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

I recently met with a client adjusting from the heady days of a boom economy to the current bust. Several of its professionals argued that they hadn’t been in a sellers’ market. Competition for large projects was always tough, they said, and though they had won a lot, they had lost some, too. True enough, but their firm’s major competitors had grown at rates over 20 percent per year and the firm, itself, faster than that, while maintaining or increasing prices. Sounds like a sellers’ market to me.

There is good reason to clarify this point, because recognizing when one is tipping from a sellers’ to a buyers’ market or vice verssus has important implications for many professional firms. That’s because the price of many professional services is quite elastic with demand. Boom turns to bust quite suddenly (see my post, Selling Professional Services in a Downturn, for an explanation of why), and you have to drop prices quickly, if you want to keep winning work. The market teaches this quite effectively, when too many firms compete for too few projects or assignments and clients play them off against each other to get the best deal.

When the tide turns to boom again, clients aren’t nearly so quick to help you see that you can raise your rates. This means that prices tend to go up more slowly in good times than they go down in bad. The firm which recognizes when it can charge its clients more generates much higher profits than its competitors.

My question is, how will we know when this downturn is over and we can begin to push up rates?

This post completes an interview with Konstantinos Kasekas, whose 8,500 LinkedIn contacts qualify him as a super user.  The first part appeared last week.
 
Q:  Are there any tricks of the trade for using LinkedIn you would care to share?
 
Kasekas: If someone sees the merit of maintaining a larger, looser network, versus a smaller, trusted network, I would recommend they also loosen the criteria determining who they add to their network. Personally, before I ran out of invitations, I would invite everyone to join my group. My friends, colleagues, contacts, people I would interview, people I would have a passing conversation with – everyone. Please note that inviting people you don’t know is a violation of the LinkedIn user agreement, so you should stop short of that.

Q:  How do you invite people?

Kasekas:  Do not send out one of those “generic” boilerplate invitations, “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” because it depersonalizes an already impersonal medium. And when you get an invitation, whatever you decide to do, always try and respond to every personalized invitation with an email “thanks for sending me the invitation”. This helps differentiate you as a LinkedIn member who GETS it. And will help you stand out.

For a more thorough list check out my blog entry On LinkedIn Size Does Matter.

Q:  Is there a saturation point where the flow of information through LinkedIn becomes so heavy that it overwhelms?

Kasekas:  Oh, absolutely. I hit that point about two years ago, when I hit the 2,000 1st contacts mark. I have turned all my email notifications off. If I were to get an email notification for everything that occurred within my network I would have crashed my email server a long time ago. This is a key problem when you are a communication hub in such a large network; how do you differentiate meaningful communication from noise? It takes time, that’s all I can say. To be candid, it is more of an art than a science. There is at least one near miss, I can recall, when a potential client sent me an inmail, asking us to participate in a global RFP. It was a completely unsolicited contact and the message was almost lost in the hundreds of inmails that sit on my LinkedIn mailbox. The good news is that I did find it in time and was able to garner some valuable conversations from the message. Have other such messages fallen through the cracks? Probably, but it is the price I pay for being at the center of the network.

Long term, this has implications for all users.  It’s like banner ads.  At first they had a big impact, now people block them out as visual noise.   The discussions and news portions of groups are becoming irrelevant, except for questions in key groups; 

Q: What are coming advances we might expect as LinkedIn develops?

Kasekas: They are trying to integrate better communications like Twitter and notes function.    People have realized that LinkedIn has advantages, so active participation is going up.  Profiles are becoming more developed, so content is improving. 

I think there is a risk that it is becoming too much of everything for everybody.  That risks alienating users.  Then it might be leapfrogged.  Superusers find paid services less valuable.

(This is the first of a series of posts on interesting people I have encountered)

The value of LinkedIn is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up.  A few heavy users lead the way, discovering new ways to use it, and the rest of us straggle behind them.  Gary Pines, Harding & Company’s strongest advocate for using the network, suggested we interview one of these leaders to gain some insight into its future direction.

