Do you know how your clients spend their time?  You should.  That information can help you in numerous ways.  First, it will reveal their priorities, and to a large degree, their priorities are yours, too.  You want to work on things that are most important to them.  And knowing how the client spends her time will sometimes reveal opportunities to cross sell other services your firm offers.  A lawyer I know, who was trying to schedule a meeting with a client, learned as a byproduct that the client was planning a trip to Boston.  “What takes you to Boston?” asked the lawyer.  “We’re thinking of acquiring a firm up there,” responded the client.  The Boston office of the lawyer’s firm ended up doing the legal work associated with the purchase.  If the lawyer hadn’t been curious about how the client was spending this time, this never would have happened.

Knowing how a client spend her time can also tell you when your priorities are out of sync with hers.  A management consultant I once worked with couldn’t understand why a client delayed authorizing a project that would save his company over $40 million.  When he finally asked the client what was holding things up, the client replied that he was currently working on two projects that would each save over $100 million.  He would get to the consultant’s project once those efforts were completed and he had more time.  With this knowledge, the consultant was able to shift his own priorities away from making an immediate sale.

The way a client spends her time has implications for how she interacts with us.  A client who spends ten percent of her time meeting with service providers to keep abreast of what is going on in the marketplace will respond differently to your calls and requests for meetings from one who rarely does so.  One who spends all his time in internal meetings will want to interact with you quite differently from one who prepares legal documents, crunches numbers, writes reports or creates drawings under deadlines.

Knowing how a client spends leisure time can also be helpful.  An accountant learned that an executive he wanted to do business with teed up at the golf course at the same time every Saturday morning with three friends.  The accountant, a member of the same golf club, took to hanging around the first tee at the right hour on Saturdays.  Sure enough, one Saturday one of the foursome failed to show, and the executive and his friends invited the accountant to join them.  The executive ultimately became a client.

So how do your clients spend their time?  If you don’t know, you had better find out.

How would you respond to this question that a friend recently asked me?

Ford,

A.

Of we have sent your clients introductory letters and emails to get meetings.  We have reminded the clients that you will see them in meeting confirmation letters and e-mails.  Once you have held meeting, someone must send a follow-up letter.  An earlier post described how to prepare follow-up e-mails and letters. Who on your team should send them?

After a team from a professional firm has a sales meeting with a client, someone often asks who should send follow-up e-mails to whom.  Sometimes that follow-up note is the last communication you have with a member of the client team before the company decides whom to hire.  You want that last communication to be powerful.

Of course, every member of the team can send a note to every person on the client team.  But that isn’t always best.  If the teams are large, the client may feel overwhelmed.  Key members of the client team may also pay more attention to one well drafted follow-up note than to a flurry of paper which will inevitably included many redundancies.

There is no answer to that is right for every occasion, but here are some things to consider when assigning follow-up responsibilities:

• Identify relationships you want to build.  Usually, you want the senior person on the client team to feel close to the client partner or other senior person your team.  So, too, with technical experts from both organizations.  If there is an engagement manager on your team, you want the client’s engagement manager to feel that this is someone he wants to work with.  In short, the members of your team should each, at the very least, send a follow-up note their counterparts in the client organization.

• Respond to concerns and questions with authority.  If a member of the client team has expressed concern or raised a question, she should get a response from the person on your team most suited to address that concern.  If it is a technical question, your technical person should follow-up.  If it is a question about the commitment of the firm, the senior person on your team should follow-up.

• Maintain and reinforce personal relationships.  Anyone on your team who has a business or personal relationship that predates the meeting with a member of the client team should send a personal note to that person afterwards.

• Don’t leave anyone out.  Every member of the client team should get a follow-up note from at least one person on yours.

Don’t let a competitor have the last word.  Send those follow-up letters and emails.

We recently won some business from a firm we had been pursuing for six years. With little encouragement from the client, I had remained optimistic all this time of winning them, believing that when they were ready, we would get a shot. It is a fine firm with good people, a valuable set of offerings and attentive service. How could I be so certain that they would one day be ready?

My confidence was based on experience with other firms which suggested that this one would, one day, find itself lead hungry. The firm had enjoyed a steady flow of leads generated by an institutional marketing effort, and the firm’s partners would convert enough of them into assignments to keep their professionals working hard. Living off this lead flow, the firm’s partners had never learned how to generate leads on their own. When the institutional lead generation ceased to work, these partners didn’t know how to go out and dig up their own.

I have seen this happen at firms as large as the late CSC Index and at small firms. I have seen it happen at firms as different from each other as strategy consulting firms and structural engineering firms. And I have seen it happen to whole firms or just one practice or studio.

That we at Harding & Company flag over reliance on an institutional lead source as an indicator of future need for our services should be a caution to any firm heavily reliant on such a source. And it should be a caution to anyone rising through the ranks of such a firm without learning how to bring in business.

