Years ago, when trying with limited success to help my son with a math problem, I was reacquainted with the beauty of the deductive power of geometry.  Using deductive logic geometry builds from simple properties to complex theorems that explain spatial relationships.  The logic allows us to manipulate forms and objects to create buildings and infrastructure.

I felt that, similarly, deductive logic could be used to explain much of what is required to become a successful rainmaker.  The fundamental elements of rain making are also simple, but, as in geometry, they can be built into complex rules of client development that allow us to get new clients.  Here is a first stab at developing a deductive logic of rainmaking.

A. Basic Properties

1. You sell to people.
2. You can only sell to people you know.
3. To know someone you must first meet him.
4. It follows that the more people you meet, the better your chances of selling something.
5. People move around.
6. A client who moves from one client organization to another can help you open a new account.

B. Relationship Properties

1. The stronger your relationship with someone, the better your chances of selling something to him.
2. Since you can’t have a relationship with someone you don’t know, it follows from (A3) that the first step in starting a relationship is to meet the person.
3. Relationships, good or bad, are based on time together and mutual help.
4. Conversely, it’s hard to have a relationship with someone you never talk to.
5. The more time you spend with someone and the more you help each other, the stronger the relationship is.
6. The more people you know in an account, industry or function, they better you are able to help them.

C.  Good People Properties

1. Good people tend to do well.
2. The more good people you meet, the better your chances of making a sale.
3. It follows from (A5) and (C1) that good people move around.
4. It follows from (A6) and (C3) that good people can get you into a new account.
5. It follows from (A1), (B1), (B3) and (C1) that it is wise to talk to and help good people.
6. Good people tend to have influence with others, and so can introduce you to others and help you develop relationships with them.

D.  Marketing Properties

1. The goal of marketing is to help you meet people and develop relationships with them (by giving you reasons to contact them).
2. Marketing efforts that don’t do one of these two things are probably not worth the investment.

That is as far as I have gotten.  I suspect that a complete logic of rainmaking could be built with this process.   Does anyone one have any corrections or additions to these properties?

Professionals who have developed skill at selling work in their areas of expertise, often find it hard to sell a broad solution to a problem that extends into areas about which they know relatively little.  Yet, rainmakers do this all of the time.  In an earlier post, I described a change in mindset needed to become an adviser on broad sets of issues.  Clearly, a change in mindset is not sufficient.  The professional must learn to conduct a discussion about a broad business issue.  Used to having command of a subject, they often say that they don’t know what to say and ask about issues where they have limited expertise.  It is a legitimate concern.

When talking with a client in their areas of specialty, professionals ask relatively narrow questions.  Borrowing from Chomskian linguistics, I will call these surface questions.  The surface questions used to learn about a client’s desire to redesign her company’s pension program differ greatly from those required to learn about her need for a new headquarters or her need to make a merger or for any other specific problem.

However, regardless of the issue, surface questions in all specialties gather information in the same categories, such as information about the nature of the client’s issue, its source, its size, its complexity, its urgency, its risks and opportunities, and so forth.  With that understanding, it is relatively easy to construct questions, which I will refer to as deep questions, that are more generic in nature and that will allow a professional to converse with the client in areas that go beyond the professional’s area of detailed knowledge.

Here is a comparison of some surface questions with some deep ones.  For the surface questions I will assume that a location consultant is interviewing a client about moving its corporate headquarters.  The deep questions, of course, can handle a much broader set of issues.  Note that these are just sample questions, not a definitive list.  Also, keep in mind that the same question can be worded many ways.  For example, Why would that be a problem for you?  is essentially the same question as I can think of several reason why that would be a problem.  Which ones stand out to you?  I have chosen brief versions of most questions to make a point.  If you don’t like the specific words shown, see if you can reword the questions to make them more palatable.

To determine the nature of the problem:

• Surface Questions:  Why are you thinking of moving your corporate headquarters?  What kinds of talent are difficult to recruit at this location?  Why is being in a peripheral location problematic?
• Deep Questions:  What is it that you wanted to talk about?  What seems to be the issue?

