I have been reading Shawn Callahan’s blog ever since he commented on one of my early posts, Sadder but Wiser, about the use of an anecdote to show you had really learned something. The Anecdote is a well-known blog, one seen as successful. Among blogs it has a Google page rank of five, something for the rest of us to aspire to. So, I thought it might be useful to see if he has turned up any business through it.

Shawn’s firm, Anecdote, consults on the use of business narrative and collaboration techniques “to redesign and improve the way people learn, share information, retain knowledge and build resolve to make changes in the workplace.” Asked what that means, he gave this example:

One of our clients is a leading financial institution and they have just completed an organizational culture inventory. These survey instruments can be a little dry and difficult to understand so we are helping them collect stories that illustrate the culture and then working with people in the company to design and implement initiatives that will shape their organizational culture.

The firm has served many large corporations and departments of the Australian government.

Shawn has been blogging since 2002, the Pleistocene by blog standards, and The Anecdote blog is his third, so he had two earlier ones to shake the ticks out of his approach. That accounts, in part, for its professional look and content. The Anecdote dates back to November 2004.

Callahan reports that he gets lots of leads traceable to the blog. Because I have not found many blogs that generate a significant number of leads for a professional firm, this becomes an important case. Here are the reasons that I think he has been more successful than so many others.

First, he had the insight to get in early and the persistence to keep at it. Yes, I mean that the blog’s high productivity probably results, in part, from its age, a factor of much importance in a network, as described by Albert-Lázlo Barabási in Linked: The New Science of Networks [Perseus Publishing 2002].

Second, it is also, in Barabási‘s terms fitter, because it has masses of content and lots of links. Type in “knowledge strategy,” “business narrative” or “storytelling training” into Google and you will find Anecdote on the first page.

More importantly type these terms in with a geographic location such as Melbourne, Canberra or Australia and it’s number one. That this may be a more significant differentiator in Australia than it would be in the US or Europe, because the nearest alternative, outside resources are likely to be a ten-hour plane ride away, does not diminish what Shawn and his colleagues have done. We all must adapt what we do to our local conditions for better or for worse. I mention it because each of us must determine what will make our blogs fit in our market places, meaning we cannot expect to succeed in exactly the way he did, using his approach as a recipe. Remember that Callahan had two blogs prior to this one. That experience undoubtedly helped him make this one fitter from the start. We, too, will have to do some experimenting.

The third reason his blog is so successful has to do not so much with the blog, itself, as it does how Shawn takes inquiries he receives on it and turns them into consulting assignments. Turning an inquiry from someone who has first heard about you on the web into new business costing the client a large sum is a big aspiration for a professional and a bigger increase in commitment than most people buying services are willing to make.

Callahan and his colleagues have addressed this problem by inserting a step between the client making a query on the basis of something read on the blog and asking him to sign for a full-blown consulting engagement.

In my book, Cross-Selling Success, I call this a portal service. In Anecdote’s case, it takes the form of courses that the representative of an organization can attend for a modest fee. During the course, the consultants get to show what they can do and what they would be like to work with. They also learn a lot about the client and its issues. After the client and the consultants take this small step together, both have learned a lot about each other and the client is more likely to sign up The Anecdote team to help them run their own business narrative projects.

It took between two and three years for the blog to evolve into an effective lead generator. It proved valuable in other ways earlier. Shawn praises the discipline it creates to get ideas down on paper and finds it a useful place to store and access ideas and information, a consultant’s stock in trade. Says Callaghan, “I often send links to specific blog posts to clients and prospects to keep in contact and show we care about them and their business.”

It’s not all fun. Like other bloggers, he feels the stress of perpetual demand for content (I can identify with Shawn’s concern: I feel that my blog sits at my feet all day, moaning, “Feed me. Feed me.”)

To address this problem, he has developed a set of posting categories: the quick link and short comment; the mini idea (a couple of paragraphs); the foundational idea (4-10 paragraphs). Assigning ideas he has for posting gives him a sense of how much time he must devote to producing the postings. Keeping his posts short, he can distribute ideas over more days When there is nothing substantial to say, he links to other people’s blogs which not only provides content for his readers, it also increases his social network.

