My last post for 2007 provided five reasons for calling your network contacts, all related to the season.  Here are some things you can do as 2008 passes.  First, list the people who have been especially helpful to you during the past year.  Based on how close they live to you and the nature of your relationship to them, do one of the following:

• Send them an email thanking them for making 2008 a good year.
• Take them lunch and thank them personally.

In previous postings, I described how to write an introductory letter requesting a meeting.  That letter should be but the first in a string of communications.

Competing for business at a professional services firm is a battle for a share of a client’s mind.  When she needs an accountant (or actuary, or attorney, or engineer, or management consultant, or whatever kind of professional you are), you want her to think of you.  If you are already working for her and so in regular contact, keeping in front of her is a manageable task.  But if she doesn’t even know you, it’s harder to come up with reasons to get her to think about you.  You must take advantage of every opportunity you get.

Once the client has agreed to meet with you, you want to use that meeting to remind her of who you are several times.  In addition to the meeting, itself, this means that at the very least you want to send an email confirming the meeting and one following up afterwards.  This posting describes the former, and a later posting will describe follow-up emails.

In an earlier posting, I observed that there are no extra points for developing business the hard way.  Meeting confirmation emails are one of the easiest ways to capture a little mindshare.  They should be short and to the point, needing only to confirm the meeting’s time, place, participants and purpose.

Dear __________:

I look forward to our meeting in your office next Thursday, November 3, at 2:00 PM to talk about the tax implications of divesting the Wescott plant.  Mark Smith of our Tax Department will be with me.  See you then.

Sincerely,

Optional additional items include a politely worded reminder of what the client has offered bring to the meeting and a brief personal note.

Dear __________:

I look forward to our meeting in your office next Thursday, November 3, at 2:00 PM to talk about the tax implications of divesting the Wescott plant.  Mark Smith of our Tax Department will be with me. If Marie Frasier or someone else from your Financial Department can join us, that would be great.  See you then.

Thanks for the news that Marty’s daughter is recovering. I’ve hesitated to ask, it sounded so bleak.  What a relief it must be for him!

Sincerely,

This email should go out within twenty-four hours of the conversation setting up the meeting.  It is easy to do, helpful to the client and businesslike and gets your name in front of the client one more time.  One should go out confirming every business development meeting.

Every other Thursday, I present a rainmaking problem for which I don’t have satisfactory answers. Here is another in our series brought to me at a coaching session by a professional whom I will call Hazel. I have seen this problem before and always have been uncomfortable with my answers. I hope you will offer your suggestions in the comments at the end of this post.

Hazel made partner at her firm about a year ago, after two back-to-back years of delivering over $3,000,000 in new business. Her biggest client in both years was an insurance company, where her primary sponsor was a man named Bill. Bill had also hired her to work on five matters already this year. Yesterday he called to inform her that he had been let go and set up a time to meet with her next week.

Hazel dreads this meeting. She knows she owes Bill a lot and wants to help him, both because she feels she has a debt to repay and because he has three small children at home. But she is reluctant to introduce him to her other clients.

After three years of working with him, she is all too familiar with his weaknesses. Though nice enough, he makes many sloppy mistakes and frequently fails to follow through on his commitments. A high-maintenance client, he requires constant attention and also takes criticism poorly.

There are ethical and practical aspects to her problem.

• The ethical problem: She owes Bill a huge debt. Without his business she would not have been promoted to partner. He has also served unfailingly as a reference. She made a significant mistake on one assignment for him, which he caught and dealt with generously. On the other hand, she also is indebted to the people he will want introductions to. And she owes her other clients and contacts fair treatment, too. She is uncomfortable giving Bill her implicit endorsement in a referral.

• The practical problem: She is most concerned about the ethical issues, but is naturally aware of the practical ones. Bill has already stated that he will give her business no matter where he lands. That pledge, she knows, would not withstand Bill realizing that she was withholding aid during his job search. If she refers him to another client who hires him, that client is bound to become aware of his shortcomings. If the new job doesn’t work out and he is let go, it could reflect badly on her.

I have been in a similar situation, myself, and felt as torn as Hazel does. What should a professional do in this situation?

(Got a problem selling professional services? Feel free to email me your problem and it may become a future “Rainmaking Problem.”)

In previous posts, Seven Things to Remember About a Senior Executive’s Secretary and Getting Help from Executives’ Assistants, I described how to get help from a client’s administrative assistant. In simple terms, I described how to develop a relationship with her that benefits her boss, her and you.

Some rainmakers delegate this responsibility to their own assistants, and so obtain several benefits. First and foremost, it frees up their own time for other marketing and sales activities. Second, it allows a peer-to-peer relationship between the assistants, which is often stronger than one you can create. Third, it results in a higher and better use their time. Many will recognize this and take pride in the contribution they are making.

