This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company.  Some of the material in this posting appears in  the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content. 

This is the fourth in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News. 4. Plan Gatherings that YOU Enjoy

You may have noticed that some recent posts are excerpted from my upcoming book, Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field. This is a new edition of my earlier, bestselling book, with about 49-percent new content.

I will make a limited number of copies available to readers of this blog who will review the book. You can post the review in your own blog and/or on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I’ll link to your blog review from this blog. Please send me an email if you’re interested.

Advance Praise for Rain Making

“Rain Making is an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry. Ford Harding provides practical, concrete advice and tools that will be beneficial to professionals in our industry regardless of their level of experience.”
Mark Mactas
Chairman and CEO of Towers Perrin

“Ford Harding’s ideas have had a big impact on how our firm thinks about marketing and selling our services. If you can only read one book on how best to develop and retain business, as well as service clients, read this one.”
Jim McTaggart
Founder of Marakon and CEO of Trinsum Group

“Ford Harding has been a thought leader in the marketing of professional services. His ideas are innovative yet very pragmatic and actionable. He provides a very clear formula for attracting new clients. This is an important resource for any professional who wants to improve his//her ability to develop new clients.”
David A. Nadler
Vice chairman of Marsh & McLennan Companies

“His guidance is practical and reveals an understanding of what it takes to sell professional services that could only be obtained by doing it and acute observation of others doing it for many years.”
Prof. Dr. H.C. Roland Berger
Founder and chairman of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants

“Ford Harding has a rare ability to deconstruct and then teach the intricacies of effective selling techniques that every professional must possess to compete in this global economy. He provides a road map enabling firms to develop processes to harness the entrepreneurial energy existing within their organizations.”
Gerard M. Creagh
President of Duff & Phelps LLC

About Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field

Rain Making can be read from cover to cover by the professional just starting the transition from doing and managing client work to selling it, or used as a reference book and refresher for the seasoned rainmaker.

It is broken into four parts that show a professional:

• How to get started at business development by building your personal brand and by meeting clients and people who will help you bring in more business.
• Build and maintain a referral network of contacts who will feed you opportunities over a career.
• Generate leads and convert them into new client work.
• Develop a personal marketing strategy.

Read Rain Making and you will see why it is often referred to as the best book available on selling professional services.

Click here to buy the book from Amazon.com

In a posting entitled The Last Interaction Seth Godin points out the importance of leaving a final good impression with a client. This is even more important if there is any question about the client’s satisfaction with the work. Often the last interaction is the receipt of a final bill for services. If the client is less than completely happy with your work, the last interaction is a reminder that he had to pay for the displeasure.

That is why it is always good to call after the last bill is mailed to confirm that the client is satisfied with the work. My colleague, Gary Pines, advocates an even stronger action–whenever possible, deliver that final bill in person.

Dick Staron was the editor of my first book.  He knew how to edit.  With many small changes; by inserting a word here and deleting one there and by flipping the sequencing of three or four others; he could take leaden prose and make it sparkle. 

On top of that, his ideas about promoting a book helped turn Rain Making: The Professional’s Guide to Attracting New Clients into a best seller.  Along the way, he taught me a lesson about selling, which I have since employed in all my own efforts to build a practice.

“Selling a book,” Dick would say, “is a lot of littles.”  He meant that getting a book noticed, talked about and sold depends on getting a reference here, a quote there and getting the book higher up in the to-be-read stack of a few influencers. 

With modification this advice holds true to building the revenue base of a professional practice.  There are legitimate big events—signing that first big client or publishing a book, for example.  But, without the small wins, the big ones will never happen.  Without the small wins, the big ones will never happen! 

Let’s consider the winning of my first big account.  I would never have won it if I had not first 1) asked to interview some executives at another firm, 2) sold a small project to one of them, 3) when this man quit, tracked him down to his new employer, 4) met a middle manager with responsibility for buying the services I offered, 5) through this man gaining access to the executive who had replaced my original contact, after he left this firm, too . . . I could go on, but I think I have made my point. 

At the time, none of these small wins looked important.  But without them I could not have won the engagement that provided eighty percent of the fees I earned during my first year in business.

If you recognize the importance of these small wins, you can use them to mark your progress in the absence of a big one.  If you are having small wins, you are likely on the way to a big one.  If not, you had best go get some.  If you are having a series of small wins at the same firm, you are probably close to winning an engagement.

