To finesse a sale is to maneuver around facts that might hurt your chances of winning the prospective client’s business were she to know the whole truth. Those who know the term use it to describe words or acts which are legal but deceptive. We can legitimately call finessing a sharp practice. Or is it?
The Lowest-Common-Denominator Finesse (hereafter referred to as “the LCD Finesse”) is, perhaps, the most common. Many a rainmaker uses this finesse effectively to win work. They use it most often to make past client work seem relevant to the current prospect when she might not see it that way, if she knew the whole truth. If we are selling to a bank and have limited experience with banks, we might describe work we did at an insurance company as being for “another large financial institution.” When talking with a prospective client from a Zurich-based bank about work we did for a pharmaceutical company based in Geneva, it becomes “another large Swiss company.” By this logic, hotels and airlines are lumped together as travel-based businesses.

A little of this is innocent enough. After all, the descriptions we give are true. But we are withholding information which might make the client uncomfortable with our credentials. How far can this go before we cross the line into unethical behavior? Years ago, while pitching to a precision aircraft parts manufacturer, I referred to a former client in an anecdote as “another metalworking company.” This was an exceedingly low common denominator. The company in my story made the metal straps that tie goods to pallets to for shipping. The two companies had almost nothing in common, and the aircraft parts manufacturer would almost certainly have discounted my story, if I had told him the whole truth.

But the story did have a message, one important for the client to hear and that was relevant to his situation. Was I wrong to tell the story in a way that made it compelling to him? I am not sure. Would it have been better to tell it in a way that made the differences between his company and the one in the story blatantly clear and in doing so risk his rejection of a point that was imprortant for him to hear? That doesn’t feel right either. I can say that we did use the LCD in the story we told, he hired us and later provided us with a good reference many times.

Ann, an architect at a big firm, got her first opportunities to be the lead designer on two daycare centers. A young, working mother, herself, she developed immediate rapport with her clients. The two completed projects gave her technical knowledge of the building type that few other architects had. She knew how the requirements for bathroom capacity grew with the number of children at a center, that the space had to be designed so that no staff member could be out of sight from his colleagues with a child, and much else. The partners saw her as a strong advantage in winning additional daycare projects, and, more critically, winning bigger projects that included a daycare center. But, on the next opportunity to help sell such a project, she tried to opt out. Her reason? She didn’t want to become a specialist.

I hear this a lot. I also work with people ten years older than Ann was at the time of the events described in the preceding paragraph who have labored diligently to remain generalist. Many of these people find themselves in a difficult position. They are at the point in their careers when they are expected to do some real selling. The question is, what?

Young professionals who feel they are ready to start selling face a challenge: Their firms’ partners perceive little short-term benefit from putting them in front of a client during a sale, and the clients perceive none at all. The partners know more about handling a sales meeting, and more about almost any subject the client is likely to raise, than is the young professional. After all, the partners have been at it for years. Lacking this knowledge, the young professional has little to add, and might even say something wrong which would reduce the firm’s chances of winning.

But if you are a specialist in, let’s say, the design of day care centers or of the effect of the new tax law on insurance trusts, you do know more about that one thing than older partners. Then there is a reason to bring you to client meetings. You have something to talk about that few others can. Being a specialist makes you special. Anne, at her tender age, was being offered more opportunities in a month to sell a professional service than many would have in a year. That experience had huge value.

As you can see, I am an advocate of specialization. I am because I have seen and experienced its value. I also don’t see it as being as limiting as many do. That is because I don’t share some of the mistaken beliefs that many others have. Before ending this note, I will try to debunk three of the most pernicious ones:

Mistaken Belief #1: If I specialize, that is all I will be able to do. While this is sometimes true, often it is not. Frequently there is not enough work in the young professional’s area of specialization for them to work solely in that area. That was certainly the case with Anne. This question requires careful consideration on a case-by-case basis.

Mistaken Belief #2: If I specialize now, I won’t be able to specialize in anything else. Also untrue. There are many people who have more than one specialty. And quite a few who have more than one specialty at a time. It’s hard to develop two specialties at a time—the development usually happens sequentially—but once you have expert credentials in an area, the maintenance of your reputation is not so time consuming. You can then go out and develop credentials in a second area. If your markets for the two specialties differ, your clients for one specialty won’t even know of your other area of expertise.

