In an earlier posting, I described Build-It-and-They-Will-Come Thinking. This is a fallacious assumption held by some professionals that if you do one major effort, such as give a speech, prospective clients will come to you and hire you. To derive sales benefit from the speech you must abandon this assumption and treat the speech as just one step to acquiring a client.

Today I was reminded of another kind of erroneous thinking that reduces the success at selling professional services. I met with an actuary who had attended an association meeting a month ago. He had planned to follow up with thirty people he had met there and admitted that he hadn’t done so. I asked why not and he responded, “I haven’t got time to follow up with thirty people.” While true, this answer is logically flawed. He could at least have followed up with the most important contact he made at the event, a senior vice president at an account he was targeting. He might have even found time to follow up with five or maybe even ten. Instead, he had fallen into the trap of All-or-Nothing Thinking. Here are two more examples:

• A business developer at a Big Four accounting firm helped a partner craft a letter to be sent to the CEO of a bank. A note came back from the CEO, saying he had passed the letter on to his CFO, and suggesting that the accountant follow up there. The partner told the business developer, “You see, it didn’t work.” He had apparently defined success as immediate access to the CEO. It was get that meeting or nothing.
• A management consultant was finding the call discipline required to build a referral network onerous. Like the actuary described above, she was having difficulty finding time for making calls. “Besides,” she added, “what can I possibly have to say to all these people every month?” She had fallen into the all-or-nothing trap by thinking that she had to call everyone on her list once a month. That might be true of some of her contacts, but more infrequent intervals would be appropriate for most of them.

In my experience, this is a common kind of error. It seems so obvious that people feel embarrassed when you point out that they have made it. All three of the professionals described here are extremely smart. They just haven’t learned yet that rain making requires many, many small advances to win big every once in a while. They haven’t yet parsed the effort down to the many small steps that they can make day after day. When they do, they will be well on their way to becoming rainmakers.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Rain making, Phone Calls. 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.