A previous posting showed how a professional who questions his own value can determine what value his clients get from his services.

To get her price, however, a professional must not just know what her help is worth, she must feel it and act like it. Of course it feels uppish the first time you quote a $500,000 or $1,000,000 fee (or whatever is a large number for your firm). This is especially so if you are used to quoting much smaller numbers (see Why Peter Couldn’t Bag an Elephant for more on that subject). But you had better not let your doubts show.

Here are some things you can do to make it easier:

First, practice saying these words, I can help you. Practice them in front of someone you trust, and, if possible, have her videotape you, so you can see what you look like. Say them with calm self-assurance. You are simply stating a fact. You aren’t arguing with anyone or trying to convince anyone; you are just stating a fact. Have your friend tell you whether or not you sound believable and self-assured. Practice it again and again until you can turn it on at will as you do a faucet. You probably won’t say these words when you get in front of a client, but you will think them and the tone will carry over into what you do say.

Now, say them again, adding these words at the end, This work will run you between $750,000 and $1,000,000. And again, and say, Well, those are our rates. And again, this time adding, Well, how much of a deduction are you looking for? We might be able to shave a little off, but if we are too far apart I don’t want to waste more of your time. Remember your tone. You aren’t arguing. You are calmly stating facts.

Practice this until you have it down, and then try it on a client.

For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition

“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)

By the time a client asks you for references, she is close to hiring you. Instead of easing off, this is the time to sprint harder to ensure you come in first. That means picking the right people to give the reference and then preparing them for the call.

There are three kinds of people when it comes to giving references:

1. those who want to help you win
2. those who want to give unbiased answers
3. those that want someone else to win

You want all of the people you give as references to come from the first group. Even though you want them to be truthful, their version of the truth will differ from that of the second group, because it will seek to put you in the best light, rather than seeking to be totally objective.

The client asks, “Did they meet the schedule?” The advocate answers, “It might have run a bit over, but frankly we weren’t as focused on that as much as we might have been. They came in under a very tight budget—they were stars at that and that’s what we really cared about.”

In contrast, the unbiased reporter responds, “They brought it in three weeks late. We had a generally had a good experience, but meeting the schedule wasn’t their strong point.” Both are honest responses, but the first one will help you win, both because of its content and because of the enthusiasm it communicates. The second answer could easily cost you the job.

When picking someone to provide as a reference ask yourself these questions:

• How good was the work we did?
• Will the prospective client view it as relevant to her own situation?
• How much does the person whose name I am giving like me?
• Is he the kind of person to extend himself to make it sound positive?  Subsidiary questions to this one include: Is he naturally enthusiastic? Has he sold a lot and so knows what a “good reference” means?

Just picking the right people to provide references isn’t sufficient; you must make it easy for them to help you. They, of course, know nothing about the client or her needs. Giving them this information allows them to prepare an answer. Tell a contact, “she is concerned about our ability to stand up to some strong-willed people, and you are in a good position to comment on that.” With advance warning, he may mention your ability in this area before the question is asked.

Next, if at all possible, give him the names of the person who will be calling to take the reference and of her company. That way, he is more likely to take her call when it comes in.

Also, remember that he is unlikely to recall the exact work you did for him and its outcome as well as you do. Be prepared to brief him. For example, you might say, “They need to cut turnover, so we thought the fifty percent reduction in turnover among pickers and packers at your Scranton facility would mean a lot to her.” There is very little chance that your contact remembers this turnover rate reduction for long after your work is completed. But if you brief him this way, he is likely to repeat the statistic when giving the reference.

Finally, when the pursuit is over, whether you won or not, call your references, advise them of the outcome and thank them again. If they like you, learning that they helped you will make the feel good. You owe them that pleasure.

* * * * * * * * *
This post was excerpted from the new edition of my 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.

Any athlete, no matter how talented, who doesn’t practice with the team falls short of being a true professional. Any actor, musician or dancer who doesn’t rehearse, is unlikely to make it as a professional. Professionals who don’t practice quickly find themselves without a position, part or seat with the team, cast or ensemble.

Accountants, actuaries, architects, engineers, executive recruiters, lawyers, management consultants, publicists have to prove themselves as presenters to make partner. That is because partners are professional presenters. They present to their clients, to judges and juries, to arbitrators, to zoning boards, to industry groups and to each other. And, of course, they present to prospective clients.

“When a group of our engineers stands up in front of a selection committee, they are being judged not so much on their abilities as engineers as on their presentation skills,” George Friedel said when, as head of sales for Parsons Brinckerhoff, he was helping stack up one of the most impressive win rates I know of.

“By the time the client gets to the short list, they know that each of the firms they are considering is technically qualified. They choose on the basis of which team will work with them best. At that final meeting, then, your ability to communicate effectively using entertainment techniques, is more important that your ability to engineer,” he added.