Mistaken Belief #3: The leading partners in my firm aren’t narrow specialists, so there’s no benefit in my becoming one. But most of the senior partners and rainmakers in your firm where specialist, or at least what was considered a specialist at that time. That they don’t seem to be specialist now is due to another trend at professional firms, the tendency for specialists with good client skills to become generalist again as they get older.

But that’s an issue for another day.

A few rainmakers break selling rules and still get hired more times than not.  They talk too much and too much about themselves.   They stress features rather than benefits.  They arrive late for meetings.  And they get away with it! One management consultant I know will tell his client that something is red.  No, the client says, it’s green.  Yes, I agree with you, replies the consultant, it is red.  And he gets away with it!  Another professional whom I observed many times would threaten prospective clients of the immediate failure of their business, if they didn’t hire him and march to his orders.  And he got away with it!

The reasons for these aberrations, I think, are specific to each case.  The red-is-green consultant is one of the most charming people I have ever met.  People want to agree with him.  The do-as-I-say professional sold effectively only to those clients which were paramilitary in style.  His talent was finding them—so many of them.

But most of us don’t have boundless charm and don’t feel comfortable ordering our clients about, or a reputation that puts us beyond questioning.  We must listen to what they say.  We must not be arrogant or imperious.  We have to follow the rules.

Has anyone else a good example of a rainmaker who broke basic rules of selling?

Writing and publishing articles helps differentiate you from competitors and colleagues. It helps you sharpen your own thinking on a subject, making you more articulate when speaking with clients. Publishing can transform a career. I know it has transformed mine. You could say the same thing about many more prominent rainmakers, including accountant and management consultant, James O. McKinsey; management consultant, Peter Drucker; architect Phillip Johnson; engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor and many others.

While not a required activity—there are many rainmakers who have never published—publishing articles offers enough benefits that it warrants all professionals’ consideration. Those with an urge to publish find time to do so. Those who don’t are put off by the perceived time required to get something written.

This posting will show that by using a specific formula, it is relatively easy to write a short article suitable for an opinions column. The articles for such columns are almost always written by outside contributors, like you, and appear towards the back many periodicals. The columns bear such regrettable titles as As I See It, or The Last Word or My Point of View. (As a significant service to the language, political correctness has forced the abandonment of one of the worst of the column titles, One Man’s Meat.)

Many of the entries in these columns express contrarian views on some trend or happening. For example, at the height corporate scandals kicked off by the implosion of Enron, The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Cross-Selling Will Outlast Enron and Anderson (August 13, 2002: Page B2). The title captures its message. Let’s look at format for this piece.

The first paragraph links the article to a current event. This was essential for WSJ, a newspaper, but not required for a magazine. The event in this case, the sale of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s consulting business to IBM, resulted from all the bad press accounting firms with large management consulting practices were getting for cross selling. This bad press reversed a trend for big service firms like PwC to add more and more services to feed to their clients. This old, bulking-up trend and its demise were described in a couple of paragraphs, including a paragraph about how the trend was sweeping not just accounting firms, but also law firms, and human resources consulting firms.

Six short paragraphs followed which agued for cross selling as essential and, in many cases, desirable for the client as well as the service provider. One paragraph shows how innocuous a lot of cross selling is. And a final paragraph summarizes the argument and states that cross selling is here to stay.

It can be outlined as follows:

1. Introduce issue and argument
2. Link to current event and its relevance to readers.
3. Introduce counter argument
4. Discuss aspects of counter argument
   Aspect #1
   Aspect #2
   Aspect #3
   Aspect #4
5. Summary
6. Conclusion

Knowing the subject, the author found this article easy to write. Pick a subject you know well of a trend going too far and see if you can make up a similar outline.
Let’s say, for example, that were predictions of the demise of mid-sized firms in your profession, and that you felt that this concern was exaggerated. Your opinion piece would be structure as follows.

