didn’t make any difference.

Note how this story was told in a way to make the listeners identify with couple in it, giving them a chance to feel first the pleasure of retirement and then the desperation of losing everything they had worked to build, including their financial security. It allowed Peter to raise a point tactfully when a more direct “I think we should consider the risks before we . . .,” might sound argumentative or patronizing. He avoids saying “I think . . .” or “I suggest . . .,” which would focus attention on himself and his brilliance. Rather, he reports what he has seen and heard of the couple’s experience and lets the story and its obvious implication for his audience stand in place of a recommendation.

During my days as a location consultant, I competed for a project to pick a low-cost location for a plant to manufacture meat slicers. Our competition was the consulting arm of a construction company which would give the location consulting work away for free, if the prospective client would also give them the construction project for the new building. The company’s sales were plummeting, as more and more customers chose cheaper foreign imports. Management planned to relocate, so that they could cut costs and drop their prices.

At my meeting with the management team, I asked, “What if relocating your plant doesn’t get your prices far enough down to allow you to compete?” I asked this question because I knew it would puzzle my audience. After all, I was the location consultant, and I was questioning the value of moving. “What do you mean?” asked the CEO and I got what I had wanted, an invitation to tell this story, rather than volunteer it:

A few years ago, Plumbing Fixtures, Inc. (name changed) was struggling to hold its own against Brazilian competitors who were undercutting their prices by fifteen percent. The head of the business unit decided to move aggressively and shifted all his manufacturing to a low cost area in Louisiana and dropped prices by twenty percent. He was a hero for about a week. By then the Brazilians had figured out what was happening and cut their prices by thirty percent. Plumbing Fixtures had created such a price umbrella that the Brazilians could drop their prices by that much money and still make a profit on the sale. Plumbing Fixtures went out of business.

On the basis of this story, instead of being hired to only look for a new location, we were hired to make two additional analyses. First, we calculated how much money could be saved by upgrading the company’s manufacturing processes. Second, we reverse engineered the competitors’ product to see how much we could save through a redesign. We found that both a new location and afresh product design were necessary to cut sufficient cost out of the business to compete with the Europeans.

Once again, in just a few sentences the weakness of the prospective client’s plan is made clear. Redefining the problem this way made the free site search offered by our competitor look hasty and without consideration about what the prospective client’s real needs were.

So, if you think a client’s solution to a problem is wrong or needlessly risky, you must tell her to watch her step. An anecdote is a good way to do that.

The words you say today can hurt you in the future.
 

Many professionals are so busy these days that they obsess about their workloads.  This is especially true of those who are just below partner level.  These people are the backbone of a professional firm.  They run many engagements and are responsible for quality control.  In a hot economy, they bill sixty to seventy hours a week, and often more.  They also have many non-billable responsibilities, such as interviewing job candidates, training recent hires, and representing their office, practice or studio on committees.  It’s no wonder they are obsessed with the workload.
 

One result of this condition is the devaluation of leads (see my posting May 7, 2007, “The Lead Glut and Its Consequences”). If they think about leads at all, professionals in these circumstances are likely to dread them, because they can’t handle additional work and dislike turning a client away.  When a client or other business contact asks how things are going, many of these people and many partners, too, are likely to respond with words like:
 

–I’ve never seen it so good in all my years in the profession.
–Our biggest need right now is for more people. 
–We’re running flat out. This is the best year we’ve ever had.
 And even:
 

–A little less work might even be a good thing.
 

I caught myself using this last sentence not long ago.
 

These statements are all true and also advertise the demand for your services, but they have a drawback:  They can discourage a contact from referring business your way.
 

If you have been in the professions for long, you know how quickly business conditions can change.  Within two or three months you can go from hardly being able to keep your head above water to standing high up on the beach with an ebb tide taking the water further and further away.  Because it takes time to convert a referral into lead and a lead into a new assignment, the claims you made two months ago that put off a referral can deprive you of a lead today, when you really need it.
 

That’s why, in good times and in bad, some savvy old professionals always say
 

–We’re always looking for more work, though . . .
 

These are words worth remembering.  True rainmakers are always looking for more work.