Spend enough years participating in the bake-off competitions for huge infrastructure projects that a firm like Parsons Brinckerhoff pursues and you will know this is true. It is equally true, though less obviously so, of most sales meetings that professionals have. The infrastructure engineering firms know what’s at stake and they do rehearse, sometimes well and sometimes not, but they do it.

There are many professional firms that prepare for an hour-long sales meeting in the ten minute cab ride to the client’s office. Or they will spend 30 hours of firm time preparing slides or a leave-behind document and not five minutes on rehearsing. They have all kinds of excuses:

• I don’t have time.
• There’s no time when we can all get together.
• I don’t learn anything from rehearsals.
• I don’t do well in rehearsals, but I’m great in front of the client.
• What’s to rehearse?
• I never rehearsed before and have done okay.

I have a response for all of these excuses. Say: “Okay, you don’t have to rehearse, but if you don’t win the business, you’re fired. You’re fired because you have been unprofessional and wasted firm time and money and were unwilling to do what it takes to minimize the chances of losing. You will have set a bad example for the others in the firm, and I must make it clear to all that what you did was unacceptable.” And if they don’t rehearse, and they lose, fire them.

Whew!! I feel so much better having gotten that rant out of my system! Could you visualize me letting him have it? How I whipped that office into shape! Oh, that felt good.

I can now focus on something more helpful to you. In next week’s posting on being prepared, I will describe what preparing for a sales meeting means.

(Sims Wyeth also discusses presenations in his post The Show in Business

Suzanne Lowe has published the results of her second mini-survey Are PSF Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut? This survey asked if firms were making their marketing and business development functions more strategic.

In her analysis, Suzanne notes “These findings highlight a critical concern for PSFs that are working to evolve their Marketing and Business Development functions: the need to better balance cultural initiatives with formal structural changes.  It appears — at least for these respondents — this isn’t what’s happening.”

Professionals often struggle to find ways to meet the senior executives who are most likely to give them business.  At the accounts where they are working they feel blocked by the person they report to.  Some feel so awkward about approaching a top executive, they don’t even try.

Rainmakers are not deterred by these obstacles.  They get in front of the people they want to know.  For the past fifteen years we have interviewed rainmakers and people who have worked closely with them to learn what they do and how they do it.  How they meet the executives they want to know is a question we ask.  We’ve tallied their responses to find the most frequently-used approach. 

And the answer is . . . . . they ask someone to introduce them.

I can almost hear the moans of disappointment at what appears to be an anticlimax.  I imagine you’re feeling tempted to surf away to somewhere else on the web. But over time, I have come to really like this answer.  I like it because it’s relatively easy, and I learned years ago that there are no extra points for getting new business the hard way.  I like it because it’s direct and straightforward.

If you time your request for a moment when your principal contact is happy with something you have done, it can a simple request for a favor.  I have covered this in an earlier posting, Asking for Referrals. 

Still, it’s not always as easy as it first appears. Sometimes you must get in front of the top executive before you have even started the work.  To do that you must make it clear to your principal contact why getting you access to the senior executive is essential. Here are three examples, all shortened and simplified to make the message clear:

Need for High Level Sponsorship:  One professional looked at the executive who wanted to hire him and said, “You and I both want to get this done, but to make it work we will need the buy-in of the whole management team.  Frankly, neither of us has the clout to ensure we get it.  The only way to be sure we get their support is to get [the president] to sponsor the effort.  If he owns it, we can get it done.  Can you get us in front of him for half an hour?”

Need to Overcome High Level Resistance:  Another said, “It’s apparent from her comments that your boss doesn’t like consultants.  This is something we must resolve quickly. Thanks for offering to talk with her, but no intermediary can make her comfortable with me.  I need to meet her and talk this through.  Can you arrange it?”

Need to Understand Goals:  And another:  “If we go ahead with this work without clarity about [the CEO’s] goals, we could end up with an end product that doesn’t match what he wants.  That’s true whether he knows what his goals are today or not.  What will happen if we go ahead assuming he wants red, and then six months from today he decides he wants green?  What will it cost us then to fix the problem?  The way around this is to help him think through the problem so that he can clearly state his goal now.  Can you arrange for a meeting with him, so that we can help him do that?”

If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

(You may also be interested in Networking Up, Part 1.)

Laura has met with more than her share of prospective clients, but been much less successful at getting them to hire her. There are several reasons for this, but the one that most urgently needs fixing is her discomfort in quoting a fee, which, of course, the clients pick up on. Her discomfort results from her doubts about being worth the rates her firm charges.