1. Introduce Issue: Predictions of disappearance of mid-sized firms are both common and exaggerated. Such firms will be around for a long time.
2. Link to event: The sale of Firm X reinforced the claims that mid-sized firm can’t possibly compete with large ones.
3. Counter Argument: These predications are made periodically by people who don’t understand the profession. Reasons to feel that mid-sized firms will survive include:
   - Argument #1, Low Barriers to Entry
   - Argument #2, Room for Niche Players Where Big Firms Can’t Compete
   - Argument #3, Mid-sized Firms Often Sold as Exit Strategy of Founding Partners, but Historically a Few Firms Succeed at Growing into Large Ones
4. Summary: Predictions of demise of mid-sized firms are exaggerated
5. Conclusion: Clients, job seekers and suppliers to midsized firm need not be concerned about their long-term viability.

Now try to do the same with a claim that you disagree with. If you want to send a draft of your article for me to review and send back with annotations, please feel free to send me a copy. Please include the words “Article for Review” in the title of what you send me. I will be happy to review and return it to you.

Remember to keep it short. Opinions pieces typically run between 750 words (about the length of this posting) and 1,000 words.

I am back from vacation and will return to my normal two postings a week starting Tuesday, August 21.

Yesterday I saw George and Ira Gershwin’s musical, My One and Only, in Stratford, Ontario. The show must have collected every professional tap dancer in Canada. The twenty-person cast tapped its way through three delightful hours.

Tap dancing may be alive and well in Stratford this summer, but it’s on the decline elsewhere. For many of us, the last tap dancer we have seen was Gregory Hines, and there is a whole generation which has never heard of the man. Today, we use the term, “tap dancing,” metaphorically far more often than we use it to describe a real dance. And that lead me to wonder, why do we use the term “tap dancing?”

The metaphors we choose tell a lot about our view of whatever it is we use them to describe. “Tap dancing” is a good example. We use it to describe the deft handling of a risky and difficult inquiry. We might say, for example, ”You really had to tap dance your way out of that one.” In this sense it connotes survival of a near disaster. When used this way, it often draws a laugh, usually a laugh of relief and the pleasure of having gotten away with something. That’s because it may also suggest a less than full disclosure of the facts or at least walking a fine line between truth and misrepresentation.

Usually, it is used as a complement, though it can have a negative slant when used to describe how a person maneuvered himself out of a mess he had needlessly gotten himself into.

The term interests me because it is used so frequently to describe what happens in a difficult sales meeting. It might be used to describe the answers to such difficult questions as:

1. Isn’t it true that XYZ Corporation replaced you midstream on their project?
2. Why should we buy the same solution from you that you have already given to our competitors?
3. Do you mean that you have never done a project like this one before?

The ability to address questions like these, especially when unexpected, is highly valued by professionals. What does the choice of “tap dancing” tell us about that talent? I believe that is tells us the following:

1. It requires skill. This is true of both the dance, itself, and the verbal ability. Many may aspire but few can do it.
2. It is done under pressure before an audience. Unlike some forms of dancing, tap dancing is used almost exclusively as performing art. You do it under a spotlight before an audience. A critical audience is essential to metaphorical tap dancing, too.
3. It is hard work. Other dances may disguise hard work behind smoothness and grace, but tap dancing is obviously physically difficult. A difficult conversation with a prospective client at a sales meeting is also exhausting;
4. There is a competitive aspect to it. Unlike other forms of dancing, competition is almost always present when tap dancing. The competition between the lead and another actor-dancer that I saw so recently in My One and Only is repeated in form again and again when tap dancing is featured. A challenge and a response is essential to the application of the term to a conversation between two people, as well. While the client tries to catch him, the professional dances furiously to respond acceptably to each question.

There is a school of thought that tap dancing at a sales meeting isn’t necessary, because a professional is always open with clients. I lean in that direction, too. But I have tap danced through a sales meeting or two in my years as a professional and in doing so, have won some work that helped the client achieve her objectives and helped the firm I was with avoid a layoff. And I have enjoyed the admiration that others in the firm expressed afterwards.

Yes, we should always be honest with our clients. But we also should put our firms before them in the best fair light. That sometimes requires tap dancing. I would wager heavily that those who learn to tap dance make partner more often than those who only know how to waltz.

All of which leads me to conclude that when a rainmaker dances to make rain, it is sometimes a tap dance.

