(This post is another in our series of Rainmaking Problems.  We invite your comments on this problem and would also welcome any problems you would like to submit to get comments from other readers.)

I received the following question from a reader in Singapore.  He was responding to Rain Making Problem #9: Lead Generation when Your Back is to the Wall to which he refers several times.  What would you suggest?

Hi all,

Ford, I just want to say first that I think what you’re doing is great. I was so unhappy with my previous firm, I set up my own practice last year with just one client. From what the client told me before I quit, I was going to be extremely busy just servicing them. However, for various reasons they have sent me only about one-quarter to one-third of the work they indicated they would send me before I quit, so your books and your website have been a life saver for me.

I’m sorry that I don’t have any tips for Lenore, but I do have a question which relates to Mel’s point on focusing on serving rather than winning. I like to think I provide first-rate service. I’m not aware of anyone else in my geographical region and area of practice who provides service and does work to the standard I do. The only trouble is, how does one show that to a potential client? The way I see it, the scope for doing this is pretty limited: you can only go so far in writing proposals, and you may be limited to just one, or if you’re lucky, two meetings with the potential client to talk over their needs, etc. Otherwise, “We’re great. Our service is awesome and we’re much better than everybody else” just sounds like another sales pitch that the potential client also heard from the competition. It is only when you actually land the work that you can show what you do.

So, do you have any tips to share on focusing on servicing during the sales process? Thanks in advance if you do.

In a sling in Singapore,

Willem

Of course, I am responsible for the in-a-sling close. Forgive me Willem; I couldn’t stop myself.

For most of our clients, business is hard to come by these days.  When coaching in this environment, we first look for the quickest and easiest sources of new business.  To this end, we ask a series of simple questions:

•    Where did your last five assignments come from?  Your last ten?
•    Where did your first new client from?
•    What worked before that you haven’t done for a long time?
•    What worked once that you have never tried again?

We have learned to ask this last question through years of experience.  When I first started coaching, I was surprised when I learned of a tactic that worked well once and had never been tried since.  Not any more.  It has happened too often, and I have even caught myself letting a good tactic get forgotten this way.

People get busy.  They get distracted by other things in their lives.  A tactic which can’t be repeated immediately for some practical reason gets replaced by others.

Well, it’s time to dust off those old tactics.

One consultant I know put together what he calls a road show, a short educational session on his specialty, and took it on a trip to large clients located off the beaten path.  Underserved by others, they welcomed the attention.  Ten visits resulted in three new clients (though not immediately).  That was three years ago, and, until now, he has been too busy to repeat the effort.

Guess what.  He’s on the road again.

John was a young professional assigned to work with a team at a client’s office complex.  Late one Friday afternoon he stopped by the office of Bill, the Vice President in the client organization to whom John and his team reported.  He had a question that needed an answer if he was to keep his team working the following week.

Bill seemed busy, but the question was important enough that he took time to pick it apart with John until they found an answer.  As John turned to leave, Bill said, “Have you got a minute more?  I’d like to ask you a question.  I have my monthly meeting with Tom Monday morning, [Tom was the EVP to whom Bill reported], and I’d like to go over something I plan to say to him.”  For the next hour, John helped his client work through how he would handle some tough issues with his boss the next day.  This was, of course, outside the scope of his assignment.

The following Monday John ran into Bill in the hall and asked him how the meeting had gone.  Bill, obviously happy, gave him a quick summary of what had happened.

This was the first time that John had ever provided career coaching to a client and he liked it.  He realized that his stature had risen in Bill’s eyes.  He also learned things about what was going on within the client organization and about important people who worked there that he might never have known otherwise.  Later in the month, he was able to use some of this information in the way he responded to a question that EVP Tom asked during a meeting.  Without having to disclose that he knew something that was not generally known, the knowledge helped shape his work and the way he spoke with his client.

Bill had told him that he had a monthly meeting with Tom.  Noting that the men had met on the first Monday of the month, John found an excuse to drop by Bill’s office the Friday night before the first Monday of the following month.  Sure enough, Bill asked for John’s reaction to something he planned to say to Tom the next Monday.

The matter that John and his team were working on ended months ago, but they are all still there working on other assignments for the client.  And on the Friday afternoon before the first Monday of every month, John stops by Bill’s office to go over the meeting that Bill will have with Tom.  This has never been formally arranged and it’s outside the scope of any of John’s work.  But both men have come to expect it and both get a lot out of it.