In spite of the demands, Shawn is clearly hooked on blogging. He says, “I really love blogging because the more I think about how things connect, the more connections I make. The blog posts become conversation topics and you are rarely lost for something interesting to say while at the same time you become attentive and mindful for new ideas and perspectives.”

Here are some valuable takeaways from Shawn:

1. A blog is a major commitment, in which a professional will have to invest up to two years before you start seeing a return in the form of new business. I hope that some of my readers can prove me wrong on this, but I doubt it.
2. In addition to time, your blog’s success as a lead generator will depend on its fitness. What constitutes fitness will vary from market to market, but at the very least it means good content frequently posted—and probably the right links to other blogs and sites, as well.
3. Rather than trying to convert a lead generated by the blog into a full-blown client, it is probably better to have a small sample of what you do that clients can try first. A blog, like any other marketing technique, can’t just be glued onto the side of your practice. To be successful, it must be integrated with other things you do.
4. Blogs have many small uses as places to store information and to refer clients and prospective clients who are looking for a bit of information.
5. Blogging is fun and can be addictive.

And, now that I’ve had my jag for the day, I can stop writing. 

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” – Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

An elevator speech is supposed to be the description of your services that you would give to a prospective client who is held captive in a descending elevator for thirty seconds.  I have never tried it on an elevator and don’t know anyone who has. 

Assuming for the moment that you can rendezvous with a client for such a ride, that the elevator is empty enough that you aren’t looking at the back of the client’s head, a mere inch in front of your own, and that the client is in a particularly generous mood—all of which pretty much exclude this from occurring in New York City—it would be useful to have something ready to say.  And, yes, there are other situations when a concise description of what you do is helpful to have on call.

Let’s look at one elevator speech to see what we can learn from it.  I have changed it slightly from the words I was given to protect the innocent, but it is essentially the same:

We use proven group psychological techniques to reconfigure and improve the way people communicate, associate and collaborate to ensure dedication to change.

This example shows what is wrong with many elevator speeches.  It tells how the firm does its work (. . . proven group psychological techniques . . .) when it should only tell what the firm does and how the client benefits from it.

The client won’t be interested in how you do your work until she is considering hiring you.  It is abstract to the level of incomprehensibility.  Each word, one suspects, was carefully chosen because of some nuance of meaning not shared with us.  Being abstract and filled with long words that are hard to absorb it is unmemorable.  As the client steps across the threshold of the elevator, she purges it from her mind. 

And I hate all the “-ates.”  They annoy me.

• Uninteresting
• Abstract
• Incomprehensible
• Unmemorable
• Annoying

Surely, that isn’t what an elevator speech is supposed to be.
Instead, it should be:

Benefits Focused:  Until the prospective client grasps how she will benefit from your service, she won’t be interested in how you do your work.  Imagine an endodontist in an elevator describing the superior features of his approach to root canal work, when your teeth are in good shape.  Chances are you wouldn’t have much interest.

Concrete:  It must use words that conjure up physical objects.

Easily Understood:  It should use short, common words, as much as possible.  So, for example, we might be able to replace communicate with talk and replace collaborate and associate with work together.

Memorable: Words describing simple actions are memorable, because they create a little video in our mind’s eye.

Professional:  This is not the place to be cute.

How about:

We help people embrace the need for change, whether it be for a new technology, for a turnaround, for a new strategy or for some other cause.  Then we help these same people bring the needed change about, whether working in teams or as individuals.  For example, we helped a luxury hotel chain turn around a reputation for poor service by helping its staff members change the way they responded to guests’ requests for help.

Do you understand what this firm does now?  If so, I will let you off the elevator and you can go home.

Rereading the notes from one of our several hundred interviews with rainmakers, I came across this story about Edwin Heft, an accountant and partner at Touche before it began its long series of mergers with other firms: 

A senior partner, Edwin Heft, decided that there had to be a way to get the more junior members of the firm out in the market learning how to develop business.  He decided that this should be done by establishing a practice development committee composed of senior managers, managers and staff accountants.  A senior manager was to be chair and Heft served as an advisor. 

