Suzanne Lowe is conducting another one-minute survey for her upcoming book. The title of this survey is “Are Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut?”

The professional services marketplace is rapidly changing, but many professional service firms (PSFs) have yet to keep pace by evolving the functional scope of their non-revenue generating Marketers and Business Developers.

We’re told many Marketers feel they’re treated like ‘cruise directors,’ stuck continuously putting out non-strategic fires. Their Business Development counterparts feel stuck, too, in an incessant ‘shut-up-and-get-me-a-meeting’ mode.

Take this survey if you would like to find out how your professional firm compares to other PSFs at working to evolve the functional scope of their Marketing and Business Development positions.

If you’re interested in the results of her first one-minute survey, see her blog post: Hiring fee-earners who WANT to Market and Sell.

We all have a web presence that others can use to assess our suitability as providers, alliance partners and clients.  It is increasingly important to monitor that presence so that we can manage it. 

One way is to use the free Google Alerts service. Set it up to search your name, your firm, and other search terms and get emails when something new is posted.

The free service doesn’t catch everything, however. If you need deeper searches, use the paid GoogleAlerts service, which even catches obscure web mentions. You’d be surprised at what it uncovers. Like the free service, it sends you an email with results.

As Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal notes, “Once information finds its way online, it’s almost impossible to get it off.” His blog post When the Internet Turns Against You contains some tips for what to do when you find negative information about you or your firm.

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

7. Keep in Touch with Your Clients

Existing and past clients are every rainmaker’s largest source of new business. A partner in a regional consulting firm commented, “I learned early on that the best source of business was existing clients. I developed relationships with people at my level at client companies. As they moved up the corporate ladder and as I moved up the firm ladder, I developed the trust and relationship that resulted in them calling me when they had issues. Some moved to other companies and would call me, and this brought in new clients. After ten years I had a strong base from this source.”

While following an existing client from one account to another was typically reported as a successful strategy, that scenario can present opportunities and challenges. “You always want a lot of relationships at a client, so that if a contact leaves, you have other relationships.” Another less proactive rainmaker indicated what she does when her contacts leave, “My client moves their people around a lot. I stay in touch with the people who moved and forge a relationship with the new ones who replaced them.”
Staying in touch with clients is easy when a project is underway and seems difficult otherwise. Women rainmakers are disciplined at finding meaningful ways to maintain their visibility with past clients. They create “reasons to meet.”

A practice leader from a New York City consulting firm pointed out, “I never do a meeting without bringing something new, so there is always something fresh. I try to anticipate what they will need six months from now and so can lead the thinking. I get ideas from things I read or from talking to people in their organization or talking to other colleagues.”
A partner from the same firm advised, “Make sure that you don’t get confined by the scope of work you are doing for the client. You need to be aware of industry and company issues that are likely to impact them. That is a good way to find opportunities for new business.”

Specifically how women rainmakers keep in touch with clients depends on their own personal preferences and style. Ruth Ford, retired Principal of Xroads Solutions Group said, “My approach is primarily through business oriented activities as opposed to personal or social ones and being extraordinarily helpful and responsive. I use meals as a key avenue; everyone needs to eat.

Lunch is the norm but I have found that very busy people would rather do breakfast since it is hard for them to guarantee that they can take a break in the middle of the day (or would rather go to the gym if they have some time). Knowing this about my contacts gives immediate insight into them as an individual as well. Dinner to me is when I pass a certain threshold where my client or contact is willing to give personal time.”

Another commented, “I have to spend a lot of time keeping in contact with the people I already know. Often I call just to say hi because we haven’t talked for a while. Sometimes I use our company publication as a vehicle and call to ask if they got it and ask what they think. We do breakfast seminars and I see people there that I haven’t seen in years and meet new ones. I call to follow up and get feedback and ask if there is any way I can help them.”

The rainmakers we talked to said they don’t rely on a firm’s mass mailings, webcasts, or events. Capitalizing on impromptu events is a more frequent avenue to reconnect with contacts.

For example, one rainmaker said that a consultant friend gave her a book that he had just published. She liked the book and thought it had some helpful points for several of her clients. Although the book focused on a different service offering than hers, she asked the consultant for a box of his books to distribute to her clients. When he asked what was in it for her since it wasn’t what she did, she replied, “It was a good book, and I thought it would just be helpful for them.” 
 

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.
 

Working for a large firm allows you the opportunity to use firm marketing efforts as excuses to call clients, prospective clients and other important contacts.

