Last week while visiting Canada, I picked up two examples of how rainmakers stay visible to their markets.

I stopped by to visit with a former client who is well on his way to achieving rainmaker status. Gilles, is as I will call him, is a lightly built man in his late thirties, whose intelligence and lively good spirits strike you immediately. Four years ago, he was unknown in Toronto. Since then his cultivation of his reputation has changed that dramatically. He knows that his clients and other important contacts will only remember him if they see him from time to time. Because he travels heavily, staying visible to his Toronto contacts is challenging.

When in town he has lunch with someone almost every day. This well established practice has been used by such notable rainmakers as James O. McKinsey, founder of the management consulting firm that bears his name.

During one of these lunches at a restaurant used for this purpose by many business people in the city, Gilles was seated at a table near the entrance. Two people he knew saw him there and stopped by to say hello on the way to their tables. This impressed Gilles’s guest. It also gave Gilles a brief meeting with two people he wanted to remember him.

Now, he has most of his lunches at this restaurant and always sits at the same table that other patrons pass on their way in. As often as not someone he knows sees him there and comes by the table to say hello. By the simple tactic of selecting the right seat at the right restaurant, he has increased the return on the time he spends.

Rainmakers take advantage of many such simple opportunities. Doing so is especially important to executive recruiters, because there is such a short time between the opening of a position in a company and the time a recruiter is hired. Get in front of the buyer in that brief period and you may get a search. Miss it and your chances plummet.

I have it on good authority that one of Toronto’s leading executive recruiters gets his daily exercise by walking up and down one of the most heavily trafficked streets in the city. He does this at lunchtime when the sidewalk fills with business people. And every day he stops to talk briefly with three or four people he knows. Several times a year at one of these chance encounters, the person he runs into says, “I’m so glad I ran into you! We just . . .” and he gets a search. This works because he specializes in recruiting bankers, and he walks in the financial district.

So, while Gilles sits inside, waiting for people to find him there, the recruiter walks the street outside. Where can you go to make yourself visible to clients?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Rain making, Networking. 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.