The small wins can also help you go the distance to building a client base.  Use them to sustain your morale.  Celebrate them, if only silently.  Did you meet your client’s CFO?  Break open a beer, because you can’t sell him anything unless you know him.  Did you get an opportunity to speak at an association?  Have a glass of merlot, because you have just increased your credentials as an expert.  Have you . . . Well, I think you get it:  Selling a professional service requires a lot of littles.
Thank you, Dick. 

This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company.  Some of the material in this posting appears in  the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content. 

This is the third in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News.

3. Start Building Your Contacts Early 

Young professionals are often intimidated by the idea of developing new business, and initially relate the task to cold calling senior decision-makers. What they don’t realize is that their existing contacts are the best place for them to start, even if the contacts are not in a position to give them work.

A partner at a large firm told us about an informal neighborhood gathering that catapulted her career. When she had just started working at her firm, she attended a cocktail party hosted by a neighbor, who was a college trustee.

At the party, she talked with the President of the college who commented on an administrative issue he was facing. She said, “When I got back to the office, I researched the issue, sent him a summary and asked him if he would like to meet a senior partner with our firm. The three of us had lunch and he liked the senior partner. After that he hired us and five years later appointed me one of his key advisors. At the time the firm created no pressure to bring in business, but I thought here was an opportunity and went after it. It opened up doors later.”

In addition to personal contacts and school alumni networks, many of the women listed trade associations as their first focus for meeting clients. Younger professionals join trade or industry associations, but many don’t recognize the opportunities for client development.

The CEO of a New England consulting firm related how she built her business from her industry association network. Fresh out of school, she joined a group and became active on a committee. The committee leader took her under his wing and made a point of introducing her to everyone and explaining who they were and why they were important. She became chair of a committee and learned that “if you do volunteer work in an organization with people you want as clients and you do a good job, they will know that you will do a good job if they hire you.”

Another woman rainmaker explained how her network has evolved from industry associations to more senior executives. “Early on I spent a significant amount of time giving speeches to groups of people I hoped would know and remember me. I would ask clients if they were members of an association that would like to have me speak and some would call me to ask if I would. That’s where my first clients came from.

Now I get my clients primarily through referral sources from clients. My target market is senior executives of corporations. It is harder to find opportunities to contact these people and they attend fewer outside meetings, so they are harder to reach with speeches. I try to get invited to meetings at which these people are present, and the firm has meetings to which it invites these people.”
 Mimi Spangler is a partner at Harding & Company, which helps professionals learn to develop business. She has worked with consultants at many firms, both large and small. For more information, visit the company’s web site at http://www.hardingco.com/ and blog at www.hardingco.com/blog. Spangler can be reached at mspangler@hardingco.com.
 

Suzanne Lowe is asking if your professional service firm’s (PSF) Marketing and Business Development functions are operating as disconnected silos. Could these functions be more effective at collaborating and sharing accountability?

As research for her upcoming book, The Integration Imperative™: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and For All - in Professional Service Firms, she’s running four very short (3-question) surveys. If you would like to provide your input, you’ll find the link to the first survey below:

Take the short survey

I collect rainmaking stories.  There is something visceral in our fascination with a story, especially when we believe it relates to us.  It’s what primitive man must have felt when sitting around the campfire listening to the clan’s best hunter tell how he brought down a mammoth. 

The value of stories to emergency workers has been documented by Gary Klein in his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, (MIT Press, 1998).  Again and again, I hear that it is the stories I tell that really show how rain is made.  But you have to be careful with stories.

Contrary to the popular dictum, hindsight isn’t perfect.  Even if the storyteller has a good memory and is impeccably honest, she will give you a distorted version of the truth.  She cannot reduce what took hours, days or months to a story without distorting what really happened.  This is common in rainmaking stories, which often suffer from a false appearance of linearity.

A friend and client, John is a strategy consultant who has proved his rainmaking prowess at three firms.  He participated in a class I taught at one of these firms to add local color and an insider’s perspective.  On request he told the story of how he brought in (or as he said with great modesty, helped bring in) a large engagement from a prestigious client.  Justifiably, the audience found this story more interesting than mine, which were about people at different times and in different places.

One participant then commented that this story told them what they really needed to do, pick a company and go after it with a singular focus, because the demands of client work would not admit the broader effort that I had proposed. 

Of course, John had meant no such thing, but in looking back at the pursuit, he had mentioned only those things that related to the company in question.  He left out the fifteen other companies he had identified as targets when he joined the firm.  Over a year later, he had given up on some of them and was still pursuing others. His story skipped all that, creating an appearance of linearity, as if he had known from the start that the company in question would hire him.