As one executive recruiter who has started up several new offices for his firm puts it, “The assistant is fifty percent of your productivity. I am a little disorganized and chaotic, so I need an assistant who is organized and disciplined. I expect her to develop a relationship with the assistants of my key contacts, even though they never meet.”

If you choose to try this approach:

• Review the two posts with her. (There is more on developing relationships with admins in Chapter 7 of my book, Rain Making-2nd Edition.)
• Help her practice by role playing several calls with her. Do it over the phone, sitting in different rooms. First, have her play the role of the client’s assistant, while you demonstrate how you would obtain her help in scheduling a meeting with her (fictitious) boss. Then, you play the client’s assistant and let her practice on you several times.
• Select some low risk targets in the market you sell to and have her try what she has learned with them.
• Give her some targets and goals and get her started.
• Give her a small budget for an occasional lunch with the clients’ assistants or to buy them flowers on special occasions.
• When you come back from a meeting she scheduled for you, always let her know how it went. Always do this. She needs the information and it is also a courtesy to a valued team member whom you want to keep motivated. And if a meeting results in a win, make sure she participates in the celebration.

There is a good post by Julie Fleming on working a holiday party. If there is a party in your future you might well find it helpful.

The other day, while I was describing the importance of having a large network, a client interrupted me to say that he didn’t need one, his work coming from about five people. It’s hard to argue with success, so let’s look at the difference between his view of selling professional services and mine.

Big networks tend to bifurcate into primary and secondary networks. Primary networks range between fifteen and thirty people and contain those people with whom the opportunity to give and receive is greatest.  Secondary networks encompass everyone else, with whom ties are weaker.

The theory of the strength of weak ties, first proposed by Mark Granovetter, states that opportunities come disproportionately from secondary networks.  Granovetter studied people looking for jobs through their networks.  They would start by calling on the members of their primary networks.  But as the job search ran on, the value of information from this group diminished, because the primary network members usually knew each other and had access to the same information.

In contrast, the secondary network members gathered information from their primary network members, people the job seeker didn’t know.  So, their information tended to be fresh.  Job seekers usually found jobs through this fresh well of information and introductions.  Primary network contacts helped by introducing the job seekers to their secondary network members.

We don’t want to read more into this study than it warrants. The point is this: As the term implies, referral networks are made up of people who refer their contacts to each other.  Primary contacts in such markets are extra sets of eyes and ears out looking for opportunities for you and you for them.

In contrast, my client has four or five contacts who give him lots of work. As valuable to him as they are, they do not constitute a referral network.  They hire him, rather than refer him.

So what, you might well ask.  Well, work from these sources increases or decreases in volume in ways beyond my client’s control.  One by one, they will eventually leave the market.  If my client wants to expand his business, he must go out and find additional buyers.  As his relationships are currently functioning, they won’t help him do this.  So, he will have to find them through some other means.  And that’s where he’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to someone with a big network.

The power of a network increases geometrically over time, if you maintain and grow it.  A person who has built up a network of 500 people over ten years, most of them secondary network contacts, has a much easier time generating opportunities than one who has built a network of only 20 over the same period.  (There are several reasons why this is true.  See Chapter 2 in my book, Creating Rainmakers, and Chapter 25 in Rain Making-2nd Edition for explanations.)  My client may be able to pursue his approach successfully for his career.  But I’ll put my money on the person with a large network every time.  The numbers work heavily in her favor.

Many professionals spend too much time on airplanes and in hotels instead of at home with their families. The luster of business travel tarnishes quickly. What once seemed exciting soon becomes corrosive of developing relationships and caring for a family.

The most obvious solution to this problem is to develop business in your home town—presuming, of course, you live in a place where there is enough local business to be had. Many talk about shifting from distant clients to local ones, but few succeed.

In our database of interviews with rainmakers, we have examples of professionals who have pulled it off from such locations as New York, Chicago, Montreal, and San Francisco. Here are some of the things these professionals did:

Planned a campaign: They realized they couldn’t develop a local clientele over night and made a long-term commitment. They identified what companies they were going after and then went after them. One recruiter helped his colleagues replace him at all of his non-New York accounts, in essence, giving them away. He then drew a circle encompassing a twenty-block area from his office, identified every potential client within that circle, and then went out and called on them. He timed his effort carefully, “This worked, because I could tell the economy was revving up when I started.”

Took risk: Most of the rainmakers went after local business knowing that if it didn’t work it would hurt their careers or, in some cases, cost them their jobs. But they went ahead anyway on the basis of their personal convictions. One, in a city that was marginally large enough to support an office, brushed aside clear messages from his firm that his town was not a priority (and my cautions about its business base) and went ahead and did it. Another, a mother of four, said “I touched all the right bases internally before I did it, but still did it at my own risk.”