A member of the audience of the Washington, DC chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) asked me if I had any opinions on brochures. He shouldn’t have gotten me started! My comments on brochures always start civilly enough and end with me ranting and foaming at the mouth. In this case, they went something like this:

Brochures have their place . . . but not on the planet!

Excuse me, I forget myself.

Brochures have their place, but they aren’t the foundation of a marketing effort that some people seem to think they are. They aren’t essential first steps in founding a firm or a practice or a studio. To the contrary, time spent writing (and bickering) about a brochure is time away from the market and, especially when you are starting up, you need to be out in the market talking with people, not in the office writing. Spend the time you would spend writing a brochure out in the market talking with people and you have a good chance of turning up some business.

Of course, that’s one of the comforts of brochure writing; you can postpone having to go out and talk with people. But time is precious during the early days of building a business. If you aren’t generating business you’re draining cash. Unless, you talk with people, you’ll never sell anything! That’s the only way you will generate cash flow. In that light, writing a brochure is like planting a flower garden when you are running out of food! Like planting flowers when starvation is staring you in the face! Instead, you should be out in the forest stalking . . .

Excuse me, I got carried away.

With modern desktop publishing technology, you can rapidly put together a presentable leave-behind document and get out in the market immediately. Offerings tend to shift rapidly during the early days of a business, and you can change your desktop document easily and cheaply as you adapt your service and the way you talk about it to the market. You can’t do that with a four-color glossy brochure, can you? No, those $3-a-pop wonders will become obsolete in a year and then sit on the shelf collecting dust. Then you’ll be sorry you . . .

Ahem.

Better still, before you prepare any document, do some market research. Take four or five potential or past clients to lunch and ask them to comment on you business concept and offerings and the way you intend to talk about them. You will get some great ideas and will have, in the context of the meetings, educated four or five buyers about what you do.

But don’t, don’t waste precious time and money writing a #*$!!>&^ brochure! The whole *(?>&%!@# is a *&^%)_? ?**&#!! and . . .

At this point, the man who had asked the question cautiously stood up and said, “Yes, but what I really want to know is, do you have an opinion about brochures?

(This post is another in our series of Rainmaking Problems. We invite your comments on this problem and would also welcome any problems you would like to submit to get comments from other readers.)

Over the past twenty years a handful of companies have prospered by running what I call lead junkets. A class of corporate manager; human resources managers, facilities managers, financial managers or some other group; are invited on an expenses-paid trip to a resort or on a cruise ship for an event with some educational content. In return they agree to participate in a set number of short meetings with people who would like to sell to them. The sellers pay a fee to attend and also get a set number of meetings with the buyers with additional opportunities to rub elbows with all attending buyers at receptions, meals and the like.

These can be pricey events, costing a seller over $10,000 plus travel expenses.  In return they are promised twenty uninterrupted minutes to pitch their wares to each of the twelve buyers. Though some sorting and matching of buyers and sellers may be done by the organizers, the sellers do not get to pick whom they meet with. Also the organizers restrict attendance by sellers who compete with each other.

The appeal of the lead junket is having prospective clients delivered to you with little effort on your part. It all seems so painless, compared to cold calling, attending association meetings, giving speeches and all of the harder ways to generate leads.

I acknowledge that I have never attended a lead junket and my skeptical view of them is reflected in the term I use to describe them. In my experience, those who want their firms to send them on these jaunts are usually those most uncomfortable with other kinds of lead generation. They are looking for fixes with a minimal feeling of rejection.

I get asked about lead junkets four or five times a year.
My question is, when, if ever, are lead junkets worth the cost? In your response, please note whether or not you have ever attended one. If you have had good or bad outcomes, I would like to hear them.  Please do not name the operator of the event in your comment.  Also, if you work for or are an investor in a firm running this kind of event, please state that in your response.

(Two earlier posts, Networking Up, Part 1 and Part 2, described how rainmakers network with executives, who are their seniors in age, authority and income.  Here is another on the subject.)