Konstantinos Kasekas, a recruiter for Hudson and an author of the blog, www.beyond.jobs, has been a heavy user for three years and has over 8,500 1st contacts (over 16 million total).  Always operating at high energy levels, he becomes so joyous talking about LinkedIn that it sweeps everyone within earshot along.  He kindly agreed to be interviewed:

Q:   You can’t possibly have relationships with 8,500 people.  Why collect so many contacts?

Kasekas:  Because it makes the key decision maker visible to me, making part of my job as a “Lead Generator”, significantly easier.  In the past, the identity of the decision maker was obscure, protected behind a veil of corporate privacy.  Now that paradigm has been obliterated. Due to the site’s depth and breadth, on LinkedIn I can conduct a specialized key word search and identify key decision makers immediately. For example, Lululemon Athletica  is a global clothing manufacturer, with a strict “No Names” policy. If you call into their HR department and ask to speak to a Recruiter, or Director of HR (key decision makers in our line of work), you will immediately be turned down by the Operator and be forwarded to a general mailbox where you can leave a message. However, a quick search in my linkedin network, gives me a short cut around this process. The importance of “Size” is critical here, since a linkedIn search is limited to my “network” of contacts, defined as “my immediate contacts, their contacts, and their contacts’ contacts. So Ford, if you conducted the same search at Lululemon, you would likely get different results than I, simply because my network is larger than yours. Simple economies of scale. The larger my network, the more I get to see.

Q:  Once you identify the person you want to meet, do you ask your mutual contact for an introduction?

Kasekas:  Usually not.   Usually I don’t know that person either, so I go directly after the person I want to meet.  There are a number of tactics to get to them but they don’t involve LinkedIn.

Q:  That’s it?  It’s just a big directory?

Kasekas:  No, but don’t underestimate the directory value.  Identifying key decision makers in a company, a process that used to take several phone calls or varying degrees of research, can now be done in mere seconds.

Q:  How else do you get value from LinkedIn that people with fewer contacts might not?

Kasekas:  Recently, I had the VP of Global Talent Management at a Fortune 500 company contact me from Paris, through LinkedIn even though she, herself, only had ten contacts on LinkedIn.  If my network was smaller, she wouldn’t have found me on the site, and more importantly wouldn’t have found me as attractive. A well connected professional with a large “rolodex” is generally viewed as a key strength in consulting.  This could lead to global relationship.

Increased visibility both ways is what it’s all about.  That’s all that counts.  It’s very difficult to gain trust on the internet, so why bother? Go for maximize visibility and work on trust through other means.

Q:   So, how does one get 8,500 contacts?

Kasekas:  I am a “super-user”. This does not mean I am super, but that I have more than 5,000 1st contacts.  This group of users represents the top 98th percentile of LinkedIn members. Unlike other members, super-users focus on one thing; growing our networks indefinitely.  It is more a mindset than anything else, as all my resources are either dedicated to using LinkedIn, or how to use LinkedIn to enhance my professional goals. There are email addicts, and blackberry addicts; I am a self proclaimed LinkedIn addict. I check my LinkedIn account at least ten times per day to see if I’ve received an invitation to connect.

Like most super-users, I am an open-networker, which means that I accept all invitations. I invite everyone I interview or call on to join my LinkedIn network. My linkedin profile is listed in my signature file of my email. I write about using LinkedIn on my blog, and host multiple LinkedIn-centric discussion groups on and off of LinkedIn.com. While traffic varies, I try to add at least 100 new contacts per week to my account.

Another great tool for access to the greater LinkedIn network, is the use of the “LinkedIn Groups”. LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups at a time, I am a member of 50 groups at all times. Every few weeks, I remove myself from five-to-ten groups and join new ones, to ensure that I am being exposed to a diversity of interests and backgrounds. I answer questions that are relevant to my industry to raise awareness of my subject matter expertise, and end every answer with an invitation to send me an invitation.  LinkedIn only allows you to send out 3,000 invitations to connect, a ceiling I hit over a year ago, so such creative ways are necessary to maintain my steady network growth on the site.