In reality, his pursuit had been more like going through a maze, backtracking from many dead ends before finding the true path.  That story would have been a good one, too, but if John had told it he would have had to leave out pieces of the story he did tell.  Stories always simplify.

I encourage you to collect stories from rainmakers in your firm.  They will be interesting and educational, but they always leave something out.  If you remember that you are less likely to take a lesson away from a story that the teller never meant to give.

Rainmakers cast big shadows.  Even more so a group of rainmakers.  For the young professional trying to make a name for himself in the same market, this creates a problem. 

The rainmaker knows the key people in key client organizations. She maintains her influence through a mix of periodic meetings, calls and emails; participating in the right associations; writing and speaking; and doing the things that rainmakers do.  Leads come to her because of the visibility all this effort creates, because over the years she has helped perhaps two dozen people in the market find new jobs, because others have gotten promotions off the back of her professional work, and because she knows the buyer’s boss, making it easier to get approval for hiring a professional.

She has worked hard for many years to achieve preeminence and has earned every bit of it.  That she has it is good for the practice and good for the firm.  But it puts the young professional seeking a chance to make partner in a difficult place.  To move up in the firm she has to prove she can generate business.  How can she do this when opportunities are swept up by the rainmaker the way a Hoover sweeps up so much dust?

I have addressed the importance of specialization in an earlier posting (We Make Choices: Generalist or Specialist?).  Today we will consider how you can create one that will get you your place in the sun.  Some of the options you have are:

Diving Deep
Though it would be impossible to develop the rainmaker’s breadth of knowledge across a practice, the young professional can develop deeper knowledge of a niche than the rainmaker has. 

Joe Rizzo, an architect with RMJM Hillier’s education studio, became an expert in the design of libraries.  He knew the issues that librarians faced—being used as free and involuntary after-school care centers; facing a relentless movement to electronic storage of information and its impact on building design; the typically Spartan offices used by staff—so he could talk library talk with even the most sophisticated buyers. 

He knew a lot of librarians.  He spoke and wrote about library design.  Whenever anyone in the firm got a query about library design, it would be passed to Joe. Others in the firm might know more about an array of educational buildings, but no one knew more about libraries.

This kind of niche within a specialty is the differentiation most young professionals adopt. 

Stretching Wide
An accountant found he needed a niche when his firm merged with another.  No one in the new firm knew much about banks, but earlier in his career he had worked with many small banks. One-by-one these clients disappeared as they were gobbled up by larger institutions. 

As that happened, a lot of bankers from the small banks found themselves unemployed.  While working to get back into the banking market, the accountant found that these bankers were coming together to form new banks.  Because he knew the industry so well and was so service-oriented, the accountant was able to sign up three of these new banks as clients.

Over two years, he has brought in eight banks as clients of the firm.  The revenues remain small, but are growing as the banks, themselves, grow and as he methodically adds new ones.  He owns the bank niche at his firm.

Crawling Under
Sometimes the best approach is to take on work that others in the firm don’t want.  That can be work that others find too small. 

A young attorney at a large firm that does a lot of mergers and acquisitions work adopted this approach.  Instead of seeking to work on the large, prestigious matters where he would be just another associate doing bits of a large transaction, he volunteered to work on the M&A issues for smaller clients. 

On these matters, he worked closely with the partner in charge and had broader responsibilities than did his colleagues working on the prestigious matters.  As a result, he had broader experience and more client visibility than did his peers and was elected to the partnership sooner than most of them.

Traveling Far
I have worked with several professionals who based their early success on a willingness to work with clients remote from their offices.
 
Lisa works for a large pension and benefits consulting firm.  Several large firms compete in this space, so she found herself in the shadows of both the rainmakers in her own firm and of those at the other firms as well.  She was assigned to an account with its headquarters in a small city 90 minutes’ drive from her home in the suburb of big metropolis. 

She quickly learned two things. First, the client had been underserved by its previous pension and benefits firm, because no one at the firm had wanted to make the drive away from the metropolis.  The client appreciated her frequent visits. 

Second, the partners in her own firm weren’t eager to make the drive either, giving her the opportunity to have a higher profile than her peers had at accounts that they were assigned to in the big city.