To establish cause:

• Surface Question:  Why are you thinking of moving now?
• Deep Question:  How did the problem arise/develop?

To establish urgency:

• Surface Questions:  How soon does your lease expire?  If you continue to fall short in the number of researchers you recruit, how soon do you end up in competitive difficulties?
• Deep Questions:  What kind of time pressure are you under?  Why the rush?

To establish goals:

• Surface Question:  What do you want to accomplish from a move?
• Deep Question:  What does success look like?

Top establish size:

• Surface Questions:  How many people are based at the headquarters?  How do they break down by job type?  How many would you expect to move?  How many square feet do you occupy?  Do you expect space requirements to go up or down?
• Deep Questions:  How big is this issue?  How many people does it affect?

To establish scope:

• Surface Questions:  Is the current location under consideration or are you definitely going to move?  Would you consider a long distance or only a local move?  Are there certain other locations that must be considered?
• Deep Questions: What are its parameters?  What areas will be affected?  How broad a set of solutions are you willing to consider?

To establish risks:

• Surface Question:  What happens if word of the move leaks out prematurely?  What if insufficient members of the research team choose to transfer to the new location?  Are you subject to political pressures in making this choice?
• Deep Questions:  What are the risks?   What could go wrong?

To establish opportunities:

• Surface Questions:  If you move to a new location and your recruiting problem goes away, what difference will it make?  How would easier access to your customers help the business?
• Deep Questions:  What are the benefits of making the change?  How much would you gain from the change.

To establish barriers:

• Surface Questions:  Why are you considering staying put?  Why not explore alternatives directly with economic development authorities instead of working through a consultant?
• Deep Questions: What stands in your way?  Why are you considering doing this with external resources, rather than in house?

I could go on, but suspect the point is made.  Professionals who are used to showing off expertise in the questions they ask, sometimes fear deep questions are too general and so highlight their lack of content knowledge.  But clients almost always answer deep questions without hesitation.  When they are focused on talking about their problem, information that draws attention to the professional can be a distraction, even if that information is posed as a question.

Jenny, a young professional at a big firm, had spent four years in a specific practice area.  Because of her smarts and interpersonal skills, she was seen as having high potential for rapid advancement.  This assessment was confirmed when a senior executive at a client where she was working invited her into his office to talk about another issue he was facing.

Jenny quickly realized that the issue was outside of her area of specialty, though well within her firm’s capabilities.   After a ten minute conversation, she offered to identify the right person at the firm to help with the matter, but by the time she had done so and could get back on the executive’s schedule, he had found someone else to work with.

It is doubtful that the executive expected Jenny to have a ready-made solution to his problem; he knew what she specialized in.  He was, more-likely, looking for someone who understood his organization, could understand his problem, participate with him as a thought partner about it and marshal the right resources to help him.  If that was the case, Jenny didn’t demonstrate the confidence and technique to serve as this kind of trusted adviser.  She lost the opportunity to advance her relationship with the client and to provide him greater value by cross selling a number of her firm’s services.

This is a limitation of many narrow specialists, including many who are older and more experienced than Jenny.  They don’t know what to say and do when presented with a problem outside of their specialty, other than to off-load it to someone else as quickly as possible.

So, what are people in this position to do?  They need two things, the right mindset and good questioning technique.  I will address the first of these here and the second in a later post.

The mindsets of trusted advisers and specialist differ on several dimensions, including:

Goals:

• Specialist:  To prove my knowledge of the special characteristics and implications of the client’s problem.
• Trusted Adviser:  To help the client articulate his concern and its implications and bring him the resources that can help him solve it.

Role:

• Specialist:  Solver of the client’s problem.
• Trusted Adviser:  Thought partner, representative of the client’s interests and needs within your firm and with others who will assist in providing a solution, the one who marshals the right resources.

Method:

• Specialist:  Ask questions that, by their nature, reveal command of the specialty and allow scoping of the assignment in detail.
• Trusted Adviser:  Ask questions that help the client explain and develop his own thinking on the matter at hand by helping him amplify his own beliefs and judiciously challenging them.  When appropriate, empathize with the client showing a shared understanding of the stresses, costs and opportunities that he faces.