The committee was given a small budget to allocate as it wished on business development. Heft understood that in the early stages it was important to reward efforts rather than results.  You can sell professional services by a shot gun or rifle approach.  With a shot gun approach, you make many contacts and get the message out to all, but the net you throw is wide and it may not pay off for a long time.  He realized that if you want to encourage young professionals to get out in the market place, you must reward the effort, because the young person otherwise is doing it strictly on faith, and that faith is sorely tested.

Becoming a rainmaker is ego-deflating.  There is a lot of rejection, or what looks like rejection to the inexperienced.  To boost morale, committee members were rewarded with a small bonus.  They set goals, but didn’t evaluate themselves; Heft did that. 

It was a small effort for four or five years, and it worked.  Heft had been savvy about who he picked for the program and insightful about how to make it go.  The experiment was highly successful.  Three of the four senior managers became great business-getters.  One later became chairman of Touche.

Edwin Heft was one of the rare rainmakers who knew how to help others learn to sell.  Almost fifty years later, we at Harding & Company had to reinvent through hard practice what he got so right the first time he tried.  I just wish I knew more about this singular effort to create rainmakers.

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” – Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

The following publications and bloggers recently posted reviews on the new edition of Rain Making.

Clique, a publication of Business Forums International. Download their April 2008 issue with the review.

A/E RainMaker, a publication of PSMJ Resources, Inc. Download their May 2008 issue with the review.

Chui’s Counterpoint blog also posted a comprehensive review, which also appears on Amazon.

CRM Industry newsletter this week named Rain Making “required reading.”

Many thanks.

How well do professional service firm marketing/sales groups work with other functions such as legal, IT, HR, and finance? Does having a formal relationship make a difference?

That’s what Suzanne Lowe wanted to know. The results of her recent survey, along with her analysis, are posted here.

One of the pleasures of professional services is the chance to meet and work with people and businesses of many kinds.  I recently had the chance to work with a group of actors turned consultants and trainers.  First, they were clients of mine and then I of theirs, so I got to see them from two perspectives. Whatever the angle, they were different . . . decidedly so.

They understood little of the technicalities of business, be it of banking or of bankruptcy.  For all they knew a POS system had something to do with batteries, an NPV might get a ticket for driving in the wrong lane on the expressway, and SOX is a baseball team.  They understood little of the economic logic or organizational design of corporations.  This meant that they would miss some simple business facts that other professionals would grasp without being told.

You might wonder how consultants could make a go of it without this basic ability.  They did it with an uncanny ability to size up another human being almost instantaneously.  When a client talked, they might miss a business issue, but they heard every nuance of tone or pitch.  They noticed every change in expression and posture.  And through these lenses they captured what the speaker was all about as a person.   In this, they were far ahead of the other professionals I work with, and, for that matter, ahead of me.  It is a powerful skill.

I am accustomed to working with Type 1 Listeners, those who listen to a client’s technical needs, and helping them become Type 2 Listeners, those who seek to learn about the client’s business needs that dictate technical changes. 

For example, I might work with civil engineers to go beyond finding ways to increase the employment count and parking on a mature site to seeing that the client needs to add personnel to rapidly increase market share and seize dominance for a new product.  I also work with Type 2 Listeners, who listen to understand a client’s business needs, helping them to become Type 3 Listeners, those who seek to understand the client as a person.

It has always progressed in that order, Type 1 to Type 2 and Type 2 to Type 3.  What am I to do with people who start out as Type 3 Listeners who must move in the opposite order?  As I figure that out, I am learning a lot.

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” – Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin
 

In earlier postings (Build It and They Will Come, All or Nothing Thinking and Dealing With Unreturned Phone Calls) I described thinking habits that undercut your will to create rain.  Another is False Clairvoyance. 

False Clairvoyance occurs when a professional feels that some, usually negative, outcome is certain and acts accordingly.  Someone who realizes there are other possible outcomes acts differently and so sometimes secures an advantage.

For example, a professional goes to an association meeting, which a colleague has recommended as a good place to get leads.  After a couple of awkward conversations with other attendees, he says to himself, “This will never work.”  Acting as if this were true, he gives up and goes home, without questioning the validity of the thought.  A competitor goes to four of the associations monthly meetings, and, at the last one picks up a lead.

