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.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Rain making, Rainmaker, Prospective Client, Leads. 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.