Few of us can shanty up to a senior executive’s office and just pop our heads in to say hello.  These are busy people and they have little time for casual visits.   Gatekeepers bar entrance to those who might fritter away the executives’ time.  So, even if you meet a senior executive during the course of your work, maintaining contact is hard.  To do so requires knowing more things of substance to share with her than most of us do.  And, if you don’t maintain contact, you will lose the relationship.

Carl whose slow, easy-going manner masked a fast, hard-charging mind, was easy to talk to and even easier to underestimate.  He built relationships with senior execs and so a successful practice, also cross selling many of his firm’s other services.  The execs learned that he was an astute observer of their organizations and so, worth talking to.  He was well briefed on matters that were just beginning to filter up to the executive suite.  His way of coming up with insights into client organizations, like many successful rainmaking techniques, was simple:  He drank a lot of coffee and listened to gossip.

“People want to target the big guys in an organization and not waste time on people in lower levels. They forget that you can’t just buy a senior executive a cup of coffee and have a chat, but you can with someone lower in the organization.  Those people will tell you what is going on and what you need to know to talk with someone higher up,” Carl explained.  “Talk with enough of them and you can learn about anything you want to know.”

Of course, Carl isn’t the first to discoverer of this technique.  In modified ways, it has been used by professionals for a long time.  In some current cases, LinkedIn replaces coffee as the medium through which information is passed.  But the underlying method is the same and forever being rediscovered, because it works so well.

Two years ago I was coaching a young German strategy consultant.  When I asked him to make some calls, he refused, arguing that later in the week he had a meeting with the general manager of a major business unit of his biggest account.  “I need to spend my time figuring out what I am going to say,” he protested.  I asked if he knew people working in the business unit with whom he could gossip a bit.  He did and agreed to call and talk with them.  Half an hour later, he came back beaming; one of the people he had talked to had laid out an agenda for his meeting with the boss.

Coffee and gossip, that’s not a bad way to spend some time each day!

A friend invited me to breakfast this coming Friday.  He didn’t give me a reason, but I know why.  He’s out of a job.  Again.  Again he wants some help, especially with introductions.   I now get two or three calls a week from people looking for work, some, like this man, for the second time in about a year.

I feel honored by these calls.  But a part of me also dreads them.  I fear that what I can give will be too little, or seem so.  I worry that I have gone to my network contacts so often, asking them to make time for another friend who is looking for work, that I risk wearing out my welcome.  And I must engage in the unpleasant networking calculation of whether to spend a precious job hunt chit on this person or save it for another.

Still, now is the time to be there for people, and even more so for those who have been there for us in the past.  When I can help someone, it is a pleasure.  Better, it’s deeply rewarding.  I must keep reminding myself that I can’t be expected to succeed at helping them all and that all I can do is my best, however feeble and disappointing that may be to some.

Identifying how you can help can be challenging. Here are some things you can do:

1>    Introduce the jobseeker to a potential employer.  This, of course, is what he most wants and in this environment the hardest to do.  An introduction to a good information source, especially one with a lot of contacts comes in a close second. I try provide everyone who comes to me for help with a job hunt with a least one introduction.

2>    Review a resume.  I am always amazed at the number of resumes I see that mention responsibilities but leave out accomplishments.  Equally surprising is the lack of customization to a specific opportunity.

3>    Provide information.  You may know things about a person, position, company, or industry that will help speed a job search.

4>    Rehearse.  You can help the jobseekers figure out what to say about aspects of their work history they find it awkward to explain or concerns about a new position they finds it awkward to ask.

5>    Let them vent.  You can be a safe place for them to vent their frustrations about what happened at a former employer or the situation they are in.

6>    Encourage and support.  You can call them from time to time to see how they are doing.  I can assure you that almost no one else does.

If you are a networker, you are in the job hunt business for your contacts.  Just as you are always looking for leads for your firm, you must always be looking for job openings for your out-of-work contacts.  Especially now.

Do any of you readers have an example of a creative way you helped a network contact or that someone else helped you with a job search?

I sat with a friend today who described frustration with a colleague who had lost a sale my friend had been pursuing for a long time. The client had asked the colleague, whom I will call Ernest, if he had ever done work in a foundry. Ernest had answered, “Yes, but only once and it was over twenty years ago for a company that was so different from yours that there isn’t much relevance to your situation.” After the meeting, Ernest had argued that a less detailed response would have been misleading, and so, dishonest.