Rainmakers make the most of these opportunities that others largely miss. Because firm marketing efforts do little good, unless someone uses them to meet or stay in touch with a market contact, these missed opportunities result in massive waste of marketing dollars,

Printed materials yellow and curl on the shelf until they are thrown away. Tickets to sports and cultural events go unused, each empty seat representing a waste of several hundred dollars. The receptivity of clients to such offerings often surprises the professional who takes advantage of them for the first time.

The first few times a professional uses a firm marketing effort to make contacts can be transforming experiences. A management consultant who had recently started to bring in business had this to say:

We recently moved our New York office and had an open house to show our new space to clients and other friends of the firm. We were all asked to invite people and most took it as a civic duty that they fulfilled by inviting two or three guests. I saw it as an opportunity to call all my contacts. I was surprised that so many accepted, but even when someone didn’t come, it gave me an excuse to talk with them and see how things were going. In the worst cases, I didn’t talk with them, but left them a message that reminded them I was thinking about them.

I know from other sources that sixteen of his contacts accepted his invitation.

Documents, printed and electronic, also provide reasons for calling clients. Once a month, an accountant at a big firm would visit the closet where the firm kept article reprints, white papers, printed cases studies and related materials. He would scan the vast quantities of materials while reflecting on his contacts, and so match as many contacts as he could to the subjects of the documents. For example, he would match a white paper on the accounting issues of doing work in China with an accountant at a client expanding there. He would then call the contacts to ask their interest in the document or send it with a note.

Call discipline, essential to rain making, often gets put off for want of adequate reasons for calling. But, good reasons for the calls are all around you. Your firm’s marketing department provides some of the easiest.

With the publication of his first book, Managing the Professional Service Firm, David Maister established himself as the dean of the study of the business side of professional firms.

His later books (True Professionalism, The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford), and Practice What You Preach) have titles that reflect his increasing conviction that the solution to a firm’s business problems lies in focusing on clients and values. Pay attention to your professional calling and the business issues will take care of themselves, he argues.

His recently published book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker, continues and expands upon this argument. I think this book important enough that I have sent it to some forty leaders of professional firms. But your appreciation of it will depend on your frame of mind when you read it. It is a strange combination of how-to and polemic that the cynics, who make up a significant share of the world’s professionals, may have a hard time with. In his view of the professions Maister fights cynicism.

That is largely a good thing. The title summarizes the weakness in most firms’ efforts to become more professional; the managers are like fat smokers who know that they should eat less and stop smoking, but haven’t the will to do so. This is an apt comparison that applies, in part, to me and to many others. In making this point and suggesting how to address it, he provides many statements that deserve to become standard aphorisms:

The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight, but resolve.

An expert’s job is to be right; the advisor’s job is to be helpful.

People will never live up to a higher standard than their manager exhibits.

There are many such jewels.

This quest for greater professionalism as a solution to a firm’s problems sounds idealistic. That may put off readers with a practical bent. If that includes you, I urge you to take another look. There are at least two good reasons for doing so.

First, the concept of professionalism is under threat. It has now become standard for product and service companies to operate professional firms. (Tom Peters recently blogged about this.) While some, like IBM, have succeeded, many others have failed, often because they didn’t understand the implications of running a professional firm.

Also, more and more professional firms are going public. This can force them to think more about shareholder value than professional standards. Some firms are getting so large that they must be managed in ways that put little stress on being truly professional. To avoid the fate of Arthur Andersen it is good for all of us to reflect from time to time on what “being a professional” means. Maister’s research shows that focusing on clients and values isn’t just good practice. It’s also good business.

The second reason why Maister’s idealistic promotion of a truly professional firm warrants attention will surprise the cynics: What Maister extols is achievable, if you adjust for his frequent hyperbole. I have worked in the professions for over thirty years and have had the opportunity to study many firms. At any given time in each profession there are a handful of firms that are doing everything right and growing by topsy. I have the pleasure of having one such firm as a client now.

These firms come as close to Camelot as one can get in the business world. They do interesting and important work for their clients. Growing rapidly, they offer ample opportunity for their professionals to advance. And the money that flows in allows them to treat their people generously. The professionals at these firms have the joy of doing cutting-edge client work, while building the institution of the firm and getting rewarded handsomely. The leadership seeks to build an institution that is more important than any individual partner because of what it does for the profession, for society and for the partners as a whole. These firms are wonderful places to spend at least part of one’s career. Maister shows how to transform your firm into such an institution. It is a worthy goal.

That Maister overdoes his argument is unfortunate, because some readers will reject his overall case as a result. His argument that simply acting professionally will resolve all problems is naïve, if he does, in fact, believe it. It is hard to argue otherwise, when he says things like:

Firms do not need to teach their people how to sell. They need to find out, person by person, what kind of work turns each partner on and what kinds of clients each person could actually get interested in. [Emphasis in the original.]