Laura is one of many professionals who have this problem. If a low-end competitor sometimes takes work away, justifying your fees to yourself gets even harder. And if you have no confidence in the value of what you do, it is hard to see why your client should. If you have this problem, it hurts you in two ways: it results in lost sales and reduces the size of your fee, when you win. This is the first of two postings on the subject

Because the problem is as much based in emotion as in logic, logic alone is insufficient to deal with it. But logic is a good place to start. We will come back to emotion in the second posting.

Step One is to keep your focus on the part of the economy you operate in. That others who do more worthy things than you earn much less than you do may at some higher level be unfair, but it is no reason to accept below-market rates for the work you do. After all, the more you earn, the more you can give to worthy causes.

Second, see if you can determine the value clients receive from your work, keeping in mind that there is no necessary correlation between the difficulty or originality of your work and the value received. Earlier in my career a colleague charged a client for a day’s billing at a rate that would probably be equivalent to $7,500 today, for which he reduced the costs of a client’s new facility by what would be more than $3,000,000 today. The client was exceedingly grateful, but so was the next one we provided the same service to, but at a much higher rate.

Anecdotal evidence that my partner and I collected from our clients ten years ago suggested we were under pricing our work. A few trusted friends with whom we shared our logic agreed, and we put through a twenty percent price increase at the bottom of a recession. A few prospective clients lost interest in working with us, but we still sold out every hour we had available.

And it is not, after all, our perception of the value of our services that ultimately determines the upper limit to what we can charge. It is our clients’ view. As an important step to determining what we should charge and getting our clients to accept it, we need to learn the value the clients expect to get from our work. Use questions to draw out estimates of savings or gains a prospective client expects to realize from your services. Often, this requires a series of questions to create a clear picture for both the client and you.

Questions to ask when value-pricing your services:

• What is this problem costing you this year?
• How much more is that likely to be next year?
• Do these costs include the opportunity cost of the time that your department spends on this issue?
• What would you be spending your time on, if you didn’t have to deal with the issues anymore?
• What would that be worth to the company?

Once you understand the value of a solution, use additional questions to determine why the client needs you to obtain it:

• You must have tried to fix this before. What happened when you did?
• You have a capable team, so why bring in outside help for this issue?

When you are done with the questioning, both the client and you should understand why you are worth so much. That will make it easier to ask for his money.

For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition

“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)

Building a network requires money.  In addition to overhead, among the costs you are likely to incur are:

• Membership fees
• Entertainment expenses
• Travel expenses
• Cost of small gifts, such as books

The top managers of professional firms often recognize need to spend.  The head of North America for a human resources consulting firm recently told his management team, “The firm should be paying for your lunch every day.”  Of course, the firm would only do so if the consultants were also picking up the tab for a guest. 

James McKinsey, the founder of McKinsey & Company, exhorted his colleagues in a similar fashion.  Within the past year I have heard the managing partner of a mid-sized law firm push his partners to do the same.

You don’t have to go much lower in most firms to hear a different message.  The office or practice head, out of whose budget the expenses come, is often less supportive of spending on long-term relationship development.  He will often question the value of the expenditure, forgetting that aspiring rainmakers need to practice where it’s safe, that they need to sort through a number of contacts to find each one who warrants long-term attention. 

The direct supervisor often fears that his people will run up excessive expenses for which he will be held to account.  And younger professionals often spend most of their time under the guidance of those who manage case, project or account teams.  Not too good at rainmaking themselves, these people keep the young professionals focused on delivery, rather than on lunches.

If you want to get the younger professionals in your firm to spend more time developing relationships, insist that they spend more money.  You can ask them to:

• Have lunch with a client at least once a week.
• Better still, give them a modest budget and insist that they spend it.

If you are a young professional, ask how much you can spend on relationship development.  If you don’t get a clear answer, as is likely, create a modest plan with a budget and ask for its approval.

Chances are, if you aren’t spending anything on relationship development, you aren’t developing any relationships.

There is a saying among architects that the design of a building is done when the project manager pulls drawings from under the designer’s pen. So it is with books. They are never really done. Rather, they represent the author’s thinking at the time the manuscript was shipped off to the editor.

My first book, Rain Making: the Professionals Guide to Attracting New Clients first appeared in 1994, and a lot has changed since then. It doesn’t even mention the Internet. An acceptable gap just fourteen years ago, it is a gaping hole today.

Also, I have had fourteen more years of helping professionals learn to sell. That gives me the benefit of working with hundreds of people in an array of professions* and also the chance to learn from my colleagues, Mimi Spangler and Gary Pines.

The new edition covers subjects I could not have touched fourteen years ago, such as:

• how to network with senior executives,
• how to network with the connectors who everyone else wants to network with,
• how networks change depending on the markets they service, such as distressed companies, the wealthy who have estate, investment and tax issues, corporations planning to move, pension and benefits providers, municipal water-and-sewage-treatment departments and others,
• how to generate more leads from your networks,
• how to shorten a sales cycle,
• how to turn away unwanted clients,
• what a sales strategy does,

and many others.