In the corporate world, as people rise though the ranks, they often move away from front-line sales activity. In the professions, the opposite occurs at most firms; the higher in the organization you go, the greater are the expectations that you will bring in work. If this is not happening at your firm, there are two possible consequences. For the firm, the failure of the institutional lead source will cause a crisis which your senior people will be ill-equipped to solve. That could result in buckets of red ink.

The individual partner set free from such a firm is likely to find prospects for employment within professional service firms limited. Other firms will expect people at that level to be able to bring in business. Unless there is strong evidence you can do that, they won’t want you.

Institutional lead flow is a great asset to a firm, practice or studio. But it can be seductive. It should never be allowed to replace the requirement that partners go out into the market and bring back business for the firm.

A participant at an Association of Management Consulting Firms (AMCF) workshop asked if it is possible to create rainmakers.  This is a frequent enough question that I decided to address it here.  As the author of a book entitled Creating Rainmakers and as a person who makes his living by helping professionals learn how to bring in business, I have an obvious bias.  Still, my colleagues at Harding & Company and I, have as much experience in this area as anyone, and so ought to have something to say on the subject.

So, my answer is yes, but one’s success at creating rainmakers will depend on the following:

• The desire of the professional to learn.  This desire, of course, must come from the individual professional, but there are things a firm can do to influence that desire.  For example, it is harder to create rainmakers at a firm where all of the heroes are technical experts, creatives or other deliverers of the firm’s services, than it is at one where business origination skill is highly respected.  It is easier to create rainmakers at firms which celebrate, even in small ways, the winning of a new assignment than at those where it is treated as a non-event.
• The earlier in the professional’s career that she is made aware that business origination is expected of every senior person in firm.  Those who, after years of working for a firm, find out to their shock that professional firms, like any other business, must sell have a harder time learning how to do it than those advised from the earliest days in their careers that they will have to sell to advance to partner.
• The ability of the professional to learn by winning small assignments before having to win big, more complex ones.  The professional who must bring in $30 million assignments from day one has a harder time than one who can start small.  At many of today’s big firms, partners learned to bring in business years ago when the firms were smaller and willing to take smaller assignments from much smaller clients than they work with now.  The young professionals coming up underneath them must go straight into major league play, a tougher requirement.
• The flexibility of a professional’s personality.  I would much rather work with an introvert who can flex his behavior to act like an extrovert when needed or an extrovert who can act like an introvert than with either an inflexible introvert or extrovert.

There are also some things that don’t make much difference.  The profession in question is one.  Yes, you may have a chance of creating more rainmakers from a randomly selected group of executive recruiters than from a randomly selected group of actuaries, but the distinction has little relevance in fact, because actuarial firms don’t compete with recruiting firms, they compete with other actuarial firms, so the playing field is even within a profession.

In short, firms which integrate the development of business origination skill and behavior into their organizational fabric are more successful at creating rainmakers than those which don’t.  That is hardly surprising.  The surprising truth is how few do so.

At those which don’t, partners often assume that rainmakers must be born, not made, and then set up barriers to learning that ensure their experiences confirm their expectations.

(This is another of our posts from one of our readers seeking advice.  Please feel free to submit questions that you would like help with.)

Ian Brodie, a smart man and rainmaking expert, sent in the following question:

I’m currently puzzling over the question of whether to focus on building a personal brand (my name) or a company brand. I know a couple of local associates who are in a similar position too.

When I first set up my practice a year or so ago I selected a “corporate” name for the business. At that stage I (perhaps lacking in confidence in my own reputation) wanted to give the impression of being an established business rather than just a “one man band”.

However, over the last year it’s become clear that no matter what the name of the business, my clients are hiring me personally – not a company.

With that in mind, I am now wondering whether it would be better to rebrand the business under my own name. That would make it easier for clients to remember and find me (by searching for my name rather than having to remember the name of the company) and also to refer me to others.

Over the long term, I also intend to publish a number of articles, and perhaps a book. This would obviously be under my name rather than under a company name.

A lot of the people I admire in consulting run their businesses under their own name: Yourself, David Maister, Andrew Sobel, etc. Others, however, have a company brand: Charlie Green as Trusted Advisor Associates; Suzanne Lowe as Expertise Marketing.

So the choice doesn’t seem obvious to me. At the moment I’m tending towards rebranding under my name. There would be a degree of administrative pain involved initially, but I guess better to go through that now than in 5 years time.

Any guidance?

“I’m no good at small talk,” someone I am coaching told me yesterday.  I hear this from time to time in the course of my work.  The speaker is usually an introvert, faced with the need to attend an association event or to develop closer relationships with clients.  An introvert myself, I had to deal with this issue long ago.  My answer to this admission is always the same: there is no such thing as small talk.  There is business talk and there is relationship talk.  All conversation with a client belongs in one of these two categories.

It is impossible to have much of a relationship someone whom you know nothing about.  So-called small talk gives you many types of information about t he person you are speaking with; including background, habits, hobbies and sense of humor, just for starters; that let you build a relationship.  There is nothing small about these kinds of information.