In other words, put them in front of the right clients for the right kinds of work and their enthusiasm will carry the day. Hogwash! Enthusiasm does increase a professional’s chances of making a sale, but I have seen many enthusiastic professionals lose sales, because they talked too much, moved to solutions too quickly, sold past the close or made any one of a dozen other common sales mistakes that a little training would have cured them of.

Extending Maister’s logic to its obvious conclusion, if you just give your people the right kinds of thing to work on, you don’t have to teach them anything. Enthusiasm is all they need.

This anti-sales attitude is probably a reflection of a long-standing bias that many academics (Maister is a former Harvard Business School professor) and some professionals hold against the subject of selling. As I have noted elsewhere, very few business schools, and none of the leading ones, teach anything about selling. Marketing, finance, and operations are all taught, but not sales. This is all the more bizarre, because it is a sale that defines the existence of a business. Studying business without studying sales makes as much sense as studying biological procreation while ignoring sex. Maister should know this. Professional firms are commercial enterprises. Selling is essential for their success.

Skim past the occasional lapse of this kind and you will find Strategy and the Fat Smoker a worthwhile read.

The logic of selling professional services is simple.  If you meet the right people, stay in front of them by being helpful, and remind them of what you do from time to time, work will follow.

Don’t be deceived; execution on this logic isn’t simple because it requires managing so many parts.  The right people include not only those who can hire you, but also those who have enough influence with the hirers to introduce you to them.  In some cases you need to start even further back with those who have influence with the influencers.

First, you have to meet these people.  Some you get to know through your client work, but for most professionals that route is insufficient by itself.  You have to go to association meetings, give speeches, ask for referrals or try one of the other numerous ways to meet people.

Then you must stay in front of them.  That means meetings, calls and emails.  Your contacts will accept all this attention, as long as they find you helpful.  That complicates things even more, because different contacts want different kinds of help.  And the only way you can find out what each one wants is to ask.  Then you must . . .

About a month into this effort, the realization sinks in that you have barely begun and that all of what you have done so far is no more than the nose of a large camel bent on coming into your tent.  There is no way you can cram this additional activity into your already crammed schedule.

I have two answers to this concern.  First, if you treat business development as something to be crammed in, it will also be the first thing to get pushed out.  It must have a priority at least as high as your client work or it will never get done.  This changed view of the problem solves nothing by itself, but without the changed view, the problem won’t be solved. Rainmakers feel a high sense of urgency about starting and developing relationships.

Second, the camel isn’t as big as its nose suggests.  The time you must invest in starting or rekindling a relationship is typically much greater than the time needed to maintain one.  When beginning a relationship, you must spend time learning about the new contact as a business person and as a human being.  That may take several meetings and phone calls.  You must distinguish yourself from other would-be networkers by finding a way to help a contact.  That takes time, too.  It helps if you can accomplish these things in a relatively short time.  But once a relationship is established, a lot of maintenance and development can be done by phone and email.

As your network grows, all this meeting and calling and emailing does demand more time.  But, as you bring more and more business into your firm, you will be given more time for that kind of activity.

In the professions, this shift in time allocation from doer and manager of client work to rainmaker seldom occurs smoothly.  By some measure most professionals are overworked by their clients and firms.  The shift does occur, and as it does, you gain greater control over your own destiny.

It is shameless to refer to our clients as game animals that we hunt down and eat, but sometimes we are weak.  And I bet our clients sometimes give in to the temptation when talking about their customers. 

So, I don’t worry about the occasional lapse and wasn’t surprised when Peter told me he needed to bag an elephant if he wanted to make partner.  In recent years he had sold enough work to keep himself and two others busy.   But in a meeting with his boss he had been told that he needed to bring in bigger assignments from bigger clients if he wanted to make partner.

“I have a habit of shooting at rabbits.  Bagging a gnu would probably do,” he said, “But if I want to be sure, it better be an elephant.” 

So, we talked through the problem, one that I see at least a couple of times a year.  It might be called The Quick Kill problem, if that weren’t so shameless.  Peter was good, extremely good, at identifying a small need, convincing the client that he could resolve it, and getting agreement to get started.  These assignments averaged about $50,000, which meant that he had to sell about two of them a month.  That he would periodically land matters with associated fees of $150,000 to $200,000, made reaching his targeted annual origination credits easier.