“Never” is a long time.  Any statement including words like “never,” “always,” “inevitable,” or “definite,” warrants reconsideration before acting on it.  Rainmakers are likely to consider the possibility of a positive outcome. As one rainmaker put it to me, “When you’re talking with clients, good things tend to happen.”

False clairvoyance is an especially seductive thinking habit, because, if we define our objectives narrowly enough, the prediction is perilously close to the truth.
Let us say, for example, that facing a revenue shortage, the management of the firm asks all of its fifty professionals to call five current and former clients. Believing, accurately, that the probability of any one call turning up a lead rounds to zero, several of the professionals don’t make the effort.  But the probability of at least one of the fifty professionals obtaining a lead this way may be quite high.  If we broaden the goal, the probability of something beneficial coming out of the calls is almost a certainty.

So, when you feel discouraged and are thinking of giving up on an effort to make rain, ask yourself if false clairvoyance is undermining your resolve.

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” – Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Steve Shu, who writes a well established and thoughtful blog on management consulting, describes what it takes to be a good facilitator. He could equally be describing a rainmaker. Two takeaways:

1. If you are a good or aspiring facilitator, try applying those skills to drumming up business.
2. If you are looking for potential rainmakers in your organization, consider those who are good at facilitation.

I recently attended the Southeast Regional meeting of the Society for Marketing Professional Services. (SMPS is an association for marketing professionals working at architecture, engineering and construction firms.  I believe all marketers at such firms could benefit from joining).  The participants generally agreed that there was precious little evidence of a downturn.  Most firms had more work than they could handle. 

I believe, however, that a downturn may be more imminent and more severe than most would suspect.  Here’s my reasoning:

First, the performance of professions that make their living off of the design and development of buildings is a lagging indicator.  New building projects don’t get started until a recovery is well underway and excess capacity either absorbed or removed from the market.  Also, there is so much momentum to these projects and the financial and emotional termination costs are so high, that they keep chugging along even as the economy dips. 

But when the top management of organizations are really convinced that they are about to take a financial bloodletting, out comes a large, stainless-steel cleaver and chops off any planned projects.  About a week later, out it comes again and lops off all projects that are underway, except for those nearest to completion.  In a period of two to three months, the professional firms go from working flat out while desperately trying to find more people to recruit to famine, with many of their people sitting around in the office dazed and unbilled, trying to figure out what happened.

Anyone who hasn’t been through a downturn will find this hard to believe.  Let me show you what happens.  You’re revenue (R) is the product of three numbers

1. the number of people you talk to about your services (N)
2. the percent of them you persuade to buy your services (B)
3. the average fee charged per client (F)

So, N x B x F = R

Or, if N = 100, B = 10% and F = $100, your revenue can be calculated as

100 x 10% x $100 = $1,000

When the downturn comes, the percentage of people in your network who buy shrinks and those who remain have smaller budgets.  In other words B and F decline.  If we assume this decline is ten percent, the revenue calculation looks like this:

100 x 9% x $90 = $810

Whoa!  What happened?  The percent buyers and the fees per client each declined ten percent, but revenues dropped nineteen percent!  That’s because the variables are multiplied against each other resulting in a geometric fall.  This shows how relatively modest declines in the buying power of our market can result in a devastating reductions in revenue.

This is an indirect path to reveal the importance of N, network size. You can’t control B or F (the percent of your contacts who buy from you and the average fee of earned from each).  But you can control N, the size of your network.  N is a function of the number of people in the market that you stay in touch with.  That number is largely within your control.

But today, you are awash with work.  You are so far behind that you don’t have time to maintain your network.  In fact, you are afraid to call people for fear that they will want you to do some work which you don’t have time for.  So, you don’t call and over the months your network begins to slide, too.   In other words N declines by, let’s say, ten percent, too. Our equation now looks like this:

90 x 9% x $90 = $729

This is a decline of twenty-seven percent.  That’s eight percentage points less than we would have to deal with, if only people had kept up their calls and meetings.  How many jobs saved does that translate into? 

So, keep up your calls and meetings, even when you are fully loaded with client work.  When a downturn comes, it won’t be as steep, nor last as long if you do.

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” – Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Business Network International (BNI) published a review of Rain Making in their April issue of SuccessNet.

Read the BNI review here.