Paid their dues: They stuck it out. They never lost focus. Said one, “You need to think carefully about your target account mix and where you build relationships because those hours are valuable. If you pursue clients at a distance and get hired, you can’t develop local business during the 20 hours a week you are on a plane, traveling to work with them.”

Looked for a lever: Most found a lever that gave them special access to prospective clients and worked it as hard as they could. One worked the firm’s alumni network. Another volunteered as staff to a blue-ribbon panel of business leaders, assembled to boost their community’s economy. A third used information he had assembled into a proprietary database to offer insightful, short presentations to his prospective clients. Yet another ran a series of breakfasts for potential buyers at targeted accounts, and then carefully cultivated relationships with people who attended. All of these tactics have been used by many professionals to win business. In these cases, the tactics were focused on and adapted to getting local business.

Of course they did all of the other things one needs to do to develop new business, too. They went out and met the right people, stayed in front of them by being helpful, and, when appropriate, reminded their local contacts of the services they offered. And eventually business came. For some it took eighteen months, for some two years and for one five years. But it was worth it, because now they get to go home to their families most nights.

So, once again, it’s not rocket science. Focused effort, commitment, risk taking, gaining access to the right people, persistence—you’ve heard about these things before from me and others and you understand. But, of course, understanding is a low-level objective when helping people learn to make rain. The high-level objective is consistent execution over time, when you face many other demands on your time.

Do any of you readers have a good story about developing local business?

Here is another of the rainmaking problems that I offer as topics for discussion. It’s one that I hate! I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts on a solution to this problem.

I hate it! I just hate it! But someone always asks how big their network should be. It is a perfectly fair question. But I hate it, because my answer is so lame. It’s lame, because I simply don’t know. My fumbling answers usually start with, “That depends. On the one hand …” and are, at best, unconvincing. The other one I hear, “bigger than yours is now,” stinks of condescension.

It’s not only a fair question, it’s a good one. To be effective, networks need some bulk, because as a network grows, its power grows geometrically. Conceptually, at least, once your network reaches an optimum size, you can shift your focus to increasing its quality.

A few sizing parameters seem reasonable. If you sell a regularly recurring service, like accounting audits, your network needn’t be as big as the one needed if you sell a nonrecurring service. People who sell a lot of small projects need bigger networks than those who sell fewer, larger ones. Factors like these suggest that there isn’t one answer for all situations.

For the purposes of this discussion, a person’s active network will be defined as those business people with whom he or she has had personalized contact within the past six months in meetings, by phone or in writing (mass (e)mailings don’t count unless you have added a personalized note).

It would be interesting to learn any of the following:

• Research done on the effects of referral network sizes on their productivity. (There has probably been some.)

• Guidelines or methodologies for determining optimum network size. (There is a good chance that these don’t exist, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.)

• Your experiences with different sizes of networks. (Were there any tipping points or other indications that something significant had changed. Please note the kind of services you offer.)

I think this request is unusually difficult, so please don’t be shy about impressions, opinions and general comments on the subject. You can’t be doing any worse with this one than I am.

(Got a problem selling professional services? Feel free to email me your problem and it may become a future “Rainmaking Problem.”)

In an earlier post I listed seven things to remember when dealing with executives’ secretaries. Here are some things you can do to put that knowledge to use:

• Keep your goal aligned with hers and remind her that this is the case by saying things like, “I want to make sure that I use [your boss’s] time well.”

• Let her help you achieve this shared goal by seeking her advice. “I sense from talking to some of my contacts in the company that x is an issue in several parts of the organization. Do you know if he feels that way? Do you think he might be open to talking about it?”

• Keep your goal aligned with hers and remind her that this is the case by saying things like, “I want to make sure that I use [your boss’s] time well.”Let her help you achieve this shared goal by seeking her advice. “I sense from talking to some of my contacts in the company that x is an issue in several parts of the organization. Do you know if he feels that way? Do you think he might be open to talking about it?”

• Also, seek her judgment. “If you wouldn’t mind, I will send the email to you first, and if you don’t think it would interest him, please don’t forward it to him. I don’t want to waste his time.” “I am planning to bring our tax specialist with me, unless you sense that [your boss] would rather meet one-on-one. What do you think?”

• Show gratitude and interest. Verbal thank-yous, thank you notes, notes to a administrative assistant’s boss commending her, and flowers are all ways to show your appreciation for help. Praise will mean more if specific rather than general. (“Your advice on x saved hours of work, helping us meet the tight schedule.”) Equally important are showing interest in her children and spouse, and in her health and well-being as you would any other business friend.

Assistants to executives want to help their bosses use time productively and efficiently. They can help you do the same if you give them a chance.