But the firm’s management wasn’t interested in assignments returning less than $250,000 in fees and was trying actively to increase the size of its engagements and the quality of its clientele.  They wanted more elephants.  At this firm that meant assignments worth $500,000 or more.  Peter’s small sales dragged down averages for the whole firm.  And the longer he went after small assignments, the tougher it would be to win any big ones.  Here’s why:

You are mentally in the wrong place.  The whole rhythm of the sales effort, including number of calls and meetings per sale, the number of people both in the client’s organization and in your own that you must work with to make the sale, the amount of competition and the frequency with which you win a new assignment are dramatically different when selling many small projects than when you are pursuing a few large ones.  The large ones require you to make a sale only once or twice a year, compared to the small ones that must be sold once or twice a month. 

Behaviorally and psychologically that requires you to be in different places when trying to win small projects frequently and a big one every once in a while.  It’s hard to ask prospective clients for $50,000 on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then ask for $1,000,000 on Thursday.

You get labeled: Clients come to see you as the small projects person, and so don’t think of you for larger ones, or worse, think of you briefly and then rule you out.  Once pigeon-holed that way, getting them to see you as right for the big assignments is hard work.  

You know the wrong people at the account, those who work on small projects rather than those who work on big ones.  Getting past these contacts can be tricky.  The small project people may feel possessive about you and the big project people may see no reason to spend time with you.

You devote precious time on the wrong companies: You’re selling small things to small clients who will never have the resources to retain you for big assignments.  Time you spend on these clients is time you could otherwise spend on developing relationships at big companies.

To get big projects you often need to turn down small ones:  Winning a big assignment often requires convincing a client that the small problem is only a symptom of a large one.  You have to risk coming away empty handed to have a chance of getting work on something bigger and more important.  If you are good at selling big ones, small ones aren’t worth your time.

Peter agreed with all these points and promised to turn away small opportunities in the future.  Two months later he was back to his old habits.  For the first month he had turned away all the small opportunities, resulting in his sales for the month dropping to zero.  When the first two weeks of the second month also produced nothing, he buckled and sold three small projects during the remaining weeks.  “I’ve had my fill of selling nil,” he quipped. 

We talked again about the different rhythms of small sales and large ones, and that several months of no sales is expected by people selling large assignments,  He has again sworn off small sales, and we will see what happens.

*  *  *  *  *

In the interests of transparency and honesty, I am obliged to inform you that Peter is a composite of several professionals I have worked with.  The issues that he had to deal with will be recognized by anyone who has sold professional services for a long time.
 

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

6. Ask for Mentoring

Many of the women interviewed had sought out both male and female mentors from within and outside their organizations. A principal with an international consulting firm said that when she started getting revenue targets from her firm she asked one of her clients who was a senior executive of a Fortune 500 company for advice on how to bring in business. To her pleasant surprise, he responded, “You should ask me more often. I know a lot of people who I can introduce you to!” And he did!
 

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.
  

When a prospective client asks several firms it is evaluating to present their qualifications one after another, it is usually referred to as a beauty contest or bakeoff.   Often it might more accurately be called a dollar auction.

A dollar auction is a game concocted by game theorist and economist, Martin Shubik.  Try it out, yourself.  It requires an auctioneer (presumably you), six or more others who will perform better if plied with alcohol for a few hours first, and a dollar bill.  Once everyone has downed two or three drinks, ask for quiet, hold the dollar bill high in the air where everyone can see it, and say the following:

“I am about to auction off this dollar bill too the highest bidder.  For example, if the highest bidder offers me ten cents, she wins and makes a ninety cent profit.  There is only one other rule:  The second highest bidder also has to pay me the amount of his final bid.  So, if the highest bid is ten cents and the second highest bid is nine cents, I get paid nineteen cents and the dollar goes to the highest bidder.  Do I hear five cents, five cent for one slightly used dollar bill?. . .The woman with the red dress offers five.  Now do I hear ten anybody, just ten cents for this dollar?  Do I hear fifteen, fifteen . ..”
                                                                                                                                      

In most cases, the bidding quickly narrows to two people.  When the bidding reaches a dollar, there is a pause.  When the bidding reaches a $1.01, the bidders pause again, and then the bidding goes on up.  Auctioneers have won substantial sums.

I was reminded of dollar auctions recently when two professionals, an engineer and a management consultant, both used the exact same words to describe how much a firm should invest in a highly competitive pursuit of a major project, culminating in a classic beauty contest interview.  Both said, “You have to invest whatever it takes.” 
This may be a necessary attitude to win, if the competition is not a dollar auction.  If it is a dollar auction, thinking this way will lead to disaster:  No one wins a dollar auction.