Resources:

• Specialist: Largely from within own practice
• Trusted Adviser: From wherever needed; inside the firm, inside the client organization or elsewhere

Duration:

• Specialist:  Often one, and seldom more than two or three conversations, prior to submitting a proposal.
• Trusted Adviser:  Often several conversations, in order to ensure that the right problem is being solved and the right resources applied.

Once you have the right mindset, you are ready to learn technique.

In an earlier post I posited that anyone who wants to cross selling his services in a professional services firm had best treat his colleagues like any other market.  Selling them is the first step in selling to their clients. You must meet with your colleagues, learn about their needs and their clients’ needs, help them understand how you can help meet these needs and then provide fantastic service to them, so demonstrating how attentive you will be to their clients.  In this context, returning a colleagues phone call promptly is every bit as important as returning one from a prospective client.

This, I think sound advice, but it isn’t a one-way street.  All members of a firm have responsibility for finding opportunities at their accounts for their colleagues.  Firm management must find ways to make everyone accountable for cross selling.  There are many tools for this, most noticeably compensating people for helping their colleagues win work.  But, in our experience, some of the simplest ways are often overlooked.

Take, for example, teaching the firm’s partners about the capabilities of practices they might introduce to their clients.  Typically, this is done by giving the practice head a podium to describe what his team can do.  In the worst cases, this is done over hours at an off-site meeting, with one presentation following another in mind-numbing monotony, and the listeners soon find their minds wandering.

Here are two alternatives to make the process more effective:

• Structure the session as an interview, rather than a presentation. Announce to the participants that they won’t learn anything about the featured practice, unless they ask about it.  Then, don’t allow the person seeking to cross sell his service to say anything, except in response to his colleagues questions.  If his colleagues aren’t interested or intelligent enough to ask good questions about the service, he is probably wasting his time anyway.  This puts the responsibility on the listeners to extract the information they need, keeping them engaged in the conversation.   You may want to provide a few sample questions to get the interview started.
• Try speed dating.  Start your monthly firm or office meeting by paring up partners from different practices to have a half-hour conversation about how they can help each other sell their services.  At the next meeting shuffle the pares, so that everyone spends time with someone new at each meeting.  Among other things, trust is more easily built in one-on-one conversations than in a presentation.

Cross selling, like selling professional services, requires lots of little acts like these on the way to landing the big assignment.

Several friends have noted that many small consulting firms have come through this recession much better than large ones.  I have seen quite a number of small ones prosper and grow, even though they are selling similar services to similar markets that the large ones are.  Why should this be?

The most common reason for revenue collapses during the past two years has been market failure.  Clients reduced or stopped buying specific professional services.  As is typical during a recession for reasons I have described elsewhere, this happened suddenly.  One month a firm had more work than it could handle and numerous prospective assignments moving their way towards a sale.  The next, clients were cancelling projects and prospective assignments evaporated.
Now that the worst seems behind us, we would be wise to take lessons from this downturn to reduce the impact of the next one.  Prior to downturns, some professionals feel immune to revenue collapses for three reasons that prove to be unfounded:

1. My market is different:   In the late 1990s professionals selling services to the telecommunications industry argued that with the rate of increase in data communications, demand for their services would keep increasing for the foreseeable future.   They failed to realize that short term imbalances in supply and demand can create a short-term bust in a generally upward market.  Firms selling heavily to the healthcare industry, which had come through earlier recessions unscathed, took a beating in this one, when many hospitals cut their spending.
2. My client is really many clients:   All markets go up and down.  The classic way to reduce the impact of such swings is through diversification.  But we must be wary of false diversification.  Over the years I have heard professionals who were dependent on one client for most of their revenue claim that the client was so big and they were working in so many parts of it that it was the same as having many clients.  When several big financial institutions failed over the past two years, some professionals learned how untrue this was.
3. My firm already has a diverse client base:  Sometimes professionals believe they serve diverse markets, when they don’t.  A dot com consulting firm, whose three biggest clients were an airline, a credit card company and a hotel chain, went belly up after September 11, 2001, when travel nosedived, and all three clients canceled projects.  Management of another firm convinced themselves that their top three clients; a credit card company, an insurance company and a bank; were so different that the firm was effectively diversified.  In this downturn, they learned that a credit crunch crunches all lenders.