Q:  What are its principal limitations?

Kasekas: A common misconception is that LinkedIn is the new alternative to networking. The belief is that by sitting in front of your computer all day, you can build a solid network of strong relationships that will replace traditional networking. As a LinkedIn-addict I am the first to yell out that this is not the case. LinkedIn is not, and will never be a replacement to traditional networking. It is a tool to help facilitate networking, but nothing more.

Trust does not come cheap, and building trust via inmails and emails, is extremely difficult. I could do more to build trust over a ten minute telephone conversation, or a fifteen-minute coffee than I can do through months or even years of email correspondence. So, our perception of LinkedIn as an end, versus a means is a key limitation of the site.

Once we overcome this perception, the tool, itself, does have another major limitation.  While it is an excellent tool for identifying key decision makers, the effectiveness of the site is limited to the size of your network. LinkedIn only allows you to “see” the names of the people within your network and their contacts twice removed (your first contacts, their friends/contacts and their contacts’ friends). So, for example, if your 1st contacts, or their friends were not connected to Barack Obama directly, you would not be able to find the name of the President of the United States, via LinkedIn.  So, on LinkedIn size does matter.

A superuser grows his LinkedIn network exponentially as a means of building your total contact list, and then picking and choosing whom connect with, within that larger group later on.

The rest of this interview will be published in a later post.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could work on only the most interesting assignments in my profession!
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do the work at a fat profit!
Wouldn’t it be nice if these assignments were delivered to me without my having to exert any effort!
Wouldn’t it be nice if they were delivered in a steady flow without any work overloads or gaps!
Wouldn’t it be nice if they were given to me in preference to my firm’s most prestigious competitors!
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone in the firm delivered them to me without expecting anything from me other than high quality execution!
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could spend my career that way, steadily advancing in both rank and compensation!
Wouldn’t it be nice if people recognized that delivering the work is what I am good at and didn’t expect me to learn how to sell, which I don’t like and am not good at!
Wouldn’t it be nice if . . .

. . . but I can’t and they aren’t and they don’t and . . . so I work hard at developing business and help win interesting work for myself and others in the firm and, over time, I have learned to like what I must do and take great pride in it.

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

An attorney, whom I will call Larry Polonisen, has sent in the following problem, one common enough in networking and well worth reflecting on.  How can he continue to take, if he has nothing to lend?  What would you do?

Hello, I am a faithful reader of your blog.

I have a suggestion for a post there (which I need to frankly admit is also a request for free advice).  The question is what to do when a contact gives you a couple of good referrals of business, and makes known (appropriately) that he expects referrals in return, but such reciprocal referrals are unlikely to ever happen (for lots of reasons not the least of which is that other better sources are in line for reciprocals before this person).  

The choices seem to be 1) tell the referral source that reciprocals are very unlikely, 2) actively search for things to refer, 3) assure the person (honestly) that if something comes along that can be referred to him it will be.  The first choice seems good in the abstract but horrible in the real world as it likely cuts off a referral source.  The second is again great, except that there is a higher priority for any referrals in this area and also because I get hardly any of matters in the referrers area (or I would be in that area myself).  The third seems the best, but if nothing gets referred, the referring lawyer ends up feeling taken advantage of.

I suppose that there might be a fourth choice (at least in my jurisdiction) is to offer the referrer a (legal) referral fee (perhaps coupled with the explanation under alternative 1).  What do you think?

Thanks very much.  I enjoy and use the information on you blog.

Professionals often see identifying a target set of clients as a first step to developing business.  It becomes a time consuming analytical process in the quest of increasing the efficiency of their rain making.

I’m not against targeting or increasing efficiency.  I am in favor of a sense of urgency about bringing in business, which dictates that you get out into the market now.  (See the posts Rain Making = Doing and Bah to Brochures for more on this subject.)  The need to find business is too urgent to go on hold while you do weeks or months of market analysis.  Targeting often serves to delay activity, when it needn’t.

