Reasons for Calling #3: Leverage Your Firm’s Marketing
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.