First, I want to commend Ernest for his desire to be honest.  There is, unfortunately, too much lying in selling situations and it gives selling a bad name.  I do not think Ernest was being prudish nor that his colleague wanted him to do something unprincipled. Yet, I think his answer was a mistake.

In making his defense of his answer, he committed at least two logical fallacies. First, he assumed he could read the client’s mind. Ernest presumed that the question was about relevant client experience. What if it wasn’t? For example, it may have been a simple devise to get Ernest to talk to get a sense of what he would be like to work with. If so, and I think this at least as likely as the reason Ernest assumed, he showed the client that he was likely to bore him with unwanted detail and, worse, that he was none too savvy.

Or the client could have wanted to know how Ernest felt about spending a good part of the next few months in a place with a lot of banging and crashing. We will never know. If so, Ernest’s answer showed no tolerance or interest in such a place. Unless you know why a person is asking a question, you don’t really know how to answer.

Second, he assumed that an accurate but imprecise answer would be misleading and dishonest. The distinction between accuracy and precision should be kept in mind when answering client questions. An accurate statement, such as Ford Harding is between 20 and 70 years old, can be imprecise. And a precise one; Ford Harding is 18 years, four months and six days old; can be inaccurate. When we answer questions, we often make tradeoffs, explicitly or implicitly, between accuracy and precision.  An answer that is sufficiently precise in one context may not be in another.  If a policeman asks a young person’s age at a bar, he requires a precision not usually necessary, for example.

Answers to the question, Have you ever worked in a foundry?, such as Yes or Yes, but it was a while ago are both accurate, if imprecise in that they don’t give much detail. If they satisfy the client and are true, he may be put off by having more information pressed upon him. He can follow up with more questions, if he wants to.

If you are concerned that you may have misled him or that you may appear to have been evasive if he does ask for detail, the solution is simple: ask before you tell more. Yes. Is experience in a foundry important to you? His answer will guide you to the right level of precision. For example, he might answer, Only in that it would be better, if you knew what it is like to spend months in a place with so much noise, before you take the assignment. This might open the opportunity to describe work you did at a heavy metal stamping plant or the noise your child’s rock band makes when it rehearses in your living room, information relevant but not obvious.

But Ernest assumed he knew what the client was thinking and the level of detail the client wanted. Ernest is a nice man and generally good to be around.  But trying to read another’s intentions, as he did in this case, can be an annoying thing to do. How would you feel, if you asked a travel agent if she had ever been to Sweden, and you got a lengthy, qualified answer which seemed to suggested she wasn’t certain about anything on the subject, when all you really wanted to know is if the currency there is the Euro?

(This post is another in our series of Rainmaking Problems.  We invite your comments on this problem and would also welcome any problems you would like to submit to get comments from other readers.)

Katy Christ of Design & Build PR posed this problem:

I am a public relations professional specializing in the design and construction industries in the state of Florida. I subscribe to the theory that the phone call to the prospect should be to get the first meeting and the first meeting should be to get a second meeting. Based in Jacksonville, I have a six-hour drive to get to Miami/South Florida, etc.

Are you able to suggest a more efficient way to reach prospects in South Florida or other distant locales? I’m interested in the steps you take to market out-of-town companies and how you determine when to invest in travel.

My initial response was as follows: One of the advantages of consulting is the opportunity to see people in different organizations face similar problems.  What one does may be helpful to others.  We have worked for several consulting firms which work exclusively for the utility industry.  Historically being monopolies with discrete territories, utilities form a geographically dispersed market.  There is usually but one, and rarely more than two based in any city.

Here are a few things these consulting firms do:

• Work the associations.  They go to places where their clients gather, specifically associations and especially the Edison Electric Institute.  They arrange for short meetings with clients at the events in advance and work the crowd.
• Work on site, when possible.  They take advantage of work for a client to get and stay on site for blocks of time.  While there, they meet and stay in front of as many people in the client organization that they can.
• Schlep.  They do the long commute to the client offices when they need to.
• Rely heavily on the phone and email to maintain relationships with a bias towards the  phone, because the real-time exchange approximates the kind of interaction they would have with the client were they to meet in person.

Not too profound, is it?  But it’s what they do and they are pros at it.

What would you recommend to Kathy, based on your personal experience or on what you have seen others do, to win and keep distant clients?