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?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 7:27 am and is filed under Business Development, Rain making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.