You can start calling and meeting with people now, before you develop a target list and do it without much loss of efficiency.  You can do it by lumping, instead of targeting.   That means you take a few moments, or even up to half an hour, to identify those organizations and people who obviously belong in your target market and start with them, now.  You can continue your analyses of less obvious candidates as an ongoing task.  But you don’t need more than a lump of good targets to start making calls and having meetings.

The head of a small regional office of a larger firm did this with his leadership team.  He reported, ”We switched our thinking.  We used to try to figure out who would be best to do business with and then spend a lot of time trying to find a way in.  Now we look for who we have an entre with that we would obviously want to do business with and go after them.  It’s transformed our business development efforts.  We are doing much better.”

Sounds pretty efficient to me.

When two people who haven’t worked much with each other first go on a sales call together, one often dominates the conversation with the prospective client. When two people go on a sales call together and one is much senior to the other, the senior one tends to do most the talking. Anyone who sells with Maxwell Flushover (name changed—actually, this could be one of a dozen different people I know) learns that he will do most talking. In cases like these, what is the second seller to do?

She (or he) has several options:

1> Sit silently trying to look wise and interested. This may be good for starters, but if it goes on too long, the client may wonder why she is there.

2> Take notes. Good, but if it is all she does, the client may perceive her as junior help.

3> Fight with the colleague for airspace. This will alienate both the client and the colleague.

4> Take the role of monitor, carefully watching and listening to the client for visual or verbal cues that her colleague may miss during the exchange. When she sees one she will insert a question, like:

• I sense that you aren’t comfortable with that idea. Is there something you could share with us?
• You said there were three reasons you want to do this. Did we miss the third one?

It is, of course, this last alternative that I am advocating. As anyone with a lot of selling experience knows, a monitor can contribute hugely to a sales meeting. Every firm should have an understanding that anyone not speaking goes immediately into monitor mode. Everyone should know that the monitor will speak seldom, but when she does, everyone else backs off immediately.A good monitor can make the difference between winning and losing. The furrowed brow of the General Counsel, unnoticed by the first seller who is speaking to the CEO, may veil a concern that will go unspoken until later, unless an observant monitor draws him out. And the concern only voiced after you leave the room is the most hurtful to your cause.

Establishing the monitor’s role as an important one in all sales meetings counters the implicit and insidious bias that important people talk during sales meetings, while others listen. The job can be done by the most senior person on the team—and should be whenever someone else is speaking. Indeed, to instill the role in a firm, senior people must model it. And they must complement those who have effectively monitored their exchanges with a client.

There are no second sellers.

In an earlier post (Seeing Events Through a Rainmaker’s Eyes, Part 1) I described how rainmakers tend to see things differently from the rest of us. In that post I provided examples of two things that we might see as negative that a rainmaker is likely to see more positively. They also tend to see as positive things that we hardly note at all. Here are three examples of that:

-
An extra person from a client organization turns up for a meeting about our work.

• How we might see it: A need for an extra set of the documents we provided
• How rainmakers see it: Another person in the client organization for me to know and a potential future client, herself

A client calls, asking for a small amount of additional information.

• How we might see it: A need to provide a small additional service within the scope of our work or another to-do list item
• How rainmakers see it: A possible reason to go see the client and for a conversation that can cover other things I want to hear about, too

A break is called at a meeting attended by many members of the client organization.

• How we might see it: A chance to check email and voicemail
• How rainmakers see it: A chance to meet and advance relationships

As before, it is not that the rainmakers are right and the rest of us are wrong. All of the interpretations listed are reasonable. But rainmakers see opportunities for small advances in developing relationships that may lead to more business. By taking advantage of many such small opportunities, they sometimes get an assignment. We can, too. If we work at it, we can teach ourselves to see these opportunities, too.

For the past two days this blog has had technical problems which have not allowed me to publish anything nor you to comment. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. It seems to be working fine now.