The first and most important rule of dealing with dollar auctions is not to get into one.  Avoiding them requires recognizing them when asked to participate.  Seductive enticements to participate can be a tip off.  Architectural design competitions, where the clients offer a small stipend to competing firms to submit partial designs, are classic dollar auctions.  Alan Chimacoff of ikon.5 architects reports a joke one hears among architects that goes as follows:

Two developers are talking about the architects they use.  The first one complains about how expensive the bids are that he is getting for an office development he is planning.  “Why not ask them to do it for free?” asks the second developer.  “No one will want the project,” says the first.  “Of course they will,” replies the second, “Just call it a design competition.”

Chimacoff describes how design competitions turn into dollar auctions as follows: 

Competing firms are given a stipend of, say, $20,000, which equals one week of design cost to defray the cost of submitting partial designs to be used in selecting an architect.  They are scheduled to present these partial designs in, say, six weeks.  Every competing architect realizes that she has a better chance of winning with a more complete submission presented compellingly in drawings and a model, so they put in a second week at $20,000 and then a third and so on, until the full six weeks are used up.  The cost to the architect is $120,000 for which she was paid only $20,000.  If the total fee to the winner of the project is $1,000,000 dollars on which the firm makes a ten percent profit, that profit has been burned up before the project even starts. 

Clients may not be aware of the unfairness of the competition they have structured.  Rick Holmes, also of ikon.5, describes a competition for a project for a college classroom building his firm participated in and lost. Ikon.5 did the one week’s design work that the stipend covered and stopped.  Other firms kept going, the winning one submitting a stunningly beautiful (and expensive) wood model of the new building.  Committee members complained that Holmes’s firm had taken their money unfairly, because it hadn’t done work comparable to the competing firms.

Rules for Dealing with Dollar Auctions

More traditional competitions culminating in beauty contest presentations can also degenerate into dollar auctions, especially when work is scarce and firms are willing to spend more to win an assignment.  From an economic perspective, when you have too little work to keep your professionals employed, a money-losing engagement that covers your variable costs and contributes to paying for your fixed costs may be worth taking.  It allows you to maintain your staff and pay for at least a little of your overhead while you wait for an upturn.  As long as the upturn comes soon enough and you are not so absorbed by the money-losing project that you can’t take on a profitable one when it comes along, taking the project will be good for the firm.  One firm willing to take the project at a loss can create a dollar-auction bidding environment.

The second rule for dealing with a dollar auction is to scare off competitors immediately by a seemingly irrational willingness to win at any cost.  So, for example, when the auctioneer asks for a first bid of ten cents to win a dollar, a bidder immediately offers $1.00 or even $1.01, the auction is likely to end immediately, to the disappointment of the auctioneer.  Preemption of this type is harder in a beauty contest among professional firms.  Should one architect who is asked submit a partial design for $20,000, get word out to his competitors that he has be authorized to spend over $100,000 to win the competition, other firms might decline to get involved.

A final way to deal with dollar auctions is to ignore the client’s budget once you get the work.  In the architectural world, a few famous designers are noted for getting their clients to pay much more than budgeted for a new building.  One museum addition I am familiar with purportedly came in ten times over budget.  Either because the architect really convinced the board that the massive unexpected cost was worth it or because the board was too embarrassed to acknowledge how financially disastrous the project was, the board ended up accepting that the building be built as designed and raised the extra money.  Some technology consulting firms also seem to take work at below their costs with the expectation of making it up later in change orders.  I have ethical concerns about this approach, but it clearly works for some.

 Do any of you readers have dollar auction stories?

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.

What do you do when a client brings up a matter she is clearly concerned about without realizing that it is something you can help with?  I must hear this question twenty times a year.  And it’s a troublesome one. 

Of course, there are some people to whom you can say, “Hillary, we have a lot of experience at managing come backs.  Let me tell you what we can do.”  But we have to know a person pretty well to know that they will accept this sudden shift into sales mode.  Many others will wish they had never brought up the matter and extricate themselves from the conversation as fast as they can.  They come away feeling that you have been insensitive or, worse, pushy and will be careful to avoid bringing up problems with you again.

Rainmakers deal with this problem simply and directly by asking permission to go into sales mode.  They say such things as:

• You didn’t come to lunch today to be subjected to a sales call, but you’ve brought up a subject that we actually know a lot about and I think we can really help you.  But I’m not trying to push anything at you.  So, just let me know if you want to talk about it.
• Would it be all right if I put on my sales hat on for a minute?

After saying these words, the rainmakers shut up and listen to what the client has to say.  If she shows any hesitation about accepting the offer, the rainmaker backs off immediately.  More commonly, he client accepts, and a sales meeting begins.