Always be skeptical of it-can’t-happen-to-us statements.

Guest post by Gary Pines

I hear many professionals say they do not know what to do with social networks. They neither have the time for them nor see the value in them.  They feel that social networks invade one’s privacy, and that there are enough communications vehicles what with cell phones, email, and a seemingly endless list of old and new media.  And they find the array of social networking options overwhelming with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, My Space, You Tube, and specialized networks for specific professions and industries.

A recent Business Week article points out that new modes of communication have always attracted this kind of reaction.  Among the examples it cites are:

• Socrates’ objection to writing, in part because this “invention” eliminated the need to exercise the memory.
• Henry David Thoreau’s objection to the telegraph, the instant transcontinental communications in the 1840s about which he said, “Maine and Texas … have nothing important to communicate.”
• Western Union’s refusal of an offer to buy the patent rights for the telephone in 1880, asking “whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communication.”
• The New York Times editorial against the typewriter because it usurped the art of “writing with one’s own hand.” (What would Socrates think of this).

To these we can add more recent examples:

• Some people disdained cell phones in 1990 with voicemail messages, saying that they would hinder person-to-person telephone communication.
• By  the middle of the decade others complained that email and the internet would lead us away from real time communication.
• And now … social networks.

Instead of being superfluous, social networks are here to stay.   During the first years of the internet, people could only guess at its future uses and impact.  Now, we are just beginning to explore their potential of social networks.  They are a piece of the rain-making process. Those who stand aloof from them lower their probabilities of success and will  lose out on their the increasing power and value in the years ahead.

Many professional service firms have learned how quickly good times can turn to bad over the past year.   They are learning or relearning that developing business is something that must be done in good times, if you want to delay and minimize bad times like these.  Less often they realize that one source of their revenue implosion has been the failure of a single channel to market.  To reduce that risk in the future requires not just increased business activity, but a diversification of the channels through which business comes to them.  Now that a recovery is underway, it is a good time to do that.

Examples of channel failure include:

• The loss of a rainmaker who provides a disproportional share of a firm’s or practice’s new business.  This is the simplest and most common source of channel failure.
• The loss of a referral source who provides a disproportional share of the firm’s or practice’s new business.  A cost reduction consultant received all of his work from a turnaround manager.  When that person was forced into retirement, his sole source of business disappeared.
• The failure of education programs as a channel for new business.  Several consulting firms ran seminars on specific methods for dealing with corporate problems.  After the seminars some attendees would hire them for large engagements.  At first these seminars attracted high-level participants, but after time, more and more junior people entered the mix.  When senior people stopped coming to the seminars, lead flow declined and when even the junior people stopped coming to the seminars, there were no more leads.
• The failure of an internal referral channel.  There are many examples of this. The engineering studio of an architectural and engineering firm got all of its business from projects that originated with the firm’s architectural studios.  When architectural projects dried up, so did the engineering studios lead flow.  In later years the management of the studio developed personal relationships with client facilities managers, which gave them a second, less cyclical, direct-to-market channel.  Also, at the large accounting firms, the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act reduced leads from audit partners to forensic accountant practices specializing in litigation support to zero overnight.  The litigation support consultants, who had relied entirely on audit partners for a steady flow of new cases, had to scramble to develop new channels.

Channel failure is surprisingly common and can be devastating, all the more so, because the single channel usually looks as if it will never cease to provide new business.  It almost all cases, its failure comes as a big surprise.

The best way to avoid the problem is to have multiple channels to market.   Any professional who relies on a single channel and who doesn’t know how to go out and generate business through multiple sources exposes himself to grave career risk.  But, I don’t really expect many people to recognize and act on this knowledge.  History shows that it is all too easy to become complacent and to ignore channel risk.  You do so at your peril.