Relationship’s are based, among other things, on shared experiences and mutual help.  So-called small talk allows you to recognize a past shared experience, whether it be experiences with a mutual friend who makes you both laugh or with a teenage child’s behavior that makes you both want to cry, with a client you have both worked for or with a problem you have both worked on.  Small talk gives you ideas about arranging experiences to share with client in the future, such as an association event or a night at the opera.

And small talk gives you information you need to help the client.  There are countless examples of this.  An actuary listening to a client’s venting about frustrations with a contractor who went bankrupt and disappeared half way through roofing her house was able to recommend another roofer.  A consultant was able to refer a client to his wife, a dentist, when the client’s child needed emergency attention.  A recruiter was able to advise a client’s child on his first job search.  All of these things happened, because the professionals in question had listened to so-called small talk.

If you think you’re no good at small talk, try the following:

• Try to find out something interesting about the person you are talking with.  People are usually interesting when they talk about things they are interested in.  Keeping the conversation going will be easy once you find such a topic.  This is standard advice to people learning to network.  It’s standard, because it works.

• Ask about the person’s family.  This is an especially productive subject if the person you’re talking to has children.  Almost everybody likes talking about their children, and the subject is a great social leveler.  You can talk about shared experiences with children with the chairman of the board or with the janitor, with someone who lives across the street from you or with someone who lives on the other side of the world.

• Use the person’s demeanor as a signal for starting a conversation.  You look like you are in a rush today.  You look a bit worried.  My, you look happy today.  Used selectively, words like these will usually start a conversation about something important to the other person.

• Key off a signal provided by the other person.  A tie with pictures of anchors on it signals a sailor.  A diploma hanging on an office wall will tell you the name of a person’s alma mater.  A trophy indicates passion and success in some area.

Anyone can learn to make small talk.  All it takes is an interest in the other person and a willingness to ask questions.

For more on this subject, see the post Networking Tips for Introverts.

In an earlier post, I promised a series on generating ideas for blog posts.  For my second post on this subject, go to Daily Blog Tips, where it first appeared.

Earlier posts have described how to write e-mails and letters of introduction and meeting confirmation letters and e-mails.  Once you have had a meeting, you will also want to send an e-mail.  These serve several purposes.  First, they remind the recipient of the meetings outcome and next steps you have agreed to.  This increases the probability of the recipient following through and captures a bit more mind share.  Second, they provide what is often the  only written record of the meeting.  Most importantly, if it is a sales meeting, the follow-up letter or e-mail often provides your final chance to reinforce your interest in the client and your qualifications for the work.

If you are going to send follow-up emails consistently, you need to reduce writing them down to an efficient system, while avoiding the appearance of boilerplate.  You can do this by using a standardized process, as distinct from a standard letter.

In most cases, you will compose a letter if in a sequence of sentences you:

• Link:  Reinforce any emotional link you established with the other person.  After all, that is one important outcome of the event.  You can only do this if you avoid clichéd personal statements.  (Please, oh please, don’t open with It was a pleasure to meet you . . . It is so over-utilized that it conveys almost as little of its original  meaning as goodbye does of God be with you from which it derives.)  Instead, note something that you found interesting or special about the person or something she told you.

Examples:

As many times as I have been through Grand Central Station, I had never noticed the one dirty brick left unwashed by the restorers.  Now in-the-know, I was able to point it out to my nephew who came to visit this weekend. Many thanks for improving my knowledge of New York.

Your directness about the problems that Trigestis Pharmaceuticals is facing was extremely helpful.

• Synthesize :  Show you clearly understand the issue at hand in a concise summary.

Examples:

You described a company at a turning point. The actions your management team takes over the next . . .

We are both seeking to increase our business with private equity firms and are meeting many of the same people.  We may be able to help each other.

• Remind or Reinforce:  Politely remind the other person of any commitments she made during the meeting.  A clear statement of next steps makes it easier for her to fulfill her commitments than if she has to recall them on her own.  Alternatively, reinforce your commitment to the client and why you are well suited to the work.

Examples:

I greatly appreciate your offer to introduce me to Oliver Princer.  I will be in Pittsburgh week after next and could stop by his . . .

You mentioned that you might be able to get some feedback on my meeting with Debra Parks.  That would be . . .

We remain most interested in working on your matter.  Our experience with the licensing of intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry equips us well to address the disagreements you are having with Trigestis.  We well understand your desire to resolve the issue amicably.  Our track record with litigation in this area will provide try Trigestis with an added incentive to do so.

Promise:  Restate any commitments you have made, so that the other person knows you haven’t forgotten.

Examples:

I will call Mary Gumstar next week to see if . . .

By regular mail, I am sending you a copy of . . .

Should you choose our firm, you will give your matter . . .

• Close:  As appropriate, end with a personal statement.

Examples:

I hope you have recovered from your cold.

I will think of you as the Bears trounce the Giants this weekend.

Link.  Synthesize.  Remind 0r reinforce.  Promise.  Close.  Follow this sequence in each follow-up email, and you will soon learn to produce them efficiently while maintaining a high quality.

(Well, the Bears sometimes trounce the Giants.)