You can order the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers, as well as the SMPS bookstore.

* The professions include actuaries, architects, auditors, chemical engineers, civil engineers, construction managers, corporate lawyers, economists, electrical engineers, executive recruiters (retained), human resource consultants, industrial engineers, intellectual property attorneys, interior designers, investment bankers, labor attorneys, litigation support consultants, litigators, mechanical engineers, psychologists, publicists, recruiters (contingency), strategy consultants, structural engineers, technology consultants, valuation consultants, and workout specialists. During the past fourteen years we have consulted to professionals in almost twenty different countries.

Larry Bodine as a good post on the Law Marketing Blog called Law Firm Requires New Associates to Have Sales Background.

My reaction is that there are many potential advantages to hiring sales attorneys. The history of this approach in other professions, suggests that there are a number of hurdles to overcome to make it successful. These include:

1) Making sure that the new position is designed into the fabric of the firm and not just glued onto the side. This means that everybody’s job is affected in some way by this new approach to business getting. A firm that doesn’t note this and educate its other attorneys is likely to suffer from at least two outcomes:a) Some attorneys will think that because someone else has responsibility for sales they can abandon most of their own efforts, b) Other attorneys will freeze the new sales force out in the belief that they own certain accounts.

2) Making sure the new position and the people in it are respected members of the firm. There is a tendency for professionals to feel that anyone who doesn’t practice the profession in the traditional way is an ineffectual, contentless dweeb. The best sales attorneys will not stand for this and leave. There needs to be a career path for these people that includes partnership and practice leadership.

Also, the more movement there is between the traditional career path in the firm and the new sales career path, the better, because it reduces the them-versus-us mentality that plagues dedicated sellers in professional firms.

Networking takes time, and for professionals, time is scarce.   Lack of time can force us to pass up an opportunity to help a network contact.  Because help is the coin of networkland, these missed opportunities lessen our value as networkers.  Miss one such chance and no great harm will be done. Miss again and again and the cumulative harm will be substantial.

Here are three things to have ready to give, so that you don’t have to take time to get them each time you want to give them to a contact.

1. The Key Resource

Clients often ask their professional advisors for referrals to other providers. If a specific kind of provider is requested frequently, it pays to vet a few of them, so that you can quickly and comfortably refer them in the future.  Whether or not these providers can also refer clients to you is of secondary importance. 

A management coach, a PhD psychologist, frequently gets requests for referral to counselors who can help a client’s family member or friend with personal problems.   She has verified two or three psychologists who do that kind of work and to whom she can refer these clients. 

Clients sometimes ask a structural engineer for advice on problems in residential buildings, not his specialty.  He developed a list of engineers who did do residential work whom he could refer.

Note in both these cases, the need for help is probably urgent.  When the need is urgent, the value of the referral is high.  You don’t want to come up empty handed when the contact turns to you at so critical a moment.

2. Note Cards

When a client is ill or has a death in the family, you may want to send a sympathy card and feel an electronic one too impersonal.  When a client has a birthday, gets promoted, or has a new child, you may think of sending a card of congratulations.  You have every intention of buying a card, but don’t get around to it and the moment passes. 

This may seem a small thing; but it’s not.  We all appreciate it when a friend recognizes our successes and our tragedies.  Doing so with a card takes little effort and is good manners, whether or not the person is a network contact.  With network contacts it helps advance a relationship. 
But, we seldom go out and buy the needed card, we are so busy and distracted.  You are far more likely to write a personal note, if you have the card in your desk in anticipation of needing it. 

The next time you visit an art museum or high-end stationer, buy some all-purpose, conservative cards and keep them in your desk.  Having them at hand allows you to draft a quick note immediately on hearing news from a contact that warrants so personal a response.

3. The Special Book

Books make excellent gifts, because they have low cash value, but high intrinsic value to the right reader.  If you find yourself recommending a book often, buy a few copies so that you have them ready to send as gifts.  Some of the books I do this with include:

1. The New Strategic Selling by Heiman and Sanchez.  This guide to planning and monitoring a complex sale is best-in-class and an important resource for professionals and others who sell.
2. Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman.  The author helps people overcome thinking habits that get in the way of their success.
3. A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons by Robert M. Sapolsky. I give this book to those who have suffered and enjoyed the difficulty of cross-cultural communication.  It makes them laugh and so is among the kindest gifts a person can make.
4. My current favorite business book. When I read a book that I think has an important message, I will send them to contacts I think will appreciate them.  For example, I have done this with:
   o  The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
   o  The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dorner et. Al.
   o  Strategy and the Fat Smoker by David Maister, which I reviewed here.

(I would be interested in hearing what books you give or recommend to your contacts.)

A little foresight will make you a better networker, because you will be able to give more and in networking, you have to give to get.