A former client called me to discuss the loss to a competitor of an assignment she had set her heart on winning. She had been told that the competitor was seen as a better fit with the company’s collaborative culture. “It’s not true! I know those people,” she said. The presentation had seemed to go well and she had sensed that the selection committee had been favorably impressed.
There was one awkward moment. She had been asked how updates on progress would be handled. “I told them how we do it, and one of the committee members started pushing for more frequent updates. I said we could do that, though I wasn’t sure too many more were warranted, given the amount of information that we were likely to have to pass on.” She wasn’t sure who the man was.

There are several possible missteps in this description, but what I expect hurt her most was trying to answer a boomerang question. Beware of the boomerang questions. They can cost you the sale.

A boomerang question is one the speaker asks you, hoping that you will ask the same question of him. For example, imagine you are in a sales meeting with senior people from the client organization. One of them comes from the staff of that part of the organization you work with most closely, be that the finance, human resources, information technology, legal or some other department. This person is ten years older than you and will have day-to-day responsibility for the matter you hope to help with. We will call her the engagement manager. You are describing your team, when she asks, “Typically, what is the role of the engagement manager when you work on this kind of issue?”

Answer this question at your peril! A rainmaker will immidiately bass the question back to th client. The chances are high that the prospective client doesn’t want you to answer. Instead she wants to be heard on the subject. Give the wrong answer and you will find yourself in an argument or worse have created a silent enemy who will kill your chances of winning once you are out of the room. An appropriate response is, “That depends a lot on the engagement manager. Do you have any thoughts on the subject?”

Boomerang questions are a subset of a larger group, called recognition questions, used by speakers when they want to state an opinion. Other kinds of recognition questions are much easier to identify. Often they are statements introduced with a short phrase like, “Isn’t it true that . . .” Boomerang questions are a special case, because they are so much harder to recognize.

Here are two more examples:

1. During a discussion of how you will do the required work, someone says, “Have you ever tried . . .?” Look at the prospective client. Does his facial expression suggest that this is an inquiry or does it suggest he has something he wants to say?
2. After meeting the president and CFO of the prospective client, the young staff members who first called and screened you by telephone, asks, “How do you think the meeting went?” You have sensed all along that he wants you to win. Does he really want your opinions about how the meeting went or does he have something to tell you and is simply being polite by starting the discussion this way.

Boomerang questions are common. You probably use them, yourself. (Honey, do you have any plans for Friday evening?) But don’t . . . don’t ever . . . confuse them with a request for information.

I am off on vacation for the next two weeks.  I will try to write a post at least once a week, but may not be able to.  (Or, I hope, having too much fun goofing off to care.)  My regular two posts a week will resume on Tuesday, August 21.

Ford Harding

Helping other professionals learn to sell gives me the opportunity to hear good ideas for developing business. Most of these ideas are simple adaptations of well-known techniques. Simplicity is a good thing for busy professionals, and there are no extra points for creativity. Any technique that is ethical and that works and that is affordable is worth considering.

I heard of one such idea today from an accountant and rainmaker who works for a litigation support firm. I call it the Post-Event Event, and he said I could share it with you. It is a way to increase the benefits of attending a professional association meeting. These events are good places to meet many potential clients and other worthwhile contacts rapidly, without having to get past a gatekeeper. But working the room to meet people will be wasted unless you follow up with them later and so initiate a relationship. There’s the rub; it isn’t always easy to come up with a plausible reason for maintaining contact. That’s where the Post-Event Event comes in.

Say, for example, that you are from Chicago attending an annual meeting of a professional association being held in San Antonio. Reviewing the list of expected attendees, you identify 14 people from the Chicago area that you want to meet. You plan a dinner in Chicago with some educational content for roughly one month after the association meeting. When you meet with one of your targets and the conversation goes well, you invite him or her to the dinner, saying that a written invitation will follow. If the initial conversation is cooler and you feel that an immediate invitation would be too forward, you send it in writing after the association meeting.

If you see someone two or three times in a few months at an association meeting and then break bread with him for several hours a month later, your relationship is well underway. Of course, the Post-Event Event could be a golf outing or seats at a baseball game.

Cool idea. Simple and effective.