She developed a simple, but astute strategy for advancing her career.  She recognized that there are several small and midsized cities within a drive or short plane ride from metropolis where she was based.  Most of these cities had one or two large companies headquartered there.  All of these corporations needed pension and benefits consulting, too.  Most of them felt under-serviced by their human resources advisors.  She focused her attentions on these accounts which welcomed her attention and led the effort to sign them up as clients of her firm.

Three years later, when the firm needed replace the retiring head of the pensions practice, Lisa had more experience working with senior executives than any of her peers.  She got the promotion.
           

This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company. Some of the material in this posting appears in the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content.

This is the second in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News.

2. Be Yourself All of the women rainmakers emphasized that success depends on not trying to be someone you’re not. Doing what comes naturally as the path of least resistance resonates in both networking and client development approaches.

Maureen Tarantello, who is in charge of account management at Watson Wyatt Worldwide in Chicago, said that she advises women at her firm to continually expand their contacts but to do so in ways that they are comfortable with. She tells them if they enjoy talking to people, do it. If the informality of this approach is painful for them, she suggests that they write articles and find other ways that play to their individual strengths.

Several of the women interviewed said that “being yourself” often translates negatively as being less direct and aggressive than men, and they encourage junior women to project more confidence and directness. Other female personality stereotypes such as being more collaborative, supportive, and helpful were viewed as positive attributes in understanding client issues and proposing the best solution.

Sometimes women rainmakers have approached things in personal ways that help them stand out from the crowd. One woman talked about a male-dominated client outing that she attended. “A group of movers and shakers in the transportation industry were on a yearly casino bus trip. The first year I was invited because of my senior client contacts, I brought margaritas. I had no problem making quick connections with many of the senior decision makers on the trip.”

Mimi Spangler is a partner at Harding & Company, which helps professionals learn to develop business. She has worked with consultants at many firms, both large and small. For more information, visit the company’s web site at http://www.hardingco.com/ and blog at www.hardingco.com/blog. Spangler can be reached at mspangler@hardingco.com.

Many professionals dislike selling, and if you do, this posting is for you.  

More accurately, this posting is for those who dislike the concept of selling, because the dislikers I am writing for have actually sold little. 

Please don’t read into that any condescension towards you for having a strong opinion about something you haven’t tried.  Everyone has such things.  (Bungie jumping comes to mind in my case.) 

But, when one of these dislikes stands in the way of career advancement or keeps you from having the control you want over your own destiny, it’s worth reconsidering from time to time.  That is what I want you to do.

When I ask professionals like yourselves if there is any selling that they can stand, most say that they enjoy selling to a client who comes to them with a problem. 

If you ask what they dislike about other selling situations, and, if you patiently tease the full story out of them, you will find that they don’t like the pushiness of selling.  They feel it is distasteful and, much worse, it requires falseness, because you pretend an interest in someone so that you can get his business. 

And that is a short step from being nice to him so that you can get his money.  With such a foul picture, it’s no wonder that those who paint it don’t want to sell.  But the selling most professionals do, that all honorable ones do, is nothing like that.

Let’s review what it is like.  Before she buys anything, a client must take two steps.   By taking Step One she determines that she needs something. 

So, for example, she may look at growth projections for her business and realize that she will have to hire more people and with more people she will need extra office space.  This, in turn, creates a need for a real estate broker, an attorney, an interior architect, and others.  

Or she may marry and realize that her current will doesn’t allocate her property to the right people.   This creates a need for a lawyer.  When she realizes she has a need, then she can take Step Two, the identification and selection of a professional to help her get what she wants.

As you probably realize, when you say that you enjoy selling to a client who comes to you with a problem, you are saying that you like selling to a buyer who has completed Step One and now is engaged in Step Two. 

What you dislike, then, is selling to a client who doesn’t realize she has a need or that she needs a professional’s help.  If that is true, please think about the following;

Many rainmakers never try to sell to a buyer who is still in Step One.  Rather, all the marketing they do; networking, publishing, speaking and all those other things; are ways to surf across the market, looking for buyers who have already reached Step Two.

This is especially true in event driven niches.  Firms selling disaster-related service have a hard time getting potential clients to talk with them, because few clients want to talk about an event they have never experienced.  Who wants to hire a forensic engineer while their buildings are all in good repair?

While some people try to sell in Step One,
Others say, “Hey, that’s no fun!’
For them the best thing to do
Is to wait till the client arrives at Step Two.

Rainmaking for these people consists of making it easier for clients at Step Two to find them.  Selling professional services isn’t about pushing people to buy something they don’t want or need.  It’s a lot closer than you might think to selling to a client who comes to your door looking for help.